You can read my review of China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, appearing in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. In fact, it’s something of a West Coast Bloggin’ Boys Club feel this week, what with appearances in the same issue by Tod Goldberg and Jim Ruland.
© 2007, Edward Champion. All rights reserved.
I was just sitting down to write about Un Lun Dun, but will probably just link to your review instead. I was so looking forward to this book but am very disappointed.
I couldn’t agree with your review any more other than to suggest that you went a little easy on Mieville. I find his writing to be clumsy, as you noted, more frequently than not. There is a lot to be said for looping, verbose prose, but when someone uses the word ‘vertiginous’ more than a dozen times in a single novel (as he did in
‘Perdido,’ I counted) I have to wonder where their thesaurus was. Additionally, I am curious what you think of his insistence that he is at the helm of his own genre — legitimate bucking of the status quo, or petty disassociation with the unpopular kids?