Un Lun Dun, the latest novel by China Miéville is lovely. Beyond enjoying the story, which I did, I am completely enamored of the useful illustrations. Not all of us can stand ready at any moment to pull up an image of, for example, a variety of mouthless beings. Thanks to the wee drawings, I don’t have to. The images also allow us to peek at another manifestation of Miéville’s rich imagination. I can just see him hunched over a notebook sketching away, and that image warms the cockles of my heart.

With the discussions around this book, it’s also been amusing to me to learn that he can’t seem to help himself with regard to including monsters, in both the narrative and the illustrations (note the venus flytrap in the above drawing). As with his adult novels, several of the imagined creatures endeared themselves to me through their connection to things I love: notably, the explorer and Skool, with their respective links to songbirds and the ocean. Others of the monsters were downright disturbing, although to a student of horror and sci fi, variations on undead creatures are par for the course. I find them creepy, and it’s a testament to Miéville’s writing that he manages to keep them so even in a young adult novel.

Monsters aside, if that’s possible, I enjoyed the book immensely. In the beginning, I found it hard to avoid mental comparisons to other books involving young protagonists, alternate worlds, and quests to be completed before one could return home; I got over that and got hooked on the narrative itself very soon into it. Un Lun Dun compares favorably to earlier works, and is endearingly modern in its sensibility, but I’m an adult now: it will never be the defining such narrative for me.

And, I had only a momentary disappointment that the tall blonde was not in fact going to be the one to save the day. I was kind of a sidekick myself, you see.