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.

On Friday, I took a break from the other novels I’m reading and whizzed through C. J. Cherryh‘s Deliverer, the latest in her Foreigner series. This is the only series of hers I’ve read, as I was drawn to the first contact elements. I know there are other series of hers that include aliens, I just have them mentally categorized as space war books, which doesn’t at all appeal to me. I still think of these books as first contact books, despite the fighting and chasing that is the major plot model, as that’s pretty much the only type of science fiction that includes space travel and aliens that I enjoy reading. The distinction between the books I enjoy and others involving space travel and aliens tends to be the sociological or anthropological slant, rather than the ‘I chase your spaceship with my spaceship and shoot guns at you’ storyline, and by sheer numbers of pages devoted to one over the other, this series still tilts my way. It’s not the best example of this sub-genre, though: my favorite books of this kind remain the Xenogenesis trilogy by Octavia Butler, The Color of Distance by Amy Thompson, and The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, all of which are excellent at imagining and conveying the experience of first contact.

In the beginning, Cherryh’s series seemed more like those. Sadly, it doesn’t anymore. I am still invested in the characters, and curious about the plot development (such as it is), but I have to confess that I skip large chunks of the narrative as I go along (here is where academic reading skills come in handy). My train of thought goes something like: ‘woe is Bren, blah blah, scary is the world, blah blah, enemies are everywhere and the weight of the world is on my shoulders, blah blah, now is when we ride the mecheiti at breakneck speed through the wilderness, now is when we try to kill the bad guys in the dark, here is where the goodies prevail, oh look, the book’s over.’ In terms of plot movement, I think she’s now managed to stretch the events of a week (two weeks? three weeks at most…) over the course of three books. Movement at this pace leaves many pages free for Bren’s mental problems, er, worrying. In 1994, the idea that a male protagonist could be introspective and concerned about flubbing things up royally was endearing and somewhat different than usual. Now, in the 21st century, we’re confronted by whiny, insecure men at every turn, and it’s really not that interesting anymore (not that it ever was all that interesting outside of science fiction).

Don’t get me wrong: I’ll keep reading the series (and hope that the next three-book-arc gets us back into space). The dragging is not bugging me anywhere near the level that the second series of Brin’s Uplift books eventually did (and the first three were so good), leading me to abandon that series in disgust. The books just seem to be getting lighter and more formulaic as she goes along, which is a shame, as the world she’s built retains potential.

Breaking quite a dry spell, I read Nalo Hopkinson‘s Brown Girl in the Ring this past week. I did enjoy this book more than The Salt Roads, likely because it was more plot-driven. I didn’t love it; I would have liked to see more character development, and a thickening of the story. I enjoyed it as a quick read, however, I can imagine also enjoying a slower, deeper version of the same story.

I also found myself skimming through the more gory sections of the book, but this is probably a complaint peculiar to me and something that wouldn’t phase most readers my age. Call me a kook, but I’ve discovered that I just don’t enjoy blood, guts, and other kinds of gore. I can deal with violence that serves a narrative, and anything over my finely balanced measure of what counts as ‘serving the story’ will generally put me off a piece. I don’t like being scared gratuitously, and I don’t read books or watch films in the horror genre for that reason (my father could tell you about the time I started to watch Dr. Giggles with some friends, in an effort to defeat my fear of horror with sheer campiness, and how it backfired horribly and I called him to drive across town and follow me back home — I had the other car with me — so that I didn’t risk getting killed by a maniacal physician in the mile or so I had to travel…did I mention, in my car. Yeah. And, I was, like, 20 or something at this point. Not, you know, 12. The end. Postscript: just locating the Wikipedia entry has caused me to start to be totally jumpy in my cozy back room with three sides of windows. Definitely a night to keep my trusty Maglite near at hand. You can start laughing any time now…). Tangentially, this is the main issue I’m currently having with Heroes: I can’t stand the blood of the serial killing, and besides freaking me out, it seems completely unnecessary (both unnecessary to write the story that way, and unnecessary to show every single gruesome death on screen: we know what he does, our brains can slot in the first gory scene when necessary, thankyouverymuch). All the other issues I have with Heroes will have to wait for another time, as they really have no connection to the issues I had with Brown Girl in the Ring whatsoever. Also, the ways in which my struggle to stay engaged with Heroes is strikingly similar to the ambivalence that led me to stop watching Twin Peaks midway through the 2nd season (although, of course, I’ve since seen them all; on laserdisc, even)? Not relevant either.

Truthfully, I didn’t have many issues with Brown Girl in the Ring. It was ok. I didn’t love it, but it was entertaining and it was a nice break from continuing to work my way through Snow. Which I plan to finish and write about at some point.

This past week, I’ve read a light (that sounds better than ‘trashy’) trilogy of recent British historical fiction, by Penny Vincenzi, the Spoils of Time books that begin with No Angel. They read like a cross between Judith Krantz novels (lots of independent, rich women with glamourous jobs and handsome lovers and husbands) and The Thorn Birds or any number of Maeve Binchy novels (lots of affairs and friends who turn out to be untrustworthy and people marrying for money). As such, they were entertaining, and engrossing as even poorly written family sagas can turn out to be. These certainly weren’t poorly written, but they also didn’t rise either to the level of Krantz’s blithe and engaging trashiness or Binchy’s humorous and insightful characterizations.

To make another comparison with a contemporary British writer of historical fiction, Philippa Gregory, Vincenzi’s books were neither as good as Gregory’s novels of the Tudor court (that begin with The Other Boleyn Girl), nor as compellingly bad as her totally fabricated historical trilogy. They did fill the time, though, and as the story progressed I found myself wondering, especially in the second and third novels, whether the bad guys were ever going to succeed at their little games (they weren’t) and whether disaster was ever going to fail to be averted just in the nick of time (it wasn’t). In this last aspect, I found the novels peculiarly and comfortingly British, this love for the comedy (and sometimes tragedy) of timing, of near misses and fortuitous arrivals or departures that kept you, whether you liked it or not, on the edge of your seat. In only this way, the novels had a Wildean quality to them, and I was particularly reminded of An Ideal Husband, with its critical entrances and exits and the dramatic tension that’s built as a result. Besides the rather thin caricature of Wilde himself in the first novel, though, there really are no other grounds for comparison. Which is fine, as Vincenzi’s books are really not that kind of novel.

They are the kind of novel that you take to the beach, or on a train, or on a plane, and are glad to have around when you are holed up somewhere during a blizzard. They are long, they involve a whole array of feisty characters, and they manage to contain a lot of truth. It became almost a truism of the books that the women would stand up for themselves and not put up with any ‘claptrap’ from the men (that would be ‘sexism’), and it would all be for the best in the end: they would go on alone, the men would come around, or a new man made of stronger stuff would come along to fill the gap (the main characters were entirely heterosexual, with a few gay fashion photographers and the Wilde-esque professor thrown in on the edges). I enjoyed and appreciated this more feminist aspect, and I also appreciated the self-aware humor that cropped up periodically, in the form of comments made by the main characters about the kind of ‘back stairs housemaid novel’ that was very far from literature, but sold extremely well. The kind of novel that the reader could hardly object to, being totally engrossed in one at that very moment.