Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

Honestly, 1.5 stars. (Book club choice)

Un Lun Dun is Miéville’s foray into young adult fiction, and despite Goodread’s description, there’s little reward for adult readers of this one aside from a few small references to connections between some historic London legislation and this fictional, reverse of the city (either above or below the real London, it’s never very clear). My sense is that this narrative would be more suitable for ~8-13-year-olds, but would probably lose the interest of older teenagers. The language is intended to be adapted to a younger audience, but the tonal shift in dialogue or general stretches of inaction is awkward and overly self-conscious. The story establishes heavy-handed plot devices and shifts, and despite its notable length, the most interesting action is limited to about a third of the overall book.

Some concepts were interesting – the jungle house, the puzzle district, smog-animated corpses, utterlings – but the majority of this book demanded a considerable amount of attention for tedious over-explanation and patient endurance while one idea after another was vaguely attempted and then discarded. How a 500-page can seemingly change its mind about properly taking on a quest is beyond me.

I did find it interesting to consider whether Miéville had successfully retained his authorial voice and write a weird fiction / steampunk narrative aimed more for young readers with a comparatively leveled vocabulary, and it does seem like he maintained his familiar style, vision and creativity, but I’ll have a better sense of this when I do finally read the Bas-Lag series.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

In the Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of a migration of more than six million African Americans migrating from the states of the Old Confederacy between 1915 and 1970. She put 15 years of research into this work, interviewing 1,200 people along the way, and ultimately tells the previously untold story of the Great Migration. She focuses on three individuals who experienced their own migration over different decades, heading in different directions, with different motivations and socioeconomic backgrounds to give the extensive work a sense of convergence. The title is taken from Richard Wright, who experienced his own migration, leaving Mississippi in the 1920s for Chicago to “feel the warmth of those other suns.”

Train schedules at the time largely dictated migration patterns, as the available routes determined destinations available to those courageous enough to make the trip. The Illinois Central took those from Arkansas, Alabama or Mississippi to Midwestern cities (Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland), while the Seaboard Air Line worked up the East Coast, taking migrants from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to Washington, DC, New York, or – for those bound for New York with little familiarity of the city or the conductor’s more Northern Accent – New Jersey (“Penn Station, Newark” sounds a lot like “Penn Station, New York”), getting off a stop too soon. The Union Pacific took those from Texas or Louisiana to California or further up the West Coast.

The story is epic in its reach and structure, though the main body focuses on the three main characters: Ida Mae Gladney leaves Mississippi for Chicago with her husband in the 1930s; George Starling, who left Florida for Harlem in the 1940s after fomenting a civil rights protest that put his life in immediate danger; and Robert Foster, a physician who left Louisiana for California.
Woven throughout their narratives are new data, like census records that show blacks who left the South had higher levels of education than those born in the Northern states. They also had lower levels of divorce, and higher rates of employment.

There are too many rich sections of this work for a review to do it justice (though if you are up for a longer review, this one in the NY Times is excellent).

The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara

The People in the Trees’ is a deep exploration of moral relativism, and especially in disruption (of ecology, of culture) in the name of science all through the lens of Norton Perina’s unusual story.

Perina is presented with an opportunity to join a mission to a fictional Micronesian island nation called U’ivu shortly after his graduation from medical school, and he immediately accepts. Days later he meets up with one of his partners, an enigmatic anthropologist, and they start their journey to this remote island. Perina, entering this world, starts to suspect he’s struck scientific gold when it becomes evident that some of the island natives are actually much older than they first appear. When he starts to understand the significance of this, the Garden of Eden that is Ivu’ivu is profoundly changed. The story is provocative and bleak throughout; Perina as a narrator is wry, superior and unthinkingly cruel, and while he’s never likable, the details of his story remain enigmatic around the most monstrous acts and decisions he acknowledges he’s accused or even convicted of.

The story is extremely imaginative, and the world within is thoroughly invented with detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna, and with particular attention to the rites, ethos, and linguistics of the Ivu’ivuan civilization.

The story is pieced together by a formal lab assistant of Norton Perina, also clearly his lover, who compiles Perina’s installments as they’re sent to him from prison into a memoir. The style is notable for his inserted, sycophantic footnotes and editorial decisions about what to include and what to excise, as we later find.

The People in the Trees is Hanya Yanagihara’s debut novel (Yanagihara of the more widely recognized Booker Nominee ‘A Little Life’), and is a fictional memoir of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, loosely modeled on the true story of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek.

The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

Lonely City slightly defies genre, as it’s part memoir, part essay, and scholarly rigorous despite its sometimes indefinite focus. Laing explores themes of loneliness during a transitional period of her own life, shortly after she moved to New York from London, not knowing anyone. A promising new relationship (presumably with a New Yorker) had come to a swift conclusion immediately before the move, and she spends this early time migrating from sublet to sublet, acutely aware of the discomfort of her own solitude, and reflecting on the feeling of loneliness in one of the largest, most bustling cities in the world. Lonely City is more a biography and study of a handful of visual artists – Edward Hopper, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz, and Andy Warhol to name a few – and the intention of this project was not necessarily to overcome Laing’s own loneliness, but to explore its negative associations and diminish the associated ‘shame’ often conjoined with loneliness.

Henry Darger, The Realm of the Unreal

The subtitle, “Adventures in the Art of Being Alone” is misleading, possibly the publishers’ suggestion, as Laing’s research is less like an adventure, and more like meditation, or diligence. She gets permission from the Wojnarowicz estate, Intuit archives for much of Darger’s personal diaries, and pores through the marginalia available to her of each of these artists, sometimes discovering less savoury insights, but more often finding vulnerability, fear, discomfort, worries of rejection, and the mental health and physical consequences of their isolation.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked up Lonely City, but after a few weeks into social distancing, where our more atomised worlds are (in some cases) in the process of taking shape, it felt like the right time.

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942