Sometimes you just get lucky.

I went to the library recently to pick up a hold that had been sent to the wrong library. I got a bunch of cds, as I usually do, then I looked through the graphic novels to see if there was anything worthwhile. At the Belmont Library, my “home” library, that section is near the science fiction section, and for a change, I decided to have a quick look there as well.

And as I said, sometimes you just get lucky.

“Un Lun Dun” by China Mieville, is not at the same level as Philip Pullman’s trilogy “His Dark Materials” — nothing is — but, like Pullman, Mieville creates an alternate version of our world that is impossible, completely believable and one the reader longs to visit as soon as possible. There are no daemons in UnLondon, but there is just about everything else.

Including a villain so evil, it’s immediately recognized, both from normal life and every James Bond movie ever made. It is that evil.

This book is for “young adults” — library-speak for teenagers. But like any great YA novel, it has layers for adults to enjoy and appreciate. Mieville is a great punster, not with mere words but entire concepts. He takes “normal” London life and twists it inside-out, creating not merely the great “abcity” of UnLondon (as well as Parisn’t and other unversions of our “real” world) but people, places and, for want of a better word, things that mirror our world — but that mirror itself is twisted and possibly inverted. It’s a strange and almost, but not quite, complete unfamiliar world beyond the Odd.

Broken umbrellas become unbrellas, able to serve the will of Brokkenbroll, the Unbrellessimo. The Pons Absconditus is in no particular place but is always available to terminate wherever it is needed. The sun is the UnSun, a dim ring of a star from whose center our sun was taken. And so on. Mieville is clearly having so much fun discovering all the twists possible in such a world, and that gives the novel a freshness and energy too often missing when a novel is the result of too much work. One of the great things about “Un Lun Dun” is that it makes no attempt to be like anything else. Mieville has a huge imagination, and while the ending is a bit awkward (and prolonged), that takes nothing away from how much damn fun the book is to read.

I need more of this luck.