Outside/Inside Fantastic London

Abstract

Neil Gaiman's (2000. London: Headline) Neverwhere and China Miéville's (2007. London: Macmillan) Un Lun Dun are contemporary fantasy novels which create and explore fantastic doubles to the modern city of London. The fantastic mode provides symbolic literalization of any city's tendency to estrange its citizens, to promise and simultaneously deny an absolute belonging which is impossible because of the city's scale. The refraction of the real-world city into its symbolic fantasy counterpart, and in particular the crisis of belonging and agency suffered by the protagonists who move from one realm to the other, become political tools for the exploration of power, difference and control. Both Gaiman and Miéville investigate the city as a space of hybridity, as well as London in particular as an imaginative construct realised as a series of images. Their fantastic Londons playfully invert these images while emphasising the disenfranchised and rejected aspects of the real-world city, interrogating and subverting notions of accepted order. The protagonists of both novels ultimately embrace and validate the other city, which is established as valuable despite its apparent construction as a subaltern realm; however, the classic polarisation of the fantasy genre into self/other dichotomies is more prevalent in Gaiman's mythologised realm than Miéville's more Marxist awareness. Nonetheless, both texts successfully use fantastic Londons to explore and interrogate notions of sanctioned and unsanctioned cultural identity.