I would trust Miéville about London. He was born there, and has even imagined UnLondon, an alternative reality where, among other things, broken umbrellas can move of their own accord. (I would recommend this for the  admittedly unlovely term  literate young adult in your life.)

But this isn't fantasy, although it teeters on the edge of hallucination. A short booklet, 83 small pages long, had better pack a lot of wallop if you're going to charge a penny shy of eight quid for it, and I would say this just about gets away with it. Riffing on the 18th-century arsonist Jonathan Martin's mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital's destruction due to godlessness, entitled London's Overthrow, Miéville turns in what is best seen as a prose poem. (Jonathan Martin was brother of the more famous John, painter of vast, lightning-ridden, blood-red depictions of apocalypse; and in a sense Jonathan could be said to have walked the walk as well as talked the talk, for he set York Minster on fire from Methodist principles, and, indeed, insanity.)

Miéville has a fine turn of phrase. "Christ's authorities dither" is a neat encapsulation of the vacillation at St Paul's over the Occupy LSX movement. "In London's Overthrow they hold their bibles the wrong way round: in London 2011, they start legal action." This is a snapshot of London last year, from late autumn to winter, as it licked its wounds after the riots and felt very ill-prepared, as well as ill at ease, about the following year's various scenes of pomp. I apologise to readers here for more London-centricity, and I assure you that I am beginning to weary of even hearing the word, or seeing it printed, but this is the kind of corrective you need for all the ra-ra (I pick the phrase from Miéville) that has been going on for the last few months.

This is a city both divided and yet crammed together, elements of poverty and wealth jostling together, and so its form  paragraphs either poetic or angrily factual with little apparent thought for structure and overall order  seems fitting. But on rereading, it seems that there is a framework underneath it all. I can't help feeling that this book was conceived and written in the same kind of mood, and for the same kinds of reasons, as The Waste Land  with the crucial difference that Miéville, as a socialist, has to keep believing that one day, things will get better. And yet he cannot let go of the apocalypse. The tone is very much that of the haunted preacher, seeing portents everywhere: "The Horniman Museum, Forest Hill  Dingy things. Half-bat skeletons flying out of their own skins. A cabinet of dog heads, a starburst of skulls and morose faces. In the centre, point zero of the canine explosion, is a tatty wolf. Its expression has no name. It stares out, its face as horrified as Martin's lion, as angry as the riot dogs of Greece." (Martin's drawing is surmounted by a lion with an appalled expression.)

The book is punctuated liberally with Miéville's blurred or shifting photographs, snatched on the hoof as he patrols the city. The blurring is the whole point (they're in colour, which I suppose is one reason this booklet is so expensive; but they look deliberately amateurish, and give the book an extra dimension, like a soundtrack).

Of course, we have Iain Sinclair to thank for this kind of thing. Fair enough: it's a good thing, and anyway Miéville acknowledges the debt. I would like to think that I would be able to tell the difference between the two styles  that if Sinclair were named as the author of this book I would spot the mistake. One giveaway: Miéville is very much on the side of the young. He even makes a case for the 14-year-old playing grime on his tinny-speakered phone on the bus. And, best of all, he denounces the phrase "feral youth": "As if such a spiteful, shocking, bestialising phrase does not disgrace every mouth from which it spills. Its utterance is not a diagnosis, but a symptom."