Name: Kraken
Rating: 3.620689655172414 (29 reviews)
ISBN: 9786155468919

China Miéville;

Kraken

China Miéville

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, a perfect and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears? For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins.

An Anatomy

Tim Pendry

We are definitely not into spoilers so it is hard to go too far into the story of this dark fantasy novel on a scientific theme. A preserved and valuable giant squid disappears (literally) from the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Musum and one of its staff, Billy Harrow, discovers a world of cults and magic that threaten apocalypse. So far, so very obviously dark fantasy, but China Mieville adds a major work to the genre that owes a great deal to the psychogeographical cult of London as the world's most magical city. Its fault is that of all modern creative fantasy - far too many ideas for a basic story line that could be culled from any urban thriller. Although resolved satisfactorily, there are moments when you feel that greatness has only just eluded Mieville. In the end, despite hints of something deeper, and some remarkable invention and (in places) ideas, it ends up being an entertainment rather than truly thought-provoking. There are certainly moments of sharp satire that anyone who has dipped their foot into London's esoteric world will recognise - the description of the Chaos Nazis alone is worth the book. The Londonmancers are psychogeography in action. The Krakenists stand for all religions based on an essential absurdity - not excluding our own dominant religions of the book. There is even a police unit with a brilliantly drawn young officer whose insubordination and style make her into magic's own female version of Gene Hunt alongside a man called Vardy as their occult 'Cracker'. The references back into English (and American) popular culture are many and various with such gems as a warning on Star Trek teletransportation that rather takes the glamour out of it all. Mieville is very good at character and dialogue even if sometimes his play with language can add a degree of obscurity in places that makes one wonder if he has been infected with the Bloomsbury virus. There is even a political sub-plot (radical politics being an interest of the author) in a magical strike led by a very old shabti with political consciousness. And the demonic Goss and Subby and rival gangland bosses Tattoo and Grisamentum are truly evil - there are scenes of which we cannot speak that seem to have been drawn from many happily wasted hours watching fantasy blockbusters at the cinema. It is not so much London that is the hero of this novel but the culture of Londoners below the veneer of rational order that the Government claims to offer. Having watched a case at a London magistrates court recently, the authorities clearly have little idea about what they are doing - justice is certainly not a part of it. The police are pictured as being completely sea, right numpties, as events unfold around them and perhaps the only serious point to make about the book is that it captures a general mood, prevalent in the last year or so of the last Government, of things falling apart and of the authorities posturing with increasing absurdity as they do so. The book captures what many people know is true at the rougher end of London and which started to become obvious as a more general problem across the country, even to the naive middle classes - that the authorities are not only not in control of this city but that those villains who are in control of their 'manors' are in uneasy truce with the police to keep everything from getting entirely out of control. Things feel better now with a change of Government but whether they are better is another matter. Perhaps all that is happening is that 'nice' middle class people can start to believe again that things will hold together. In fact, villains can generally act with impunity so long as they don't rub the coppers noses in it. In part, this book is about what happens when the system finally breaks down and we come close to a meltdown. It is also about the subtle shifts of belief and loss of confidence that unnerve the general population without them actually knowing that anything is going on until the apocalypse is upon them. There have been moments in the last year or so when 'sensitives' have smelled riots in the streets without being able to put their finger on where and when - what is happening in Athens might well have been our fate. It is, in short, a political commentary masking as dark fantasy and, unlike the romantic and mildly pessimistic dark fantasies of most middle class genre writers, this one has an edge of thuggery, fear and brutality that gives us a far better idea of what things look like at street level. Not a great book but a good book and well worth reading if you like dark fantasy or are interested in London, that is, ironically, the real London rather than the 'realistic' London of those interminably dull literary recreations of who is bonking who and their torments in Islington or in the bourgeois postal codes around BBC studios.

A contemporary fantasy set in present-day London finds people flocking to a British Museum exhibit of a giant squid that is stolen by magical criminals, a crime that propels young curator Billy into a supernatural underworld. By the Arthur C. Clarke- and Locus-winning author of Perdido Street Station.

Sarah Sammis

Kraken by China Miéville is a book that defies easy classification. It's at the crossroads of a busy intersection with science fiction, urban fantasy, horror and mystery / thriller. It's very long, requires a good deal of concentration and a full vocabulary to finish.

As the book is so long and complex, I've included thrice the amount of links to other reviews as I normally do. If you're seriously considering reading the book, I recommend you go through the posted reviews. You may love the book. You may be confused by it. You may hate it.

Billy Harrow works at London's Natural History Museum where he specializes in mollusks. His pride and joy is a giant squid he taxidermied. At the start of the book, "Archie" the squid has gone missing. Billy calls the police and when they don't have any leads, he sets out to find Archie himself.

Billy's search leads him into an alternate London (not quite as alternate as Miéville's Un Lun Dun () but more along the lines of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. The other possiblity is that the search for Archie makes Billy aware of all the oddities of London that are there just under the surface of day to day perception.

I was reading Kraken at the same time I was reading Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus. I imagine Billy living in the present day London of Theodosia where shabtis can (and do) go on strike, tattoos can be sentient, and there's a Kraken cult trying to awaken the sleeping monster that is London.

But... there's a point where no matter how beautiful the language or how imaginative the scenes, a book begins to drag. Kraken suffers from that. There's a lot of filler.

Michael Springer

In the city of _______, the end of the world is quickly approaching, instigated when a/an _______ gets stolen. Genero, the undistinguished protagonist, all of a sudden discovers a new world when he's ________ by a ________ and then rescued by a ________. It then turns out he is a hero sort, a necessary element of the battle between a ______ and a/an ___________.

Jeff Vandermeer: Alright, Mieville, the name of a city. 

China Mieville: This will be a London sometin'. 

JV: Alright *writes it in* Now, we need a noun.

CM: Ah. . . squid? 

JV: Sure. Why not. *Writes it in* Verb?

CM: Kidnap.

JV: Past tense?

CM: Kidnapped.

JV: *taps forehead with pen* You know, Mieville, I kind of like the idea of basing our next books off of Mad Libs, but I can't help but feeling like this particular storyline is just unavoidably plain. I mean, you could use this framework to generate The Dark Is Rising, or Un Lun Dun, or-

CM: I AM CHINA MIEVILLE. I WILL MAKE IT WORK. 

JV: Profession?

CM: Uh. . . gangster.

JV: *Writes it in* The Lord of The Rings, even. I mean, this looks kind of Tolkeinish in its framework-

CM: I'M CHINA MIEVILLE, BITCH. 

(1 year later. . . )

JV: Hey, China, congratulations on Kraken!

CM: Did you like it, Jeffy?

JV: It was quite funny! Collingsworth was a terrific secondary character. And when you brought in that guy who figured out how to teleport, man, that was vintage. And so was the Tattoo. 

CM: Cheers, Jeff!

JV: The idea of competing armageddons is a fun one. And you have the detectives over here, the friend over there, the protagonist here, and they all meet up at the end . . . it's a terrific way--

CM: Yeah, thanks--

JV: Of getting around a fair-to-middling plot. 

CM: . . . . .

JV: And a dull, flat main character.

(Mieville turns, looking out of the review at the reviewer.)

CM: Where do you get off judging my book and giving it a star rating? Not to mention impersonating me, and claiming I said inane things.

Michael: *Leaps back from his computer, startled* Uhh. . .hi. I'm a big fan.

CM: Fuck you, a big fan! "Big fans" appreciate the elements that work in a book, they don't spend time nitpicking because it didn't reinvent the genre. You're docking me two bloody stars because it's a hero's journey?

M: . . . First off, I don't give five stars to anything that didn't stun me with its brilliance. So, that's kind of like an "extra credit" number of stars. So, really, I'm docking you ONE for the hero's journey thing. 

CM: But you gave five stars to "The Monster at the End of This Book."

M: So I did. Did you read Keely's review of Kraken? Did you pick on him?

CM: He didn't call himself a big fan.

Michael: Touche.

Jeff Vandermeer: Do you still need me? Can I go home now?

M & CM: Shut up, Jeff!

M: It's just that I expect a lot from you. . . That's all. The Bas Lag books were technically speculative fiction, but they surpassed that, and I think qualified as literary fiction. Kraken is pulp fantasy, isn't it?

CM: You say "pulp" like it's a bad word. I wanted to have some fun with the genre of fantasy, and write a humorous book, and I did both.

M: Good job! Doing that gets you three stars from me.

CM: WTF! Not that I care about how many stars you give me on your social networking site. What have you written?

M: . . . . 

CM: Exactly. 

M: You don't have to shit on my self esteem just because I gave you three stars. We can still be friends.

CM: Feast on my dung. I'M CHINA MIEVILLE, BITCH. I REST MY CASE. *Returns to his blog.*

JV: *Shrugs* I don't know what to tell you. 

M: Somebody's having a bad hair day. I mean, you can't fill your book with stock characters who never develop, follow a traditional pulp storyline, and expect to write something that moves your readers deeply. He HAD some good ideas in the book that made it a very entertaining read. But I can't give him extra credit for being China Mieville, right? You see what I mean?

JV: Last time you wrote a review with me in it, you had me murdered. Don't expect sympathy here. 

M: Yeah? Well, my reviews are sometimes violent. It wasn't personal.

JV: *Shakes his head and goes back to Ambergris*
 
M: I guess there's a downside to being a meanspirited cynic who disses books all the time. I mean, really, books are my closest friends. Because real people are such assholes.

Harold Bloom: Maybe you're just using book reviews as a way to avoid working on your real writing project. Perhaps you're afraid this novel will turn out to be less edgy than you hope for, and that fear is making you find ways to avoid working on it. Perhaps your rough treatment of China Mieville is really the result of your own insecurities.

M: Goddamn you, Bloom. If this is going to become a review of ME, I'm fucking leaving.

Yulande Lindsay

There was a fascinating story here, but much of it was obscured by the language. How to explain? The idea of an apocalypse being brought on by the disappearance of a giant squid is in itself, an interesting story. But China Mieville love affair with language effectively interferes with the enjoyment of the story. It was too dense, too - if this makes sense - in love with its own voice. When one has to spend whole minutes deciphering the meaning of a word, a sentence, a paragraph - too many times - it is tiring.

Jessica Smith

One concept that appears in this book is "knacking", a form of magic in which an object makes sense to everyone as something else. An example given is that of an underused meeting room door next to a toilet in an office; if a worker should notice its existence they would remark to themselves how strange it was that they'd never noticed before, then go on to never notice it again. They might notice a sign on the door saying something like "out of order", or something else — something the effect of which was to say "not here, go somewhere else". 

Well, I felt that this book had been "knacked" with the same effect. I struggled to concentrate on it; my thoughts were always going elsewhere. There were a huge number of characters and I struggled to remember who they all were. I struggled to follow what was happening. It just ended up very confusing which is sad because it seemed to have some interesting ideas.

Kraken

Reviews

Highlights