Kraken

Product Information

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. Like, literal entrails: they cut through and pry apart pavement and the city has literal blood and organs and stuff.

A wonderful read, but I give it 4/5 stars because of the ultra-slow pace of the first several hundred pages. One day this prize specimen is stolen and the biologist who was responsible for studying it finds himself investigated by the police, named as the prophet of a cult of squid-worshipers, and pursued by a mostly disembodied underworld kingpin. Any novel that pays homage to The Sweeney with such splendid lines as "We're the bloody cult squad, Harrow," clearly has a playful intent. Every few chapters, just when I thought we would make a big break, there would be a new twist or new piece of information. Throw in characters like Wati, an ancient Egyptian spirit who can only manifest in carved or created figures (like statues or dolls) and is now a union leader for mystical familiars, or Simon, a teleporter who is the world's biggest Star Trek fan (and dresses accordingly, complete with working phaser), and you begin to get a sense of just how large this world is that Mr.Harold Bloom: Maybe you're just using book reviews as a way to avoid working on your real writing project. Miéville's joy in crafting monstrous villains reaches new heights with the Tattoo, an occult gang boss manifest in illustrated form as ink-on-skin and leader of the Knuckleheads, men transformed into giant walking fists. Billy makes a good hapless protagonist, thrust into a world he didn’t know existed the night before. Chapter 502: Okay, there's some room left in the book to explain how the hero did what he did to stop the bad guy from doing what he wanted to do. At first he rides with the police’s underfunded, underappreciated division that handles cult-related zaniness.

Now, is it true that the plot can be rather Gordian in its knottiness and more than a little jumbled for wide swathes of the story? But I rather suspect idea satiation of the text was part of the point, and, indeed, Miéville says, “it was a bit of a kitchen sink” of ideas in Kraken. But there’s an important difference: established religions have the weight of tradition and, to varying degrees, society behind them. The main character, Billy Harrow, is a hapless young Londoner who works at the museum where the squid was preserved as a tourist attraction.While I originally rated this slightly lower, it grew on me the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to read it again. For this reason the novel misses the emotional resonance and mythic qualities of the greatest urban fantasies, such as Neil Gaiman's American Gods or Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In the course of discovering the truth behind these strange events, the protagonist and the reader are taken on a whirlwind tour of this shadow London. Kraken is light hearted and, while it never strays too far from how immanent the apocalypse is, veers wildly from one conceptual sidetrack to another. Despite my brain gasping for oxygen and begging for a moment of calm in the story’s relentless prose storm, the eyegasms kept coming and coming on almost every page.

And Mieville both mentions the criminally unknown Hugh Cook (of the delightful The Walrus and the Warwolf) in the forward and includes one of his poems, The Kraken Wakes, within the pages. And yet it has always been those details that subgenre-defining authors drew on to create their vision of a magical London, from Gaiman to Milligan to Moore.There are kraken cults, unionized familiars on strike, an embassy for the ocean, fatal teleportation, tachyonic fire, incubating bullets, sentient tattoos, sentient ink, Londonmancers, ghostly police, and much more.

Bottom-line, this is an experience book, where the journey through clever, gorgeous prose is worth a few scratches of head and the beauty and majesty of the commentary more than outweighs the periodic moments of stunned confusion.For readers who are drawn to fantasy precisely for those qualities, Kraken may seem like a handsome but empty cadaver missing its emotional heart. However, Miéville differs from Brown in a few key points: he isn’t claiming this is all fact, covered up by some shadowy organization. Since there seem to be no rules to the operation of this magic, everyone accepts that virtually anything is possible if someone is powerful or clever enough. In Kraken, most of the asides outline a freewheeling Kantian magic system built on belief and symbology, the other asides are fodder for his plot twists, which are somewhat obvious, if only because he has avoided the swirling eddies of uncertainty that would otherwise hide their trail. The main character reminded me a bit of Richard Mayhew from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, but the two magic-amped assassins chasing Billy, known only as Goss and Subby, reminded me even more of the two unstoppable killers chasing after Richard Mayhew, the Messrs Croup and Vandemar.