Review: Kraken by China Miéville
Jack Nicholls
October 06
China Miéville likes monsters and he likes cities. It is perhaps no surprise then that Kraken, his latest novel, tells a tale of a natural monster lost in a city full of supernatural ones. Like last year’s award winning The City and the City, Kraken is an urban mystery story, but there the similarities end. The City and the City was monster-and-magic free, and perhaps as a result found itself classified as ‘crime’ or ‘literature’ despite its fantastic premise. Booksellers around the world will face no such uncertainty in pigeonholing Kraken. It is unashamedly urban fantasy; chock-full of the kind of baroque flourishes that characterised Miéville’s early Bas-Lag novels. Look for it in the ‘eschatological comedy’ shelves at your booksellers, or failing that, among ‘sci-fi/fantasy’.
The plot is not easy to distil, but it is driven by the ‘squidnapping’ of a preserved giant squid from the London Natural History Museum. The squid’s curator, Billy Harrow, investigates this mystery and soon discovers a secret London underworld of apocalyptic cultists and working-class sorcerers. Before long, Billy has been proclaimed as a squid messiah, and is being pursued by magical police officers, two-dimensional mob bosses, theatrical Nazis, Kraken worshippers and a pair of demonic, ageless psychopaths.
Which of these groups stole the squid? It’s a good hook, but it rapidly becomes apparent that it doesn’t much matter. The missing squid is pure MacGuffin, an excuse to draw Billy, and the reader, into the mad world Miéville has invented. The meat of the book is in its competing cults, which squabble ceaselessly among themselves for the privilege of bringing about their own idiosyncratic apocalypse.
This is China Miéville we’re talking about, so it is no surprise that the book is crammed with deft word-play, visual puns, memorable characters, and clever satire. What does come as a surprise is that, this time, the whole is very much less than the sum of its parts. This awareness comes slowly. After an intriguing opening, Kraken plunges into a wealth of brilliantly-realised scenes: humans folded up like origami! 1970s police spirits that talk only in cliché! Ancient Egyptian icons turned socialist union leaders! But as the story progresses it becomes apparent that most of these details are not really relevant. The final plot machinations are ingenious, but their relation to the previous four-hundred pages are tangential at best.
No doubt this was largely intentional. Miéville has said that he intended Kraken as a comedy, and the sub-plots are certainly amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny. But silliness palls over five hundred pages and by the end of the novel, I was thinking the hitherto unthinkable with a China Miéville book: that I was bored.
Perhaps the real problem is that it all feels too familiar. Miéville himself has set two previous fantasy novels and a novella in London. Kraken is especially reminiscent of Miéville’s first novel King Rat: both novels sharing a protagonist on the run who is inducted into the world of London magic by a mentor who has freed him from captivity. The spectre of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere also looms large. Kraken’s pair of diabolic hitmen are terrifically scary, but they are little too close for comfort to Neverwhere’s Messrs. Croup and Vandemar. On the other hand, Miéville must be praised for resisting the easy road of turning a story of squid-worshippers into a Lovecraft pastiche, for which I was thankful.
Graham Greene used to divide his oeuvre into ‘novels’, and ‘entertainments’. Well, if The City and the City was one of China’s novels, then Kraken is definitely an entertainment. For those who know and love Miéville’s style, I would cautiously recommend it. If you haven’t read anything by Miéville yet, then you should start with Perdido Street Station, which is undoubtedly a better book. As for those who’ve read Miéville in the past but were not sold on him, Kraken is unlikely to change your mind.
For me, the experience of reading Kraken was best summed up by Miéville’s own invention of katachronophlogiston: a magic fire which burns things so thoroughly that they are erased from existence and memory. Only a few weeks after finishing Kraken, I feel like its details have been seared out of my mind – leaving only a trace-memory of something Too Clever By Half.
Jack Nicholls is always happy to pass judgement on other people’s work, and his preferred apocalypse would be for the world to be drowned in ice-cream.
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Comments
06 Oct 10 at 10:17
I really wanted to like Kraken.
I’d never read any of Melville’s books before – I think I fell into the trap you mentioned of assuming that because The City and the City was in the lit section, Kraken would be a lit take on sea monsters. I really like sea monsters, and probably skimmed too fast over the blurb before purchasing based on the large tentacles on the cover.
But Kraken I found exceptionally disappointing. Formulaic and amateurish in its style, I couldn’t get past the first 100 pages. For me, this was like a bad day with Dan Brown. And it’s not about sea monsters at all.
There is a line on the 17th page that I think summed up the overall quality of writing:
Billy stared at the phone. He was annoyed that he felt obliged to acquiesce to that last order.
China may be poking fun by using this kind of writing class fodder, but if he is, he’s not fully aware of how tired the joke becomes after a few chapters.
...06 Oct 10 at 14:22
Race past it to John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. Brilliant book!
...06 Oct 10 at 16:35
Agree with you on Wyndham’s ‘The Kraken Wakes’. Now there was a writer who knew how to do End of the World stories!
...07 Oct 10 at 11:47
Hmm I have just made The City and the City my first foray into speculative fiction for a long while (review here: http://plumeofwords.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/china-mievilles-the-city-and-the-city/) and was vaguely considering having a go at Kraken, so thanks for the heads up!
...07 Feb 11 at 22:40
Agree with most of your comments; however Mieville is not the first one to invent the concept of “katachronophlogiston” (after which my own recently created site is named). Robert Jordan refers to “balefire” in his Wheel of Time books which does pretty much the same thing.
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