Kraken

This book is a huge improvement over The City & The City, to which I gave 3 stars and which was a creative but rather dull experiment by Miéville in urban fantasy outside Bas-lag. Kraken is not always consistent but has the spark that The City lacks. It is more creative and ambitious, even though it doesn't match Perdido Street Station. The language is funny and enthralling, if you have the patience to read this book more slowly than your typical mass-consumption novel. The story is often just an excuse to keep introducing new mind-blowing, terrific, and also terrifying features. Miéville is not content with doing this just to build up momentum for the story, but is also careful with keeping the writing surprising and enjoyably obscure to the end. Despite the typical flaws of ambitious works that get lost at some points and where characters lose shape and become functions of the plot, this book is awesome enough to deserve 5 stars.

When a gigantic preserved squid goes missing from London's natural history museum, it's obvious this is no ordinary heist. Billy Harrow, the curator who arrived on the scene of the crime and had also been the one to preserve this particular specimen, is questioned by a special police squad, which suspects that the culprit may have been a local underground cult devoted to kraken worship. It turns out they aren't the only ones with the motive and means to perpetrate such an impossible crime, and the cult and occult police squad aren't the only ones who'd like to know what Billy may or may not know about what went down. This oddball heist may just turn out to be the beginning of the end, or of the many competing ends envisioned by the various bizarre religions that populate the London deep-underground. Mieville is a fascinating and inventive writer, whose stories are intricate and convoluted puzzles that always manage to come together in a satisfying way, even if it feels like it takes time for the outlines to become clear and in the end there may be a couple pieces missing, whose contours you must supply with imagination. He does like to keep his readers guessing, and sometimes throws you in headfirst into a situation, where you have to take your bearings in bewilderment in much the same way as the hapless characters whose misadventures you follow into mystery upon mystification. He's not one to lay it all out at once, and next to never lets his characters explain to each other what's what as if they didn't already know. Happily, he does let us sit in on the lives of a couple of characters who need to figure things out, and do, gradually, along with us, even as we share their frustration as the folks they're with tend not to lay it all out neatly but only piecemeal. This approach may trouble some readers. It drew me in, engaged me, and kept me hooked. What also kept me on were the fascinating and unpredictable twists, whose sense became clear only in their aftermath, and the clever and often quite amusing subplots, such as that of a statue named Wati, who'd freed himself from bondage to some dead Egyptian nobleman, and wound up, eventually, in London where he was forming a union of enslaved magical artifacts and animals, insisting they demand better pay for their services. These weren't just digressions. Even the oddest detour almost always turned out to be relevant to understanding the endgame. The prose, throughout, is playful and inventive. Mieville finds new ways to say old things and precise ways to express the unheard of and unusual. He draws effortlessly upon a wide range of sources, from pop culture to philosophy, science and history, handles and exploits technical terms (like "autopoiesis") with a playful ease, and creates rich allusions and inventive puns (e.g. "squid pro quo") that had me laughing out loud or grinning nearly every other page. It's a fun and funny book, that nevertheless demands attention because he

China Mieville writes like nobody else. Exceedingly erudite (he has a PhD) he throws many words you've never heard of into this fantastic brew taking place in his London- and London to him is a huge living thing, a great breathing, crouching beast. Windows rattle and bricks speak and of course there's plenty of swirling fog to top everything off. His writing is quirky, he uses highly inventive similes such as "Bits of rubbish shifted in gusts, crawled on the pavement like bottom feeders." London is alive if not well. Mieville carries you with him with great skill. You're there. You shudder. You shiver. You laugh. He takes you into the bowels of London. He wraps you the reader in a supernatural cocoon where all the ends are tied up and you can't escape. Where bizarre events and supernatural goings- on appear quite normal. You are plunged into a surrealistic world of strange cults, pagan apocalypses and god-like reptiles."Kraken" is concentrated New Weird which takes a bit of time to get used to. The action starts when Billy Harrow, the unassuming curator of mollusks in the Darwin Center is leading a group of visitors on a tour when he discovers the Center's star attraction, an eight meter long giant squid preserved in a huge tank of formalin, has disappeared tank and all. It is unthinkable, it is impossible but there is a great gaping space where the squid used to be. Billy embarks on a mission to solve the mystery and he is plunged into a surrealistic world of twisted and peculiar events, and crosses the path of strange cults, all fighting each other to conquer with their own particular apocalypse. Somehow the disappearance of the giant squid has set in motion a series of horrible events, an Armageddon which will destroy the world. This is a roller coaster ride and the reader finds he is sucked into a world that is impossible yet believable. That's part of Mieville's genius: he makes the outré, the fantastic, the surreal quite believable. There is a holy war going on with a giant squid as a god and some are not taking the theft of their god well. Billy has a large supporting cast, but he remains the pivotal character of the book, unassuming, modest and rather endearing. The local London police have a special division called the Fundamentalist and Sect related Crime Unit, its most illustrious member being the brash, witchy no- holds- barred Kath Collingswood "trendily unkempt." Dane, who is a worker at the Darwin Museum, belongs to a Krakenist cult and isn't a bit happy about the theft of the squid-god. Dane and Billy join ranks with Wati, a member of the spirit world who insinuates himself into strange objects, statues, stares through "wooden eyes on a Jesus" He sometimes inhabits nerdy objects, too, such as Star Trek's Captain Kirk.(Mieville is gently pulling our leg here). Crime lord Tattoo with his terrifying undead henchmen, Goss and Subby is Billy's chief antagonist. Will the snarled, convoluted groups of squid worshipers get their

A fascinating new novel by China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station, which won the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award the 2001 British Fantasy Award, and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and British Science Fiction awards. (He also wrote "King Rat", but not the "King Rat" that is set in a WWII POW Camp. ) The publishers would like you to think that it's similar to Neil Gaiman, and sure, two of the villains in this story are reminiscent of "the Old Firm"(but nastier, if that's possible). But I see more Tim Powers and James Blaylock, with more than a touch of H.P. Lovecraft (or maybe it's just all those tentacles....). It's technically Urban Fantasy, set in more or less modern day London. But it also has more than a little horror. And, oddly enough- it has some rather humorous bits too. Both scary and funny at times. The authors obvious love for and deep knowledge of London gives the book added depth. Our protagonist is swept along by events and people (and things) he hadn't any concept of in his prior life as a museum curator. He is forced out of his humdrum existence by the impossible theft of a giant squid pickled in a huge tank of formalin, a kraken that he himself had a hand in preserving. Enlivened by some interesting and original characters, including a few new deities and religions, it's entirely a different kettle of cuttlefish than your usual urban fantasy. It's also not a book you want to read yourself to sleep with. (The tentacles!!!!! Eeeeeeeeeeee!) It's different. It's dark. It's scary. It's different. It's humorous. It's well written. It's worth reading. It's... did I say different?