Kraken

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I had to tell myself to have faith in the Kraken, but what I really wanted was to pick up the bottle. So not only do these cultists pass as normal in London society without difficulty, they interact with each other the same way rival political activists might: they argue, they share drinks, they make temporary alliances, and occasionally come to blows. In interviews Miéville identifies as an atheist, and I guess to him believing in virgin birth or reincarnation is just as fanciful as his squid cult. Aside from some mild name-dropping (in the case of Grisamenthum), Miéville doesn’t spend much time introducing the major players and the history of this aspect to the city. But here the combined weight of ideas and plot press down on the characters, which struggle to grow beyond entertaining pop-cultural caricatures.

A wonderful read, but I give it 4/5 stars because of the ultra-slow pace of the first several hundred pages. Meanwhile, blogger Damien G Walter enjoyed the literary fantasy of the year, finding in China Miéville's Kraken, a tale of cops and apocalypse in an alternative London, "a prodigious imagination letting rip". The main storyline becomes not only hard to follow but is almost impossible to identify, leaving the reader to just blindly go along on this crazy ride. We got pieces of chaos nazis, a bit of Read Or Die, but everything else was pure extrapolation and imagination, as far as I could tell.You've probably read the blurbs: The impending apocalypse is kicked off when a giant squid is abducted from the Natural History Museum in London. Billy discovers the kraken missing beginning his adventure into a world of magic, squid cults, and sentient tattoos. I made up my own mind about his looks and I'll make up my own mind about his writing, too, thank you very much. Miéville takes this boilerplate idea and makes it something new with the unique cast of characters, types of magic, etc. Enter that room and you breached a Schwarzschild radius of something not canny, and that cephalopod corpse was the singularity.

Like Neverwhere, the normal everyday guy protagonist finds himself pulled into a parallel London where the supernatural is commonplace. There are conspiracies galore, gods created by belief, and the psychotic duo of Goss and Subby, who remind me both of Croupe and Vandemaar of Neverwhere fame and of The Domino Men. Like any classic movie monster, it works its fascinating magic only as long as we don't care to inspect the structure that supports the illusion, or questions its premises.The exuberant energy and ambition of Kraken make for a complex novel packed with fascinating and original concepts. If I ever read this a second time, I'm going to do it slowly, savoring each turn and hint and phrase very carefully. His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities and explanations.