Kraken / China Miéville

Let me preface this review by stating that I’m a total China Miéville fanboy. I have every one of my copies of his books signed (except this one). I ordered the U.K. edition of this book so I would not have to wait two months for the U.S. version to come out, though a shipping snafu meant I didn’t get it until only a week before the U.S. release date. Miéville’s books are imaginative, complex, and thought-provoking. They also usually have monsters.

But I wouldn’t recommend his books generally, except for Un Lun Dun and The City and the City. Most of them are hard to read. He has lots of things going on, setting up stuff that doesn’t pay off until late in the books. He likes to use big words. And he references political, economic and cultural theories that I haven’t ever been exposed to. He’s not for everyone.

Kraken has all those qualities. It’s also my least favorite Miéville novel to date, though. Maybe I’m just becoming more attached to tight, focused prose than I used to be. That’s something that he’s rarely accused of. There were too many characters, too little idea of what was going on, and too many plot twists that wiped out everything known at each occurrence. I also was not invested in the possible ending throughout the book. It still merits a middle tier placement though, for sheer inventiveness. I always know I’ll get images of things never seen before when I read China Miéville books, and this doesn’t disappoint.

Billy Harrow is a young-ish researcher at the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum. He preserves marine biology specimens, among them a giant squid. At the start of the book, Harrow is giving a tour of the Centre but when the group enters the lab where the giant squid tank should be, it’s simply gone. Vanished.

From there, things get hairy. The police squad investigating is named the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit (F.S.R.C.), indicating something even weirder is up. They suspect a squid-cult is behind the disappearance. They want Billy to join up with them on some sort of freelance basis as a squid expert. Then one of the guards turns out to be a member of the squid cult and goes missing. From there, everything goes pretty crazy. The Church of the Kraken’s prophecies indicate that the squid’s disappearance is the harbinger of the end times.

Miéville’s love of monsters is apparent. The Remade from his Bas-Lag make an appearance, though only by description. One bad guy is a living tattoo. Another set, Goss and Subby, are ruthless but we know very little about them other than everyone is completely afraid of them. One good guy is a spirit, a familiar, that inhabits any statue or three dimensional figure. And guns whose bullets are eggs, spawning more guns. And there’s the Grisamentum, whose esoteric form I shall not reveal here, but which plays an unexpected and yet crucial role in the fight to save the universe.

It’s that inventiveness that salvages the book for me. I couldn’t always follow what was going on, but within a few pages there’d be some sort of being that would pop up, or a situation that turned the ordinary extraordinary. Communication by Morse Code through broken street lights, for instance. Or the Knight Foundation truck tooling around as headquarters. (You’ll get that reference if/when you read the book.) I continued reading simply to find out what Miéville would come up with next, despite my confusion about the intricate plot.

One minor nitpick about the cover. The covers of all three editions, from Macmillan, Random House, and Subterranean, feature a scary looking squid in water, as if you are about the meet a watery grave far from shore. That totally mis-characterizes the book though, in which the squid is missing for a long time, and is a preserved specimen the rest of the time. It isn’t the squid that’s dangerous, it’s the people trying to get hold of the squid that potentially bring the end of the world.

Other blogged reviews:

• Barbaric Document
• The Book Smugglers
• Disorganized, As Usual
• Dreams and Speculation
• Bibliolatry
• Karisa’s Reading Review

Title: Kraken: An Anatomy
Author: China Miéville
Cover creator:
Imprint / publisher: Macmillan / Pan Macmillan
Format: Hardcover
Length: 481 p.
Publication date: May 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-333-98950-0