Review - Kraken by China Miéville (Pan)

Kraken by China Miéville

Published by Pan

Paperback – 400 pages
Published May 2010

Review copy given by Pan MacMillan

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

I found the characters rather grating at first. I didn't sympathise with many of them and I found myself irritated by them. However, I quickly realised that this is because I would have been irritated by them in real life, and they were well written, accurate portrayals of certain aspects of British social classes.

The characters of Goss and Subby I found very well written. As a duo of heartless mass murderers, Miéville has made them not only threatening but merrily malevolent at the same time. The fact that there is no real personal motivation behind their murders, just that they find it fun, is incredibly sinister.

The world that Miéville has created is definitely the biggest strength of Kraken. This 'other London' idea isn't an entirely new one (fans of Kraken usually refer to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and, more recently, Ben Aarovitch's Rivers of London/Midnight Riot for this sub-genre) but Miéville has perfected it.

The city is a hive of magical activity, with a vast number of religions, cults and cub cultures operating beneath the thin veil of 'reality' that most people perceive. Miéville holds nothing back in showing you the sheer depth and complexity of the hidden London, from the Londonmancers who divine the future from the innards of the city itself, to the Church of God Kraken who have their own well established ideological universe. This is a world in which the familiar meets the fantastic in which you find yourself willingly immersed.

Kraken is brilliantly paced. Miéville is able to balance suspense and action in order to keep the story flowing without having to rely on info dumps to bring the reader up to speed. With such a complex social underbelly to work with, this is not mean feat. The reader finds things out at the same time as the protagonist, and so the gradual realisation of what is going on is a pleasure to experience.

Miéville's writing style is difficult to get into. It's very 'wordy' and flowery in places. At first I mistook this for arrogance (some kind of literary clique where if you don't understand it, you're not cool enough etc.) but I realised that this was all to aid in this rich world that he has created. Once you're able to penetrate the language, you're pretty much hooked into it. However, once I put the book down I was reluctant to pick it back up again since I knew it would take time to get back into the flow of the story. This is definitely the kind of book that needs to be read in epic sessions.

Kraken is a book that, by the end, I really liked. It has a deep and complex world setting that is both familiar and unfamiliar, inhabited by very real characters that make the fantastic elements all the more strange. Were it not for the dense language and writing style, Kraken would have been something that I would have loved. As it stands, it's still a thoroughly enjoyable book, though probably not one for casual readers.

Recommended to be read at least twice so you can fully appreciate the text. I'll definitely be giving it a second run through, and I'm looking forward to reading more of his work.