Kraken

I was totally absorbed in this brilliant, very weird, sometimes quite silly, but mostly gripping and sometimes downright chilling, yarn about a giant squid heist and multiple predicted apocalypses vying for imminent fulfillment. The hero Billy Harrow is a perfect stand-in for the reader, both in his initial bewilderment at the complicated supernatural world he's been thrown into, and later in his realization, gaining confidence, that he knows more than he thinks. The characters are richly drawn, from the incorporeal labor organizer Wati who speaks by temporarily inhabiting statues to the heartbroken Marge, like Billy a regular person, who's drawn into the aetherial cult world seeking answers for her partner's disappearance.

It's overwhelming sometimes, particularly in part 5 (of 7) where the novel dragged a little with a subplot that felt extraneous, but the denouement brought me back, full of unexpected twists and turns. A fitting novel for our apocalyptic times. "End of the world?" "Ends."

Après avoir reçu diverses recommandations convergentes à l'égard de China Mieville, j'ai attaqué ce roman car il avait le mérite d'être disponible à la médiathèque municipale (càd que ce n'est pas tant le résultat d'un choix très éclairé que celui du hasard).

Ça commence plutôt bien, avec une ambiance mystérieuse, un cambriolage impossible, une touche de surnaturel... Le style me semble parfois un peu lourdingue, mais ça devrait aller.

Sauf que non : de très courts chapitres, de 6 à 8 pages, pour un bouquin de plus de 500 pages, c'est un choix étrange. Là, on est balloté de péripéties en personnages nouveaux, de cultes étranges en magies improbables, les personnages sont à peine esquissés, l'intrigue n'a aucun sens ni intérêt, on dirait que l'auteur veut nous montrer qu'il a de l'imagination (et il en a), mais ça ne suffit pas à faire un roman.

Je m'arrête au bout de 412 page, je suis essoufflé, je m'ennuie, je ne veux même pas savoir comment ça finit.

C'est un peu triste tout de même.

J'espère que ce n'est pas son meilleur bouquin.

This it a re-read, I picked this up when it was first released.

In some ways, this is one of the more straightforward stories from China Miéville. It's a romp of a thriller in which esoteric religious beliefs ground an urban fantasy, as a museum curator, Billy Harrow, tumbles down the rabbit hole into a London of mystical cults, exotically arcane gangs, and clashing apocalypses.

Miéville's love for the crazy melting pot of London is on display, as he takes every bizarre sect at its word, and continues to twist the surreality dial over the course of the tale from "curiouser and curiouser" all the way to "gargling warthogs dancing the can can".

The writing is jarring mixture of his signature extended vocabulary at the service of a chopping London vernacular cadence that gets a little tough to read in places. That's just a sometimes thing, though, in what is otherwise a delightfully witty and loving wink at the power of faith and narrative. Excellent characters, some fun twists, and a setting that doesn't let you pause for breath.

Makes me want to reread some of his others now too.

I loved Miéville' s "The City and the City" so when I saw he'd written a book with the protagonist being a mild mannered cephalopod biologist, of course I had to pick it up! Set in London, the book follows Billy, the aforementioned, and the furor that ensues when the preserved remains of a giant squid go missing from the museum where he works. The squid is so huge that nobody could possible have removed it without any trace, and yet, that is what's happened. Adding to the confusion, the dead body of a man is discovered in the museum's basement, stuffed intact into a preserving jar into which there is physically no way he could possibly have fit.

Billy tries to make sense of events, but events simply get stranger and stranger. In a fantastical version of London where magic exists, where gods of all sorts are worshipped on a daily basis, and where warring groups of squid worshippers fight to try and recover the remains of their squid-kraken-god, the plot just gets stranger and stranger.

Although I enjoyed the creativity - and the fact the author managed to work the phrase "squid pro quo" into the novel - and of course I enjoyed the biology and the cephalopods - overall I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as The City and the City. The plot was just SO fantastical that the world had no predictability, meaning each plot twist felt like just one deus ex machina after another.
When the fictional world is so unpredictable, so unexplained, and so bizarre that the reader is unable to form a coherent mental image of what's going on, I feel the experience loses me somewhat. Definitely creative, fun, and I enjoyed parts of it, but overall it seemed too unpredictable and incoherent to really grab me. I will definitely try another Miéville novel though!

This is not a review. Or it's a not review. If you look at my Khanya blog you will see a couple of recent posts about vampires and vampire cults and vampire communities. I discovered that there were people who regarded themselves as real vampires, and thought that real vampires were fictional. I was interested in cults of fictional creatures, but hadn't quite been prepared to discover that there were people who regarded themselves as the creatures, and the fiction as some kind of distorted presentation of their real nature.

I walked into my son's room looking for coffee cups to put in the dishwasher, and saw this book lying upside down on a pile of dirty clothes for washing. [b:Kraken|6931246|Kraken|China Miéville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320551670l/6931246.SY75.jpg|8814204] it was called, by China Melville or some such. I picked it up, and turned it right side up, and saw that it was by [a:China Miéville|33918|China Miéville|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1243988363p2/33918.jpg]. Never heard of him. Turned it over and read the blurb. It said something about a museum specimen, a giant squid, which some people worship as a god.

I just had to read this book, didn't I?

It was surely meant to be. Here I am, absorbed in the question of actual people involved in actual cults involving fictional creatures. And here is this book about fictional people involved in fictional cults worshiping actual creatures.

I was pummeled by the logic of the Golux.

If you don't know the Golux, he is a character in [a:James Thurber|16839|James Thurber|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1183238729p2/16839.jpg]'s [b:The Thirteen Clocks|2093969|The 13 Clocks|James Thurber|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1439379552l/2093969.SX50.jpg|2099329]. The Golux, a little man with an indescribable hat and a dark describable beard, guides prince Zorn of Zorna to a castle where the evil Duke has killed time, seconds and munutes bleeding on the floor. The Duke keeps Princess Saralinda prisoner, and her hand is the only warm thing in the castle, and if she can warm up the thirteen stopped clocks, maybe time will live again. So they go round and she touches the clocks, but they don't start and time stays dead. The Golux has an idea. "If you can touch the clocks and never start them, you can start the clocks and never touch them. That's logic as I know and use it." So they go round not touching the clocks, and they start.

So if you want to grasp real people involved in a cult of fictional creatures, what better than reading a book about a fictional cult of real creatures?

So I began reading [b:Kraken|6931246|Kraken|China Miéville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320551670l/6931246.SY75.jpg|8814204].

If Tom Lehrer was impressed by a man facing singlehanded a ton of angry pot roast in a bull fight, how much more impressed must one be with one man facing half a ton of pickled calamari?

Well, I wasn't very impressed. It jumped the shark, or rather the squid, in the third chapter.

What sort of book is this? It is [a:Neil Gaiman|1221698|Neil Gaiman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1234150163p2/1221698.jpg] meets Harry Potter meets [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg] but it somehow lacks something that those books have.

A giant squid exhibit is stolen from a London museum, in mysterious circumstances. The Kraken Church are suspected by the London cult squad (the most realistic thing in the book, shades of the South African Police's occult crimes unit -- the one thing they didn't investigate was the activities of their colleagues in another branch who put hexed nails in Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu's driveway, but that's another story). The curator who discovers the theft, Billy Harrow, was also the one who pickled the squid to put it on display, and he is thought to be the prophet of the Kraken by the Church of Kraken, so they are after him, and so are a whole lot of other people, and gods, and demi gods in the mysterious London underworld or other world. This is where there is a vague whiff of Gaiman and Harry Potter and Charles Williams. Like the Diagon Alley of Harry Potter, there is this other London, and like [a:Charles Williams|36289|Charles Williams|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1217390107p2/36289.jpg]'s [b:All Hallows Eve|143225|All Hallows' Eve|Charles Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347477101l/143225.SY75.jpg|138160], London, the city itself, is one of the characters in the story.

The cops give Bill protection, but this is breached by Goss and Subby, or Goss and fucking Subby, as he is usually called. Not that he does much fucking in the story, or much of anything else, either. It's not clear whether he has the apparatus. What he does have, is ... no, I'd better not give away the plot, not that there's really a plot. One of the twists in the plot, or rather one of the twists in the not plot. If you want to know about Goss and Subby, you can Google them. Perhaps it's Sub and Gossy. No a gossy is a keratinous relic of an ancestor that subsides into oblivion down ley lines in Helliconia, and resembles a duppy, but not quite, but that is part of another book, or series of books, by [a:Brian Aldiss|33297|Brian W. Aldiss|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1333457329p2/33297.jpg]: [b:Helliconia Spring|672244|Helliconia Spring (Helliconia, #1)|Brian W. Aldiss|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387750658l/672244.SY75.jpg|1559837] and summer, and winter. So no, these gossies return, or rather Goss and Subby are back and everyone is scared because a more nihilistic pair of villains you have never met.

In my youth I used to be rather fond of the Theatre of the Absurd, which was popular in the late 1950s and the 1960s -- people like [a:Samuel Beckett|1433597|Samuel Beckett|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1522050561p2/1433597.jpg] and [a:Eugene Ionesco|7689|Eugène Ionesco|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1474565529p2/7689.jpg] and [a:Harold Pinter|1197|Harold Pinter|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1210188251p2/1197.jpg]. I'm told by the critics that there were Modern authors, and represented Modernism. I'll take their word for it. Samuel Beckett's novel [b:Watt|104613|Watt|Samuel Beckett|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1171520807l/104613.SY75.jpg|1491908] was as weird as could be, but I was disappointed because the copy in our library and in our local bookshops has a page missing, the page that made me want to read the book in the first place. I went through the library copy page by page, and it was not there. It had vanished as though it had never been. If anything was Absurd, that was.

Well, if those were Modern literature of the Absurd, [b:Kraken|6931246|Kraken|China Miéville|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320551670l/6931246.SY75.jpg|8814204] could perhaps be described as Postmodern literature of the Absurd, but it isn't as pleasantly absurd or as absurdly pleasant as the others. There's a deus ex machina in every chapter. Well, every second chapter. The bad guys have extraordinary powers that make them invulnerable to attack until something quite simple defeats them. Perhaps that's more like a Premodern fairy tale, but the fairies are pretty scary. That fits, too.

If you think this review is pretty disjointed and full of non-sequiturs, that's because the book is too, and anyway, as I said at the beginning, this isn't a review.

You've all heard the anecdotes about the guy who sits down in a restaurant, plops a chunk of money on the table and says, "this is the tip; I'll be making deductions for every misstep!" What a jerk.

Well, it's a bit how I approach novels. At page one, everyone has five stars (assuming the first line isn't "It was a dark and stormy night.")

The Kraken lost one star a couple of chapters in when I thought "who does this guy think he is: Neil Gaiman?" Think of every derivative work slightly tweaking The Lord of the Rings and I think that's where we're headed with Gaiman's style. Mieville might be the start of it or just the first I've read.

The Kraken lost its second star when I realized that Mieville is no Neil Gaiman. For all its quirk and dark oddity (Mieville might have an edge on Gaiman in creative profanity, I guess) the story doesn't contain its threads as well as it should. There are little weak links in the chain that aren't soldered in place by a concrete mythology; your disbelief falls through a rotted wood slab on a hastily constructed suspension bridge.

The Kraken lost its third star for slighting characters it had gone through some effort in getting you to care about. I won't say more about it because I don't want to click the 'this review contains spoilers' box.

Two stars and a suggestion that you read Mieville's The City and the City, which reminds me of no one else's work in style or plot and is well-formed and satisfying.