Kraken

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!

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.

In a book that features squid-worshippers, talking tattoos, thugs with fists instead of heads, and even a tribble, you would think that all this ridiculousness might run wild, but that is not the case with Kraken. Even though the world of the novel is a version of London where multiple gods roam and many of the residents have some affinity for magic, the novel never fully descends into outright absurdity. The villains of the story--a Dickensian pair of personified malevolence, one of whom speaks entirely in a hodgepodge of mixed metaphors, awful analogies, and Cockney nonsense--ground the narrative in a violent reality. Even though the characters have magic at their disposal, the villains have powers far greater and far more sinister, so there is actual drama and conflict, not merely a series of events ending in someone pulling a rabbit out of the hat and then watching as the rabbit saves the day.

The main flaw with Kraken is that the author sometimes gets lost in creating his alternate London. Like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, much of the narration of Kraken is explaining how the world works, and the histories of its bizarre denizens. These explanations come whether they are needed or not. Explaining the squid cult that is at the center of the novel, or the backstory between London's warring factions is all well and good. But is it really necessary to devote time to explain Chaos Nazis? They're Nazis who love chaos; it's pretty self-explanatory. There are also a couple of sub-plots that, although they join up with the main plot in the end, go into more detail than is actually needed. And there's one potentially interesting sub-plot, involving a kidnapped girl who might be a cross between a human and a djinn, that doesn't get nearly enough attention. But wayward plots are what come with the territory when mixing genres like Kraken does. The novel has elements of horror, Sci-Fi (speculative fiction, if you're nasty), fantasy, and mystery, blending all these genres in a seamless fashion.