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Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Del Rey (2010), Edition: 0, Hardcover, 528 pages
Description
Fantasy. Fiction. Literature. Science Fiction. HTML:With this outrageous new novel, China Mi�ville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this�or any other�year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about�or prevent�the End of All Things. In the Darwin Centre at London�s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre�s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux�better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy�s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens�human and otherwise�are adept in magic and murder. There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity�and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC�the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit�a branch of London�s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city�s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London�s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying�yet darkly charismatic�demonic duo. All of them�and others�are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from China Mi�ville�s Embassytown..… (more)
Media reviews
A Son Of The Rock
Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT.
This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in
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mind - one with a potentially light-hearted take - but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound.
It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen - formalin, tank and all - from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby - two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) - and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts.
Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint.
While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc. Show Less
Miéville has done what all great science-fiction has done—and great so-called literary fiction, when it gets around to it—provide a nuanced, highly imagined critique of the zeitgeist, dressed up in a crackerjack story.
""... "Kraken" is, no mistake, a literary work. The hint is in the subtitle, "An Anatomy," because Miéville is exploring the gap between the prosaic squid and the mythic Kraken, between the mundane ground of everyday life and the sacred. What precisely turns a fish into a god? What is the anatomy
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of a legend? And how do gods manifest themselves in our world?
...Miéville's best work since "Perdido Street Station." Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member GingerbreadMan
Billy Harrow works at the Darwin Centre in London, where he has just recently has preserved a really rare specimen – a complete, undamaged giant squid. A Kraken. It’s unique, and a given centerpiece of the guided tours of the museum. Until one day it’s impossibly just gone, giant tank and
Do you remember when Gaiman’s “Neverwhere” came out and urban fantasy just seemed so mind-bogglingly fresh? I haven’t had that feeling for this genre since, until now. Here’s a plot so fast-paced, complicated and smart I’m not even going to try and go into it. And a discussion on faith, theology and identity. And basically just cramming as many things I find utterly marvelous and weird into 480 pages as possible. That’s actually one of the things I really love about Miéville. He never holds back on ideas. There are so many things just hinted at here or mentioned is casual passing, which could warrant short stories or even novels of their own. His worlds always seem so much bigger than what’s in focus for the storyline at hand. They always leave me wanting more.
Here, you get warring cults with rival versions of the Apocalypse, a crime-lord tattooed on the back of an unwilling host, a striking worker’s union for familiars, an embassy for the Sea and trademark Miéville horrors Goss and Subby. There are a host of believable and flawed characters, some of them even tainted heroes. My favorites are probably sloppy chav police witch Collingswood and Marge, who plunges into the secret side of London looking for answers protected only by a hungry iPod with a crappy taste in music. Oh dearest China, what you do to me. This is one of his best, in my opinion, and easily one of the best reads of this year for me.
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all. Even more impossible: in the room where the squid is no more, a man is found drowned in formaldehyde, in a bottle with an opening much too small to put him into. And there’s something very strange about the police turning up to ask Billy questions. What Billy is about to find out – which comes to no surprise to anyone familiar with this genre – there is *another* London. It’s a place full of home-spun, of secret churches and hidden places, where finding the right metaphors means power. And now, after the theft of the Kraken, all the Londonmancers, who ask the city itself about the future, are suddenly seeing the exact same thing. The end of the world is coming fast, and Billy has already been given a role to play.Do you remember when Gaiman’s “Neverwhere” came out and urban fantasy just seemed so mind-bogglingly fresh? I haven’t had that feeling for this genre since, until now. Here’s a plot so fast-paced, complicated and smart I’m not even going to try and go into it. And a discussion on faith, theology and identity. And basically just cramming as many things I find utterly marvelous and weird into 480 pages as possible. That’s actually one of the things I really love about Miéville. He never holds back on ideas. There are so many things just hinted at here or mentioned is casual passing, which could warrant short stories or even novels of their own. His worlds always seem so much bigger than what’s in focus for the storyline at hand. They always leave me wanting more.
Here, you get warring cults with rival versions of the Apocalypse, a crime-lord tattooed on the back of an unwilling host, a striking worker’s union for familiars, an embassy for the Sea and trademark Miéville horrors Goss and Subby. There are a host of believable and flawed characters, some of them even tainted heroes. My favorites are probably sloppy chav police witch Collingswood and Marge, who plunges into the secret side of London looking for answers protected only by a hungry iPod with a crappy taste in music. Oh dearest China, what you do to me. This is one of his best, in my opinion, and easily one of the best reads of this year for me.
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LibraryThing member bragan
Billy Harrow works in a museum in London, until the day their carefully preserved giant squid goes missing, along with its equally giant tank... which is a bit perplexing, considering that you'd need a crane to move the thing. Or, just possibly, magic. From that moment on, Billy finds himself
My only criticism of this book is that the story moves a little slowly -- though it has has what feels like it should be a non-stop action plot, often surprisingly little seems to be happening -- and then wraps up a little too quickly. But, really, the appeal of China Mieville's stuff is always more in the setting and the wild inventiveness than in the plot, and this book certainly doesn't fall down in that respect. As usual, it's full of all kinds of weird, wonderful, utterly crazy stuff, and gives the strong impression that we're seeing only one little corner of a world with its own strange history and personalities and rules. I've heard complaints to the effect that it mostly just consists of Mieville throwing a lot of random ideas together and hurling them at the reader, and maybe that's true, but, you know, as far as I'm concerned that's not really a criticism. He can hurl his random ideas at me all day, and I will happily catch them, because they're always interesting and cool, and often a little brain-melting, in the good way.
This book also just has a real sense of fun to it, more so than anything else of his I've read. Yes, it's violent and sometimes pretty dark, but it's also got a sense of humor that really sneaks up on you, along with some amusingly unexpected pop culture references, and you can tell Mieville is greatly enjoying playing around with urban fantasy tropes, especially the near-ubiquitous supernatural investigations branch of the police force.
It's possible to argue over whether or not this one ranks among Mieville's best. But, honestly, that's not a debate I'm interested in having. Suffice to say that I enjoyed it.
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falling deep, deep down a rabbit hole into a London filled with supernatural gang warfare, crazy cults (including, yes, giant-squid-worshipers), and a union of striking familiars, among other forms of weirdness. Not to mention a looming apocalypse or two.My only criticism of this book is that the story moves a little slowly -- though it has has what feels like it should be a non-stop action plot, often surprisingly little seems to be happening -- and then wraps up a little too quickly. But, really, the appeal of China Mieville's stuff is always more in the setting and the wild inventiveness than in the plot, and this book certainly doesn't fall down in that respect. As usual, it's full of all kinds of weird, wonderful, utterly crazy stuff, and gives the strong impression that we're seeing only one little corner of a world with its own strange history and personalities and rules. I've heard complaints to the effect that it mostly just consists of Mieville throwing a lot of random ideas together and hurling them at the reader, and maybe that's true, but, you know, as far as I'm concerned that's not really a criticism. He can hurl his random ideas at me all day, and I will happily catch them, because they're always interesting and cool, and often a little brain-melting, in the good way.
This book also just has a real sense of fun to it, more so than anything else of his I've read. Yes, it's violent and sometimes pretty dark, but it's also got a sense of humor that really sneaks up on you, along with some amusingly unexpected pop culture references, and you can tell Mieville is greatly enjoying playing around with urban fantasy tropes, especially the near-ubiquitous supernatural investigations branch of the police force.
It's possible to argue over whether or not this one ranks among Mieville's best. But, honestly, that's not a debate I'm interested in having. Suffice to say that I enjoyed it.
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LibraryThing member -Eva-
In a nutshell, what Perdido Street Station is to society and politics, Kraken is to faith and religion. Miéville proffers to the reader a plethora of thoughts, philosophies, cults, ideas, prophesies, idols, premonitions, exegesis, fanaticism, and (naturally) war, all wrapped in a fantastic tale of
The world-building is spectacular as usual, but, as is also usual, prepare for a "treacle-read" - there is no rushing through the lush, erudite, and sumptuous language of a proper Miéville tale. The payoff is worth every effort, though, for to be transported to God Kraken's grotesque London by the imaginative mind of this author and be presented with his myriads of side-stories is an always intriguing, sometimes breathtaking, and occasionally an absolutely hilarious ride. (Vardy and Collingswood planning a double Armageddon is a riot!)
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Billy, a rumored prophet (possibly virgin-born), and his pious bodyguard, Dane, out to save the God Kraken from its enemies and to prevent the ending of the world in the process.The world-building is spectacular as usual, but, as is also usual, prepare for a "treacle-read" - there is no rushing through the lush, erudite, and sumptuous language of a proper Miéville tale. The payoff is worth every effort, though, for to be transported to God Kraken's grotesque London by the imaginative mind of this author and be presented with his myriads of side-stories is an always intriguing, sometimes breathtaking, and occasionally an absolutely hilarious ride. (Vardy and Collingswood planning a double Armageddon is a riot!)
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LibraryThing member clfisha
If like me, the thought of a new Mieville books brings excitment (even more so when it's a tale of squid, magic and cults) then you should drop everything and buy this book now. Really go on, go and and order it.
Of course I might be biased. I mean I adore museums that display dead things in jars.
So opening in the awe inspiring setting of the (fictional) Darwinian museum the story hints this be will be another [City and the City], straight in both language and tone. But then the language shifts and the tale twists into chaotic, baroque, urban fantasy. It's here that the novel starts to truly take off because not only is it a tightly plotted fast paced tale, with a lovely everyman protagonist, great villains and characterful city of London, it is also packed with a barrel load of inspired, inventive ideas. So we get many many cults all vying for their version of the apocalypse, a wonderful playfully literal attitude to magic and magical creatures (guess what the knuckles head are?), a nod to old steampunk fusions, a great meeting of politics/magic and ancient Egyptians gods, and of course new and interesting words. I mean how can you hate a book that invents(?) the word squidity.
The lack of concrete examples or even a plot summary is because this a is book to enjoyed as fresh as possible and I already fear I have said to much. So go buy it. Mieville fans I hope will be impressed and for everyone else I hope it's an enjoyable madcap ride (although bring dictionary).
Of course I might be biased. I mean I adore museums that display dead things in jars.
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So opening in the awe inspiring setting of the (fictional) Darwinian museum the story hints this be will be another [City and the City], straight in both language and tone. But then the language shifts and the tale twists into chaotic, baroque, urban fantasy. It's here that the novel starts to truly take off because not only is it a tightly plotted fast paced tale, with a lovely everyman protagonist, great villains and characterful city of London, it is also packed with a barrel load of inspired, inventive ideas. So we get many many cults all vying for their version of the apocalypse, a wonderful playfully literal attitude to magic and magical creatures (guess what the knuckles head are?), a nod to old steampunk fusions, a great meeting of politics/magic and ancient Egyptians gods, and of course new and interesting words. I mean how can you hate a book that invents(?) the word squidity.
The lack of concrete examples or even a plot summary is because this a is book to enjoyed as fresh as possible and I already fear I have said to much. So go buy it. Mieville fans I hope will be impressed and for everyone else I hope it's an enjoyable madcap ride (although bring dictionary).
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LibraryThing member krau0098
I got an advanced reading copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program. I have previously read Mieville's King Rat (loved it), UnLunDun (liked it), and The City and The City (tough read, but interesting). I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of it is quite funny and creative, but a lot
You follow a number of different characters throughout this book. The main character is Billy, who is a curator at the Darwin Center. He runs tours of the facility in addition to other duties and the main draw on his tour is a giant squid that has been preserved in a large tank. Only on his current tour, something is wrong, the squid is missing. How does a giant squid just "go missing" from a giant tank? Well two police officers that specialize in a rather abnormal branch of the police force suspect it may all be the fault of that silly religious squid group. They pull Billy into a crazy underground world in London that's full of magic, mayhem, and numerous religious cults. Billy will find that it may be up to him to stop the apocalypse itself.
I liked the first couple chapters of this book and enjoyed the ending. The concept behind this novel is quirky and interesting and definitely creative. All of the characters are completely off the wall. You have Tattoo, the gangster-like character that exists only as a tattoo on a catatonic man's back. Collingsworth, a slight female police officer who has a bad case of tourette's. And a billion other incredibly crazy characters. The overall concept behind this story is very thoughtful. Basically Mieville is exploring the concept of people making things happen because that is what they believe to be true.
There are also a ton of things I did not like about this novel. It is a difficult and time-consuming read. The chapters are erratic in length and the viewpoint switches between numerous characters. There are about a million plot lines with as many characters going on at once. Then there is the Brit-speak, this is especially bad in the beginning of the novel but gets better as it goes on.
Mieville also just throws so many random facts at the reader that after a while (between all the Brit-speak and random junk) my eyes would just glaze over and my thoughts start to wander. Next thing I would be yawning and cursing this stupid book because it never really sticks to the story or gets to the point in any but the most meandering of ways. This was a book I constantly had to push myself through, I had to concentrate to get it to hold my interest. Which is really a pity because between all the extraneous junk, there is an interesting and darkly humorous story in here.
The other bothersome thing is a similarity to other works already out there. The setting reminded me of Neverwhere by Gaiman or The Haunting of Alaizabel Crane by Chris Wooding (I know different time period). The deal with all the gods reminded some of Gaiman's American Gods. The crazy wackiness with which random events and different deities popped up reminded me of Simon Green's Nightside series. And in my opinion all the aforementioned works are much more well done. Anyone who compares Mieville's writing style to Gaiman is on crack, Gaiman writes an absolutely wonderful story and Mieville, while creative and innovative, tends to not focus on the story itself. The setting between Neverwhere and this book are somewhat similar though.
So should you read it? If you liked The City and The City this book is written in the same somewhat fractured and strange style, so you may enjoy it. Just know that this book will require a lot of patience to get through. You will have to struggle through Brit Speak and weed out all the random excess of data Mieville throws at you. It is creative and darkly funny but a tough read. Personally it just wasn't my thing and put me off picking up any of Mieville's future works.
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of it is just annoying.You follow a number of different characters throughout this book. The main character is Billy, who is a curator at the Darwin Center. He runs tours of the facility in addition to other duties and the main draw on his tour is a giant squid that has been preserved in a large tank. Only on his current tour, something is wrong, the squid is missing. How does a giant squid just "go missing" from a giant tank? Well two police officers that specialize in a rather abnormal branch of the police force suspect it may all be the fault of that silly religious squid group. They pull Billy into a crazy underground world in London that's full of magic, mayhem, and numerous religious cults. Billy will find that it may be up to him to stop the apocalypse itself.
I liked the first couple chapters of this book and enjoyed the ending. The concept behind this novel is quirky and interesting and definitely creative. All of the characters are completely off the wall. You have Tattoo, the gangster-like character that exists only as a tattoo on a catatonic man's back. Collingsworth, a slight female police officer who has a bad case of tourette's. And a billion other incredibly crazy characters. The overall concept behind this story is very thoughtful. Basically Mieville is exploring the concept of people making things happen because that is what they believe to be true.
There are also a ton of things I did not like about this novel. It is a difficult and time-consuming read. The chapters are erratic in length and the viewpoint switches between numerous characters. There are about a million plot lines with as many characters going on at once. Then there is the Brit-speak, this is especially bad in the beginning of the novel but gets better as it goes on.
Mieville also just throws so many random facts at the reader that after a while (between all the Brit-speak and random junk) my eyes would just glaze over and my thoughts start to wander. Next thing I would be yawning and cursing this stupid book because it never really sticks to the story or gets to the point in any but the most meandering of ways. This was a book I constantly had to push myself through, I had to concentrate to get it to hold my interest. Which is really a pity because between all the extraneous junk, there is an interesting and darkly humorous story in here.
The other bothersome thing is a similarity to other works already out there. The setting reminded me of Neverwhere by Gaiman or The Haunting of Alaizabel Crane by Chris Wooding (I know different time period). The deal with all the gods reminded some of Gaiman's American Gods. The crazy wackiness with which random events and different deities popped up reminded me of Simon Green's Nightside series. And in my opinion all the aforementioned works are much more well done. Anyone who compares Mieville's writing style to Gaiman is on crack, Gaiman writes an absolutely wonderful story and Mieville, while creative and innovative, tends to not focus on the story itself. The setting between Neverwhere and this book are somewhat similar though.
So should you read it? If you liked The City and The City this book is written in the same somewhat fractured and strange style, so you may enjoy it. Just know that this book will require a lot of patience to get through. You will have to struggle through Brit Speak and weed out all the random excess of data Mieville throws at you. It is creative and darkly funny but a tough read. Personally it just wasn't my thing and put me off picking up any of Mieville's future works.
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LibraryThing member misericordia
When I go into a bookstore, or more likely surf the cyber stacks of the intertubes, I think "Where are all the great books about giant squid cults?" But I don't want an ordinary pedestrian giant squid cult book. I want a crazy book. A book with;
A cigarette smoking wise cracking witch/police-woman
Multiple apocalypse scenarios
An animate evil tattoo
The ocean's embassy in a brownstone
An undead Egyptian tomb servant
Spooky paper airplanes
A Star Trek fan boy wizard
Yes I said I want a book with both giant squid cults and a Star Trek fan boy wizard. I think these are almost diametrical opposite on the big dial of Science Fiction / Fantasy clichés.
Lucky for me and you there is a master who can bend and twist clichés to do his bidding, China Miéville. His book Kraken plays with so much of the Science Fiction / Fantasy metaphors your head will spin. (So just in a brief aside what is up with that name? I understand he is French and all, but really China? Is it a pen name? Furthermore are we talking China as in Fine China Plates or China the country?)
So a book about a giant squid cult, You should figure it’s going to be in the Unseen World genre. You know the genre where there is this world and a world of magic and monsters. The Unseen World genre is all about how vision and perception isn’t actually the same thing. That what we choose to perceive this world and not see the real world of magic and monsters. That we can learn not perceive any number of things. We can learn to not see the different and reach a kind of peace. But this kind of perception leads to dangerous situations. (Whoa I have a weird feeling of having written this all before? What is that déjà écrite?) The whole Harry Potter series is in the Unseen World. Most of Neil Gaiman's work is Unseen World genre.
In Kraken there is the world with a Giant Squid in a museum. Then there is this unseen world where the Giant Squid is god worship by a cult. When the Giant Squid is stolen the story's protanist Billy Harrow enters his journey into the Unseen World, trying to recover it.
So I am really torn right now. I mean I want to tell you about the book. But I don't want to ruin the book for you either. I can't really tell you what all happens without dulling the pure shock value of where China Miéville's story goes ( I mean seriously Star Trek fan boy wizard! ) But it isn't so much where he goes but where he takes the whole Unseen World genre.
I mean in Gaiman's Unseen World books "Neverwhere" or "Stardust" there is a sharp divide between the seen and unseen world. There is a door way to the subterranean or a gap in a hedge. Once you cross over you are in the land of faire when you cross out you are in the really world. In JK Rollin's Harry Potter books it is not quite the same. It is sorted of a soft one way line. Magic leaks into the seen world and has to be dealt with. But technology doesn't leak into the magical world. No one ever tries to shoot "He Who Must Not Be Named" with an AK-47.
This is all well and good. These authors create a world with its limited rules and then construct a story that adheres to those rules. But in Miéville's world the rules and the lines between worlds are nebulas at best. There are things and people bleeding back and forth across the line. Miéville's scope for the book is so massive, that it isn't a book about a story. It is a book about a genre... No that is too small. It's a book about how we try to bend reality to suit our want and desires and what that does to us.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. Years from now, today is going to be the referred to as the age when paper died or the Electric age of Sci-Fi or some other cliché, either way listed as the best authors of the time will be China Miéville. (I mean seriously if the Chinese have a vote the name alone, makes him a lock!.)
A cigarette smoking wise cracking witch/police-woman
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Multiple apocalypse scenarios
An animate evil tattoo
The ocean's embassy in a brownstone
An undead Egyptian tomb servant
Spooky paper airplanes
A Star Trek fan boy wizard
Yes I said I want a book with both giant squid cults and a Star Trek fan boy wizard. I think these are almost diametrical opposite on the big dial of Science Fiction / Fantasy clichés.
Lucky for me and you there is a master who can bend and twist clichés to do his bidding, China Miéville. His book Kraken plays with so much of the Science Fiction / Fantasy metaphors your head will spin. (So just in a brief aside what is up with that name? I understand he is French and all, but really China? Is it a pen name? Furthermore are we talking China as in Fine China Plates or China the country?)
So a book about a giant squid cult, You should figure it’s going to be in the Unseen World genre. You know the genre where there is this world and a world of magic and monsters. The Unseen World genre is all about how vision and perception isn’t actually the same thing. That what we choose to perceive this world and not see the real world of magic and monsters. That we can learn not perceive any number of things. We can learn to not see the different and reach a kind of peace. But this kind of perception leads to dangerous situations. (Whoa I have a weird feeling of having written this all before? What is that déjà écrite?) The whole Harry Potter series is in the Unseen World. Most of Neil Gaiman's work is Unseen World genre.
In Kraken there is the world with a Giant Squid in a museum. Then there is this unseen world where the Giant Squid is god worship by a cult. When the Giant Squid is stolen the story's protanist Billy Harrow enters his journey into the Unseen World, trying to recover it.
So I am really torn right now. I mean I want to tell you about the book. But I don't want to ruin the book for you either. I can't really tell you what all happens without dulling the pure shock value of where China Miéville's story goes ( I mean seriously Star Trek fan boy wizard! ) But it isn't so much where he goes but where he takes the whole Unseen World genre.
I mean in Gaiman's Unseen World books "Neverwhere" or "Stardust" there is a sharp divide between the seen and unseen world. There is a door way to the subterranean or a gap in a hedge. Once you cross over you are in the land of faire when you cross out you are in the really world. In JK Rollin's Harry Potter books it is not quite the same. It is sorted of a soft one way line. Magic leaks into the seen world and has to be dealt with. But technology doesn't leak into the magical world. No one ever tries to shoot "He Who Must Not Be Named" with an AK-47.
This is all well and good. These authors create a world with its limited rules and then construct a story that adheres to those rules. But in Miéville's world the rules and the lines between worlds are nebulas at best. There are things and people bleeding back and forth across the line. Miéville's scope for the book is so massive, that it isn't a book about a story. It is a book about a genre... No that is too small. It's a book about how we try to bend reality to suit our want and desires and what that does to us.
I'm going to go out on a limb here. Years from now, today is going to be the referred to as the age when paper died or the Electric age of Sci-Fi or some other cliché, either way listed as the best authors of the time will be China Miéville. (I mean seriously if the Chinese have a vote the name alone, makes him a lock!.)
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LibraryThing member KingRat
This is my least favorite Miéville novel to date. 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
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member ed.pendragon
There has been precious little discussion, in fact none that I've read, about the significance if any of Kraken's subtitle. Anatomy, which now means the science of body structure, derives from Greek roots implying cutting open and, particularly, apart. Kraken is not just about a giant squid
Ultimately this urban fantasy is about the power of words. Words on the novel's pages to conjure up the stuff of nightmare, words in the mouths of characters to change reality, words written on pieces of paper which have awareness. Billy ("don't be a hero") Harrow is the bespectacled protagonist who gets thrown into a, literally, harrowing series of crises for which he didn't volunteer, mixed up with underground cults, unorthodox police, a transmigrating fetish spirit and, most terrifying of all, Goss and Subby. Goss and Subby are, were, the most convincingly menacing personages in the novel, Goss for his gratuitous violence and pally malevolence, Subby for his powerful vacuousness (we realise that Subby probably stands not for subnormality, his outward appearance, but for substitute, his inward role). Of the other characters, Kath Collingswood and Dane Parnell stand out, one a witchy chain-smoking constable, the other a true Londoner who gains Billy's at first grudging and then outright respect. Everyman Billy is a little bit cardboard cut-out for me: he spends the first half of the book as the confused innocent abroad and the second half as urban guerilla, but I never have a sense of him as a scientist, the role we first see him in.
In a way, London is the hero: it is there, ever-present, the action never moves beyond the M25, the story doesn't just inhabit the streets, it is the streets. But, other than the Museum, it's not the tourist's London, and apart from the occasional mention of districts or the Thames Barrier this is an anonymous, almost generic, seedy metropolis of faceless buildings and people, all functioning as a backdrop to the action leading inexorably to apocalypse. The supporting characters and even some of the main cast are expendable, ciphers in the narrative's drive to resolution.
Is this a great novel? No, and one can argue that it was never meant to be. But it's witty and inventive, dark and humorous at the same time, full of striking concepts and punny language (typically, magic, the mainspring of the action, is never mentioned; instead maguses and adepts 'knack' and magicked things are 'knacked'); and only the characters involved take the situations they find themselves in seriously as a matter of life-and-death. It's my first Miéville novel, and I suspect it won't be my last.
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specimen in the Natural History Museum (or rather, for most of the book, out of the Museum) but about how it is used to cut open the underbelly of an arcane and corrupt London and expose its putrefying innards.Ultimately this urban fantasy is about the power of words. Words on the novel's pages to conjure up the stuff of nightmare, words in the mouths of characters to change reality, words written on pieces of paper which have awareness. Billy ("don't be a hero") Harrow is the bespectacled protagonist who gets thrown into a, literally, harrowing series of crises for which he didn't volunteer, mixed up with underground cults, unorthodox police, a transmigrating fetish spirit and, most terrifying of all, Goss and Subby. Goss and Subby are, were, the most convincingly menacing personages in the novel, Goss for his gratuitous violence and pally malevolence, Subby for his powerful vacuousness (we realise that Subby probably stands not for subnormality, his outward appearance, but for substitute, his inward role). Of the other characters, Kath Collingswood and Dane Parnell stand out, one a witchy chain-smoking constable, the other a true Londoner who gains Billy's at first grudging and then outright respect. Everyman Billy is a little bit cardboard cut-out for me: he spends the first half of the book as the confused innocent abroad and the second half as urban guerilla, but I never have a sense of him as a scientist, the role we first see him in.
In a way, London is the hero: it is there, ever-present, the action never moves beyond the M25, the story doesn't just inhabit the streets, it is the streets. But, other than the Museum, it's not the tourist's London, and apart from the occasional mention of districts or the Thames Barrier this is an anonymous, almost generic, seedy metropolis of faceless buildings and people, all functioning as a backdrop to the action leading inexorably to apocalypse. The supporting characters and even some of the main cast are expendable, ciphers in the narrative's drive to resolution.
Is this a great novel? No, and one can argue that it was never meant to be. But it's witty and inventive, dark and humorous at the same time, full of striking concepts and punny language (typically, magic, the mainspring of the action, is never mentioned; instead maguses and adepts 'knack' and magicked things are 'knacked'); and only the characters involved take the situations they find themselves in seriously as a matter of life-and-death. It's my first Miéville novel, and I suspect it won't be my last.
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LibraryThing member HarperGray
Having looked at a few reviews, it seems of some importance to note straight off that Kraken was my first Mieville book, and I went into it with no idea of what to expect from this author. My initial reaction is to compare Kraken (again, just this book, not Mieville as a writer) with Umberto Eco,
Kraken, then, revolves around the disappearance of the eponymous sea-beast from its home in a Natural History museum. No witnesses, no sign of removal, nothing - simply vanished. Billy, a curator of the museum, and the one who had personally taken care of the giant squid, is the first to notice, and finds himself drawn into a world where the police have a special unit to deal with cults and magic, including a cult which worships the kraken as a god, where the tattoo on a man's back runs one of the nastiest gangs in London, where a group called the Londonmancers personify the numen of the city.
Mieville's clever, acrobatic prose draws the reader through a novel which struck me more as a detective novel than science fiction, alternate reality notwithstanding. Tongue persistently in cheek, the novel succeeds both in not taking itself too seriously and creating genuine emotional attachment to certain characters. Billy, for instance, annoyed me to no end at the beginning of the book, but developed spectacularly throughout the story. From my experience of London, it felt like Mieville captured the feeling of the city aptly; the atmosphere he created leaped right off the page to draw me in.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Kraken. That being said, I think it definitely appeals to a certain kind of reader, one with an enjoyment of - almost affection for - humourous chaos. Mieville doesn't meander in Kraken the way Gaiman (also a writer of humourous, if often languorous chaos) tends to; once the former's foot hits the gas, it's as if the brake has melted into the floor. But I was along for the ride 100% of the way.
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particularly in Foucault's Pendulum. While Mieville's moments of pretentiousness didn't go as far as Eco's wildly complicated musings of fairly straightforward objects, the two novels yet have in common a slow start followed by breakneck-speed pacing as well as a dizzying array of conspiratorially interlinked cultish groups. At this point Kraken begins to remind me of a Jasper Fforde detective novel with its madcap alternate reality, one that you've just been dropped into, where half the fun is watching the different and often bizarre groups unfold. A Ffordian Eco? An Ecoese Fforde? Something along those lines. Kraken, then, revolves around the disappearance of the eponymous sea-beast from its home in a Natural History museum. No witnesses, no sign of removal, nothing - simply vanished. Billy, a curator of the museum, and the one who had personally taken care of the giant squid, is the first to notice, and finds himself drawn into a world where the police have a special unit to deal with cults and magic, including a cult which worships the kraken as a god, where the tattoo on a man's back runs one of the nastiest gangs in London, where a group called the Londonmancers personify the numen of the city.
Mieville's clever, acrobatic prose draws the reader through a novel which struck me more as a detective novel than science fiction, alternate reality notwithstanding. Tongue persistently in cheek, the novel succeeds both in not taking itself too seriously and creating genuine emotional attachment to certain characters. Billy, for instance, annoyed me to no end at the beginning of the book, but developed spectacularly throughout the story. From my experience of London, it felt like Mieville captured the feeling of the city aptly; the atmosphere he created leaped right off the page to draw me in.
All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Kraken. That being said, I think it definitely appeals to a certain kind of reader, one with an enjoyment of - almost affection for - humourous chaos. Mieville doesn't meander in Kraken the way Gaiman (also a writer of humourous, if often languorous chaos) tends to; once the former's foot hits the gas, it's as if the brake has melted into the floor. But I was along for the ride 100% of the way.
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LibraryThing member justabookreader
Billy Harrow is boring and nothing much happens in his life. He’s a curator at London’s Natural History museum and has an uncanny ability to make creatures look alive in formaldehyde. Giving a tour one day to a small group of people, a normal occurrence that comes with the job, he finds the
I’m at a loss as to how to describe this book. In genre terms, it’s fantasy. It’s a caper of sorts, but it’s really not. It’s a mystery, but it’s not exactly. There’s so much going on in this book that I feel that if I talk only about one portion, then I wouldn’t be doing it justice. On the other hand, if I don’t tell you about it all, then I won’t make it come alive.
My first experience with Mieville’s writing was The City & The City. It’s a dark, detective, police procedural and even though it wasn’t my regular reading, I enjoyed it. I thought this would be somewhat the same but it’s not at all. It’s funny, witty, strange, downright weird, and chaotic in parts. He takes you to the story’s abyss and pulls you back in. (Oh, come on, I couldn’t resist.) There’s a long list of characters that range from the most bland to the oddest of people and one who actually is what his name suggests --- a tattoo. He talks by moving around on a man’s back, slightly creepy but very effective. There’s a god who flits back and forth into stone statues and the odd Star Trek figurine trying to help Billy track down the stolen squid and at the same time he’s also trying to put down a strike by familiars. Then there are soothsayers who cut holes in the skin of the city (the asphalt serves as the city’s skin) to read its guts and predict the future. There are otherworldly hit men and a police force that deals in the supernatural.
Here’s the hard part about this review --- I enjoyed this book. A lot. Thanks to this book, there are many new words that I want to incorporate into my vocabulary --- Google-fu, Krakenists (people who worship the Kraken god), and squipnapping to name three. Although, admittedly, squidnapping is going to be much harder to slip in during normal conversation. It amused me, made me think of paperback thriller books you can buy at the grocery store, and made me add Mieville to my list of must-read authors but the books itself is impossible for me describe.
What I can say is that Mieville is a master story-teller able to incorporate a wide range of pop culture along with numerous religious arguments you never really knew you’d find yourself thinking about while reading a book about a giant squid that has been kidnapped.
I spent several days ruminating over this review and I still don’t think I’ve provided anything useful. It’s strange book but a good mix of everything. It’s fantasy (the story takes place in an alternate London) but offers so much more.
Here’s what I will say to wrap this up and staunch the bit of a love fest I have going on --- if you’re looking for something completely out of the ordinary, try this one. It won’t disappoint, just make sure you go in with an open mind and a good bit of, “Oh, OK, that’s where we’re going with this. Then lead on,” attitude.
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museum’s most famous exhibit, a giant squid, missing. The cops are called, interviews granted, and no leads emerge. Billy goes home and tells two friends about the missing squid, or squidnapping if you will, and his odd day. What follows is a strange tale of squid worshippers, encounters with Londonmancers who predict the city’s future, magicians, gods, familiars, gunfarmers, chaos Nazis, and Star Trek fanatics.I’m at a loss as to how to describe this book. In genre terms, it’s fantasy. It’s a caper of sorts, but it’s really not. It’s a mystery, but it’s not exactly. There’s so much going on in this book that I feel that if I talk only about one portion, then I wouldn’t be doing it justice. On the other hand, if I don’t tell you about it all, then I won’t make it come alive.
My first experience with Mieville’s writing was The City & The City. It’s a dark, detective, police procedural and even though it wasn’t my regular reading, I enjoyed it. I thought this would be somewhat the same but it’s not at all. It’s funny, witty, strange, downright weird, and chaotic in parts. He takes you to the story’s abyss and pulls you back in. (Oh, come on, I couldn’t resist.) There’s a long list of characters that range from the most bland to the oddest of people and one who actually is what his name suggests --- a tattoo. He talks by moving around on a man’s back, slightly creepy but very effective. There’s a god who flits back and forth into stone statues and the odd Star Trek figurine trying to help Billy track down the stolen squid and at the same time he’s also trying to put down a strike by familiars. Then there are soothsayers who cut holes in the skin of the city (the asphalt serves as the city’s skin) to read its guts and predict the future. There are otherworldly hit men and a police force that deals in the supernatural.
Here’s the hard part about this review --- I enjoyed this book. A lot. Thanks to this book, there are many new words that I want to incorporate into my vocabulary --- Google-fu, Krakenists (people who worship the Kraken god), and squipnapping to name three. Although, admittedly, squidnapping is going to be much harder to slip in during normal conversation. It amused me, made me think of paperback thriller books you can buy at the grocery store, and made me add Mieville to my list of must-read authors but the books itself is impossible for me describe.
What I can say is that Mieville is a master story-teller able to incorporate a wide range of pop culture along with numerous religious arguments you never really knew you’d find yourself thinking about while reading a book about a giant squid that has been kidnapped.
I spent several days ruminating over this review and I still don’t think I’ve provided anything useful. It’s strange book but a good mix of everything. It’s fantasy (the story takes place in an alternate London) but offers so much more.
Here’s what I will say to wrap this up and staunch the bit of a love fest I have going on --- if you’re looking for something completely out of the ordinary, try this one. It won’t disappoint, just make sure you go in with an open mind and a good bit of, “Oh, OK, that’s where we’re going with this. Then lead on,” attitude.
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LibraryThing member suetu
I've been intimidated by China Mieville for years. I keep buying his books, but I don't read them. In part, it's because I'm not a big fan of one of his primary genres, science fiction. Of course, trying to pigeonhole a writer like Mieville is futile, as his novels are a jumble of sci-fi, fantasy,
Well, I'm a wimp no more! I've read Kraken, and guess what? I LOVED it! In fact, it made my top ten list for 2010. This is one of those times when you just want to kick yourself for not getting around to something earlier. Happily, Mr. Mieville's backlisted titles are sitting on my shelf waiting for me.
It helped that this latest novel was essentially written for me. Who else but the world's foremost collector of "trashy underwater fiction" would gravitate to a novel about squid worshippers? But I'm getting ahead of myself... The protagonist of this novel is biologist Billy Harrow who, as the novel is opening, is leading a tour though the museum where he works. The highlight and finale of the tour is the preserved architeuthis dux, the giant squid. When Billy and his tour enter the room where it's kept, the immense creature and its 25-foot tank are, impossibly, nowhere in evidence.
So begins a bizarre tale. Billy is as flummoxed as the average reader. Early on in the novel he is told, "How could you possibly understand what is going on? Even if you wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot." Not all of the dialog is quite so enigmatic, but a good deal of it is as funny. At least if you have an appreciation for British humor.
I honestly don't know what else to say about this novel. The plot is impossible to summarize. It's been incredibly polarizing among readers. Elements of Kraken were reminiscent of authors like Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Barnes--high praise in my book. There's a limit to how much weird I can take, and Kraken is weird, but it was fantastic, too! I suspect that this is one of those "love it" or "hate it" novels. Based on that assessment alone, it's worth giving a try. Like me, you just might surprise yourself by falling into the "love it" camp.
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mystery, humor, and God knows what else. No, mostly I'm intimidated by his intelligence and literacy. I've met the man several times. He's lovely. But you can tell right away: Dude is wicked smart. I'm no light-weight, but when it comes to Mieville I've just wimped out. Well, I'm a wimp no more! I've read Kraken, and guess what? I LOVED it! In fact, it made my top ten list for 2010. This is one of those times when you just want to kick yourself for not getting around to something earlier. Happily, Mr. Mieville's backlisted titles are sitting on my shelf waiting for me.
It helped that this latest novel was essentially written for me. Who else but the world's foremost collector of "trashy underwater fiction" would gravitate to a novel about squid worshippers? But I'm getting ahead of myself... The protagonist of this novel is biologist Billy Harrow who, as the novel is opening, is leading a tour though the museum where he works. The highlight and finale of the tour is the preserved architeuthis dux, the giant squid. When Billy and his tour enter the room where it's kept, the immense creature and its 25-foot tank are, impossibly, nowhere in evidence.
So begins a bizarre tale. Billy is as flummoxed as the average reader. Early on in the novel he is told, "How could you possibly understand what is going on? Even if you wanted to. Which, as I say, dot dot dot." Not all of the dialog is quite so enigmatic, but a good deal of it is as funny. At least if you have an appreciation for British humor.
I honestly don't know what else to say about this novel. The plot is impossible to summarize. It's been incredibly polarizing among readers. Elements of Kraken were reminiscent of authors like Neil Gaiman and Jonathan Barnes--high praise in my book. There's a limit to how much weird I can take, and Kraken is weird, but it was fantastic, too! I suspect that this is one of those "love it" or "hate it" novels. Based on that assessment alone, it's worth giving a try. Like me, you just might surprise yourself by falling into the "love it" camp.
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LibraryThing member reannon
This was my first experience reading Mieville, and I feel like I've been on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride - but that ride is far too tame a comparison.
Billy Harrow is a curator at the Darwin Center in London. His greatest accomplishment is preserving the Center's giant squid specimen. So he is astonished to
Soon thereafter he finds a body in a bottle, and his best friend disappears, swallowed whole by a supernatural hit man named Goss and his sidekick Subby. The police who deal with the supernatural become involved, and Billy finds out that London is awash with cults, all of them certain that Apocalypse is coming. Very soon. One of the cults is the Teuthies, worshipers of the giant squid known as Architeuthis. One of the Teuthies, whom Billy had known as a guard in the Center named Dane, becomes Billy's protector, though he goes rogue from the cult in order to do so. Everyone is searching for the squid, some of them with harm in mind, including the criminal mastermind who lives as a tattoo on another man's back.
Meanwhile, Billy and Dane are aided by Wati, a spirit that moves from figure to figure and inspires dog and cat familiars and other servant spirits to go out on strike for better working conditions.
Mieville writes about a lot of cults in Kraken, but I suspect that if he belongs to one it is Discordianism, which worships chaos. The author bludgeons the reader's ability to suspend disbelief until it gives way with a whimper, and after that the reading is easier. One doesn't so much read this book as wrestle it to the ground, to emerge victorious on the last page. Do I recommend it? Yes, if you want an unusual experience. It definitely makes most books seem tame by comparison.
Billy Harrow is a curator at the Darwin Center in London. His greatest accomplishment is preserving the Center's giant squid specimen. So he is astonished to
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find one day, while leading a tour of the Center, that the squid and its tank have vanished.Soon thereafter he finds a body in a bottle, and his best friend disappears, swallowed whole by a supernatural hit man named Goss and his sidekick Subby. The police who deal with the supernatural become involved, and Billy finds out that London is awash with cults, all of them certain that Apocalypse is coming. Very soon. One of the cults is the Teuthies, worshipers of the giant squid known as Architeuthis. One of the Teuthies, whom Billy had known as a guard in the Center named Dane, becomes Billy's protector, though he goes rogue from the cult in order to do so. Everyone is searching for the squid, some of them with harm in mind, including the criminal mastermind who lives as a tattoo on another man's back.
Meanwhile, Billy and Dane are aided by Wati, a spirit that moves from figure to figure and inspires dog and cat familiars and other servant spirits to go out on strike for better working conditions.
Mieville writes about a lot of cults in Kraken, but I suspect that if he belongs to one it is Discordianism, which worships chaos. The author bludgeons the reader's ability to suspend disbelief until it gives way with a whimper, and after that the reading is easier. One doesn't so much read this book as wrestle it to the ground, to emerge victorious on the last page. Do I recommend it? Yes, if you want an unusual experience. It definitely makes most books seem tame by comparison.
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LibraryThing member SamMartinez
Kraken is about a man named Billy Harrow, who works at the Darwin Center at London's Natural History Museum. His claim to fame (initially, anyway) is that he's the guy who worked on preserving "Archie" (short for Architeuthis dux), the giant squid specimen that's been on display at the Darwin
However, when Archie is stolen, Billy Harrow finds himself thrown into the "other" side of London, seeing an aspect of this city that has been around for centuries, but which only a few know about.
To be honest, it was the idea of a giant squid getting stolen that initially pulled me in. I mean, come on: giant squid? How do you steal one from a museum? Or, for that matter, why would you want to steal one? That initial premise led me to a re-visioning of London as a city where magic and religion all exist - a city of Londonmancers, people who are part of the city itself and can make it obey their whim; a city where memory angels are born and guard the great museums; a city where the sea actually has an embassy in a house down a street; a city where one of the most powerful protection charms you can possibly have is an iPod that feeds on playlists.
If any of this sounds a wee bit familiar, I'd have to say that's quite true: it sounds a whole lot like Neil Gaiman's American Gods with a bit of Neverwhere thrown in, except most of the story happens above-ground instead of underground. Does it do as well as American Gods? Not quite. I'm still firmly of the opinion that American Gods is one of the best examples of urban fantasy written so far, and while Kraken tries to be another American Gods (or London Gods?), it doesn't seem to quite get there.
Maybe it's the characters. While Billy Harrow is okay as a character, he's significantly overshadowed by others: Dane Parnell, for one, and Kath Collingswood, for another. Explaining why they overshadow Billy is a spoiler-laden road which I'll avoid, but reading about them tends to be a wee bit more interesting than following Billy around, especially initially. I guess this is because Billy is supposed to help the character by virtue of his own cluelessness regarding this new world he's discovering he's lived with almost all his life. Sure, Billy becomes interesting after a while, but he's not exactly like Shadow, who's pretty interesting right from the get-go.
There's also another character, Marge (short for Marginalia), whose storyline I think the novel could have done without. I think her presence is like Billy's in that she's supposed to help the reader get acquainted with London as it's been written in the novel, but by the time she appears we're already tolerably acquainted with it via Billy - in fact, by the time she shows up Billy gets pretty interesting in his own right. Whenever the novel cut to her side of the story I felt like I was taking an unwanted diversion. I wanted to go and read about Billy and Dane, or maybe about Collingswood, not about Marge. And that's a sentiment that kind of lingers all the way to the end.
It's also possible that, as Billy becomes absorbed into the not-so-normal London underbelly and becomes not-so-normal himself, Marge begins to represent the one remaining bastion of normality: an ordinary person without extraordinary abilities who is forced to make her way - alone - through the craziness of not-so-normal London. Still, if that were the case I think her storyline could have been handled a mite better. Or maybe, it could have been eliminated entirely, as I mentioned earlier, since by that stage in the novel the reader is pretty much invested in Billy, and hence more keen on following his progress.
I also felt that the scope of Kraken, which is mostly concerned with Armageddon (or multiple Armageddons) but not in the way the not-so-normal folks of London expected it, was somewhat limited. This could be a fault of the title, since if you're going to be titling a novel Kraken then you've got no choice but to stick to the darn thing until the end. While the action to the climax was pretty interesting, the ending still fell a little flat compared to the ending of American Gods, which was, in my opinion anyway, more epic than Kraken. Then again, with a title like American Gods, how could it not be?
What I did enjoy about Kraken, however, were the concepts. Mieville came up with a pretty solid lot of them, including the concept of "knacking" - essentially the ability to use magic. People have different kinds, levels, and strengths of knacks, ranging from the ability to teleport people ala Star Trek (I kid you not, and this is crucial to the story), to the ability to summon spirts to do the dirty work for you. I especially loved the idea of "memory angels:" entities who come into being within museums, made up from the collective memories within - for after all, what are museums but repositories of memory? Each museum has a memory angel or memory angels unique to it: so the Victoria and Albert Museum has a specific set of memory angels, while the Darwin Center has its own specific memory angel too.
Overall, Kraken isn't a half-bad novel, but if you're going to be comparing it to something like American Gods, or even some of Mieville's other works like Perdido Street Station, it does fall a teensy bit flat. It's still worth a shot though, if only for the concepts Mieville writes about, as well as a chance to see a London that's completely different from the everyday one. Could use a touch of the Doctor, though...
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Center since 2006. It's the centerpiece of what's known as "The Spirit Collection," which is essentially the Darwin Center's collection of specimens preserved in liquid.However, when Archie is stolen, Billy Harrow finds himself thrown into the "other" side of London, seeing an aspect of this city that has been around for centuries, but which only a few know about.
To be honest, it was the idea of a giant squid getting stolen that initially pulled me in. I mean, come on: giant squid? How do you steal one from a museum? Or, for that matter, why would you want to steal one? That initial premise led me to a re-visioning of London as a city where magic and religion all exist - a city of Londonmancers, people who are part of the city itself and can make it obey their whim; a city where memory angels are born and guard the great museums; a city where the sea actually has an embassy in a house down a street; a city where one of the most powerful protection charms you can possibly have is an iPod that feeds on playlists.
If any of this sounds a wee bit familiar, I'd have to say that's quite true: it sounds a whole lot like Neil Gaiman's American Gods with a bit of Neverwhere thrown in, except most of the story happens above-ground instead of underground. Does it do as well as American Gods? Not quite. I'm still firmly of the opinion that American Gods is one of the best examples of urban fantasy written so far, and while Kraken tries to be another American Gods (or London Gods?), it doesn't seem to quite get there.
Maybe it's the characters. While Billy Harrow is okay as a character, he's significantly overshadowed by others: Dane Parnell, for one, and Kath Collingswood, for another. Explaining why they overshadow Billy is a spoiler-laden road which I'll avoid, but reading about them tends to be a wee bit more interesting than following Billy around, especially initially. I guess this is because Billy is supposed to help the character by virtue of his own cluelessness regarding this new world he's discovering he's lived with almost all his life. Sure, Billy becomes interesting after a while, but he's not exactly like Shadow, who's pretty interesting right from the get-go.
There's also another character, Marge (short for Marginalia), whose storyline I think the novel could have done without. I think her presence is like Billy's in that she's supposed to help the reader get acquainted with London as it's been written in the novel, but by the time she appears we're already tolerably acquainted with it via Billy - in fact, by the time she shows up Billy gets pretty interesting in his own right. Whenever the novel cut to her side of the story I felt like I was taking an unwanted diversion. I wanted to go and read about Billy and Dane, or maybe about Collingswood, not about Marge. And that's a sentiment that kind of lingers all the way to the end.
It's also possible that, as Billy becomes absorbed into the not-so-normal London underbelly and becomes not-so-normal himself, Marge begins to represent the one remaining bastion of normality: an ordinary person without extraordinary abilities who is forced to make her way - alone - through the craziness of not-so-normal London. Still, if that were the case I think her storyline could have been handled a mite better. Or maybe, it could have been eliminated entirely, as I mentioned earlier, since by that stage in the novel the reader is pretty much invested in Billy, and hence more keen on following his progress.
I also felt that the scope of Kraken, which is mostly concerned with Armageddon (or multiple Armageddons) but not in the way the not-so-normal folks of London expected it, was somewhat limited. This could be a fault of the title, since if you're going to be titling a novel Kraken then you've got no choice but to stick to the darn thing until the end. While the action to the climax was pretty interesting, the ending still fell a little flat compared to the ending of American Gods, which was, in my opinion anyway, more epic than Kraken. Then again, with a title like American Gods, how could it not be?
What I did enjoy about Kraken, however, were the concepts. Mieville came up with a pretty solid lot of them, including the concept of "knacking" - essentially the ability to use magic. People have different kinds, levels, and strengths of knacks, ranging from the ability to teleport people ala Star Trek (I kid you not, and this is crucial to the story), to the ability to summon spirts to do the dirty work for you. I especially loved the idea of "memory angels:" entities who come into being within museums, made up from the collective memories within - for after all, what are museums but repositories of memory? Each museum has a memory angel or memory angels unique to it: so the Victoria and Albert Museum has a specific set of memory angels, while the Darwin Center has its own specific memory angel too.
Overall, Kraken isn't a half-bad novel, but if you're going to be comparing it to something like American Gods, or even some of Mieville's other works like Perdido Street Station, it does fall a teensy bit flat. It's still worth a shot though, if only for the concepts Mieville writes about, as well as a chance to see a London that's completely different from the everyday one. Could use a touch of the Doctor, though...
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LibraryThing member candlemark
An extremely engaging, erudite, and altogether weird book. I think I loved it.This is NOT a book for everyone - Mieville plays with words, phrases, tones, and meanings like a toddler plays with finger paint, presuming that toddler is in fact an artistic genius. There's splashes of colour and
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vibrancy and playfulness everywhere, even in the midst of action and philosophy. It's more proof that he's one of the literary geniuses of our time.If you've read Neil Gaiman's American Gods or Neverwhere, or if you've read anything in the Matthew Swift series, you'll know what to expect here - a magical world-within-a-world, hidden from most of the population, where Londonmancers manipulate the fabric of the city and strange creatures walk the city streets. It's a different feel than any of those books, though - Mieville has a flavour all his own - and tends towards wordplay, wry wit (you have to love any book with Treknomancy included), and odd bits of trivia scattered throughout. You'll learn about trap streets and giant mollusc anatomy even while following along with a very, very strange heist and a terrifying end-of-the-world chain reaction.The characters - and there's a lot of them - are not necessarily the most fleshed-out, or the best personified. And yet the quick, broad strokes that Mieville draws them with are more than adequate; you know how Collingswood is going to behave, and how Dane thinks. There are some plot threads that are left dangling - many, in fact, owing to how utterly complicated and convoluted this is (like a nautilus's shell, some might say). And yet it doesn't feel unsatisfying in the end. The ending is only slightly foreshadowed, and very abrupt, yet it doesn't feel like a failing of the book that its denouement is so rapid after having had such a long, long, complicated setup. The end (or continuation) of the world is less of a feature of the book than its examination of how we live, and how we think, and what we believe, and how that shapes us and our reality. There are gunfights and explosions, though, so it's all good. Truly a memorable world, with memorable factions and characters and situations and magical paradigms. It's a big, sprawling, messy place, Mieville's magical London, and you won't soon forget any of the characters and knacks and paradigms and creatures, even if the plot rapidly grows hazy in your mind because of how generic it is, and how quickly it wraps up in the end. Definitely worth a read for any fan of erudite fantasy/science fiction. Show Less
LibraryThing member omnia_mutantur
This should have been my wheelhouse. But it didn't seem to know what to do with itself, and to cover up that, it just kept throwing new elements at the wall to see what would stick. And there's awesome elements. Cult-collectors, the overlapping myths of a city, someone who goes by the name
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Marginalia (but every calls her Marge), familiars going on strike. Final verdict, a bit of a slog, but I enjoyed most of it. Show Less
LibraryThing member wordsampersand
While Miéville's obtuse, low/high prose almost drove me up a wall, the ambition and creativeness of the novel kept me going.
LibraryThing member Knicke
I feel like this book owes a lot to Gaiman's Neverwhere and American Gods, but Mieville is an enjoyable writer in his own right. Best bits of this book were the descriptions of striking familiars, the Tatoo (what an awesome villain!), and the descriptions of the other villains, Goss and Subby.
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Mieville is able to create a strong feeling of dread with only a vague description of awfulness, and has written a world that is chockfull of STUFF with plenty of spaces for the readers own imagination to take over. Sort of long in the endgame, but all books like this seem to suffer from the same fate. Good, creepy fun. Show Less
LibraryThing member mabroms
Oh, for the days when the mere announcement of a new Mieville novel made your whole being ache in anticipation of a new, impossible world in which to get lost. Of course it was always about the politics and religion and classism and feminism, but you didn't have to care if you didn't want to. Now
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we are asked to endure modern day London with modern day references (Amy Winehouse, and Star Trek, for heaven's sakes?), IPods, cell phones, unintelligible local dialects and accents, Scotland Yard.... Certainly there are (brief) moments of the classic brilliance, but they are few and far between. I never felt really connected. I, for one, will heistate before blindly biting on the next offering. Show Less
LibraryThing member ragwaine
China really is my favorite author. I haven't read everything he's written (he writes faster than I read) but just Perdido Street Station and Iron Council are enough to promote him to God-like status. Kraken showed some of that greatness - Goss and Subby were great, Wati was great, the
I can't really say what I didn't like about it. Maybe I expected too much, got my hopes up. I did get lost in a lot of the British jargon. Collingsworth left me confused about 80% of the time. I guess I didn't really like the main character. He reminded me of the main character in Neverwhere whom I didn't care for at all. I'd much rather have an asskicker like Dane be the main character instead of a reluctant bungler. That usually gives a completely different tone (a tone I like more).
So I would probably give it 3.5 stars because of all the cool ideas and if it sounds like your kind of thing I would definitely recommend reading it. Just didn't blow my mind like his other stuff.
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londonmancers were cool, the final revealed plot was cool and not easily guessable, all the cults, the magic mp3 players was funny. But for some reason it all didn't really gel for me. I can't really say what I didn't like about it. Maybe I expected too much, got my hopes up. I did get lost in a lot of the British jargon. Collingsworth left me confused about 80% of the time. I guess I didn't really like the main character. He reminded me of the main character in Neverwhere whom I didn't care for at all. I'd much rather have an asskicker like Dane be the main character instead of a reluctant bungler. That usually gives a completely different tone (a tone I like more).
So I would probably give it 3.5 stars because of all the cool ideas and if it sounds like your kind of thing I would definitely recommend reading it. Just didn't blow my mind like his other stuff.
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LibraryThing member GordonPowell
Reminded me of Gaiman's Neverwhere, but I didn't like the story as much as Gaiman's. Great images, amazing metaphor, a whirlwind of tantalizing details, but I needed more story.
LibraryThing member stuart10er
Not sure really what to say about the writing in this book. I enjoyed it - but I found the amount of dialect in it off-putting. Something akin to Trainspotting meets the Anubis Gates. Set in London in present time, a museum curator gets caught up in an all out magical war between 2 sets of
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criminals and their henchman, some special magic police, and various cults, mages, and thugs in an underbelly of London that isn't generally known to exist. It keeps your interest, even though I kept getting pulled out of the text by the dialogue that was more challenging to understand at times than I cared for. The book does take one very nice twist right at the end that I should have seen better, but didn't. I had been recommended to read his books for a while from various sources. I liked this one enough to feel that the recommendation was warranted and that I'd like to read more. So, I guess that's a thumbs-up as anything else. Show Less
LibraryThing member Tyllwin
Reminded me a great deal of a harsher and less playful version of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, with a touch of Torchwood. Billy, the museum curator is pulled into a unseen London filled with cults and magicians at war with each other. Plenty of action, and interesting characters, but the ending had a
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sort of unsatisfying feel to it, that didn't seem to come organically from what had preceded it. Worth a read, but can't hold a candle to The City and the City. Show Less
LibraryThing member metamariposa
Brilliant and bizarre. I put the book down for a year in between the first half and last half, but once I got back into it and could appreciate what Mieville was trying to do, I didn't stop wondering what happened. A great meditation on the textuality of religion, the religion of textuality, and
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the truth. Show Less
LibraryThing member stefferoo
This one's definitely getting filed under "weirdest books I've ever read". Even now I'm at a loss as to what to say about this book.
I had been interested in reading China Mieville for a long time, after hearing such great things about "Perdido Street Station" and "The City & The City" from my
"Kraken" basically follows Billy Harrow, a museum scientist at the Museum of Natural History in London. An expert on mollusks, Billy is also responsible for the preservation of a giant squid, one of the most popular exhibits. When the thing goes missing, Billy finds himself thrown into a side of London he never knew existed, a world full of magic, secret cults, doomsday theories and other supernatural creatures.
The first quarter of the book, arguably the most "normal" part, drew me into the story right away. It was afterward that things started spiraling out of control. But even as it gets increasingly abstract, it's in a way that's more Neil-Gaiman-type-whacky, which in and of itself is fine even if it's not really my thing. I'll even give this book a thumbs up, if for nothing else the entire chapter full of Star Trek references including a live Tribble and an actual working phaser gun.
The main problem for me was the prose that got more and more out of hand as the book droned on, killing the momentum completely. It's hard to get into the world and characters when you're continuously distracted by so much that is superfluous to the main story. In the end, I realized all I wanted to do was get the book over with, find out what happened, and move on. Couldn't wait to get done fast enough. Disappointing, since it had such a good start, such great ideas and such an interesting premise.
I don't think I would read something like this again. I hear, however, that the author has quite a varied writing style and it seems he is more straightforward in some books than others. I still have plans to give "The City & The City" a read, but only once I feel like I've gotten "Kraken" out of my system.
I had been interested in reading China Mieville for a long time, after hearing such great things about "Perdido Street Station" and "The City & The City" from my
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friends. To be fair, I was warned by people who have read "Kraken" that it is not like his other books, which made me wonder if it was such a good idea picking it for my first taste of Mieville. Even knowing what might be coming, it was still nothing like I expected."Kraken" basically follows Billy Harrow, a museum scientist at the Museum of Natural History in London. An expert on mollusks, Billy is also responsible for the preservation of a giant squid, one of the most popular exhibits. When the thing goes missing, Billy finds himself thrown into a side of London he never knew existed, a world full of magic, secret cults, doomsday theories and other supernatural creatures.
The first quarter of the book, arguably the most "normal" part, drew me into the story right away. It was afterward that things started spiraling out of control. But even as it gets increasingly abstract, it's in a way that's more Neil-Gaiman-type-whacky, which in and of itself is fine even if it's not really my thing. I'll even give this book a thumbs up, if for nothing else the entire chapter full of Star Trek references including a live Tribble and an actual working phaser gun.
The main problem for me was the prose that got more and more out of hand as the book droned on, killing the momentum completely. It's hard to get into the world and characters when you're continuously distracted by so much that is superfluous to the main story. In the end, I realized all I wanted to do was get the book over with, find out what happened, and move on. Couldn't wait to get done fast enough. Disappointing, since it had such a good start, such great ideas and such an interesting premise.
I don't think I would read something like this again. I hear, however, that the author has quite a varied writing style and it seems he is more straightforward in some books than others. I still have plans to give "The City & The City" a read, but only once I feel like I've gotten "Kraken" out of my system.
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LibraryThing member cattylj
Kraken begins with a vanishing squid. Its disappearance is met by Billy Harrow with confusion and dismay, as the giant squid serves as the climax of his tour at London's Natural History Museum. For Billy, this disappearance marks the beginning of an absurd and epic journey into London's underground
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world of mystery, cults, and magic. This book is not an enormous departure from Mieville's other works (in that it still combines elements of scifi, fantasy, magic, and a surreal imagining of London), but you might not/probably will not like it if you're looking for the hard scifi and more serious tone of New Crobuzon. Instead, this reminded me quite a bit of Neil Gaiman in its tone, humor, and generally playful nature. If you need a break from heavy literature but still want something smart and entertaining, this is a great book to turn to. Show Less
Awards
Dublin Literary Award (Longlist — 2012)
Locus Award (Finalist — Fantasy Novel — 2011)
SF Site Reader's Choice (2 — 2010)
SF Site Editor's Choice (3 — 2010)
Seiun Award (Nominee — 2014)
Black Quill Award (Nominee — 2010)
The Kitschies (Finalist — 2010)
Locus Recommended Reading (2010)
The A.V. Club best books (2010)
Language
Original publication date
2010
Physical description
528 p.; 6.73 x 1.69 inches
ISBN
034549749X / 9780345497499