A review by starsal
Kraken by China Miéville

4.0

The blurb describes this book as "one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year." This is entirely correct. It's also a very difficult-to-classify book. I would go with urban fantasy with thriller elements.

It won my heart immediately by being about a museum curator. There are not enough novels about museums and curators. In addition to that, the curator in question (Billy) is well-drawn and believable. There are people just like him working at the National Museum of Natural History just down the street. (Where, sidenote, we have an Architeuthis in a tank.) He was engaging, and I was interested in him immediately, even when he was just walking around giving the tour. Then the museum's squid goes missing, and all heck breaks loose.

This is a wild romp of a book, with plots, and subplots, and tiny details mentioned once that suddenly become very important later on. It's a book that keeps the reader on her toes, and one that (occasionally) disturbs her sleep. While never anything (very) overtly gory, there's some very well-done creepy squickiness.

This book kept me guessing right up until the end. Miéville does a very good job of introducing and tracking characters organically. In some books, you meet someone and immediately know they are a Character. Maybe this happens in other people's real lives, but it certainly doesn't happen in mine, so I appreciate writers like Miéville who introduce people slowly, without a bunch of physical description and back story to drive home the fact that You Should Be Paying Attention to This Person. It was really refreshing. The relationships and loyalties were also nicely organic and believable.

The story was incredibly imaginative and engrossing. The characters, even the most absurd, were well-drawn, and the concepts were just outstanding. I loved the angels of memory, Wati's union, the embassy, Perky the helpful pig, and all the other characters Miéville created and brought together for this extraordinary story. At root, this is a story about the nature, and importance, of belief. Miéville handles it dexterously and with rare humor, so it never bogs down.

My biggest (and only gripe) (and maybe isn't a gripe so much as it is a question) has to do with the last few pages of the book.

Spoiler

I understand what Vardo was trying to do and why. But what about Alfred Wallace? Wallace was stumbling toward the idea of natural selection at the same time as Darwin was, just in a different part of the world. Don't get me wrong, I know Darwin was important. But he didn't invent natural selection. He merely discovered it. It's there, and true, even if the Beagle went down, with all hands, in the Pacific. Wouldn't someone else have just discovered it? Or is the way the time fire works so precise that burning out Darwin's records mean that natural selection never gained dominance as a theory? I'm a bit curious about this. Though I was very touched at the squid's behavior, and the loyalty Billy feels toward Darwin, biology, and the museum.