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A review by cmarcatili
Kraken by China Miéville
3.0
I've read quite a few Miéville books now, Kraken being the latest and perhaps least favourite.
Regular Miéville readers will recognise the linguistic verbiage (the book is about a kraken, so expect plenty of squid puns), the frantic sense of action even when nothing much is happening, the inclusion his activist insights and politics. There's a collection of weird and wonderful ideas, cults, gods, and monsters. Standard fare for Miéville's unique storytelling.
There's a subgenre of book I can now fairly confidently say I'm not interested in: the 'alternate London' fantasy novel. A lot of English authors lean on this trope (Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Ben Aaronovitch, V.E. Schwab, and J.K. Rowling are popular ones that spring to mind, but I know there's many others out there) and I'm sure there's plenty of novels of alternative New Yorks and whatnot that I can't think of right now.
The alternative London novel is often from the point of view of a hapless muggle who—either because of some innate but as-yet undiscovered talent or because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time—finds themselves entangled in a mess of magic and strangeness on the otherwise familiar streets of ol' London town. It's convenient for the author to have a clueless protagonist so they can ask convenient questions. But the consequence of having a hapless protagonist is that they have to follow around someone knowledgable, someone who can show them the ropes and intervene when needed. They often struggle with agency, usually right up until the very end when, realising their full potential at last, they defeat the strange enemy and master the peculiarities of Underground London.
In Kraken, our hapless protagonist is Billy, a curator at London's Natural History Museum. When their prize specimen, a huge deep water squid, vanishes without a trace, Billy gets embroiled in London's unseen world of cultists, gods and gang warfare. The theft has, though no one ever quite articulates why or how, triggered what seems to be a final apocalypse. The Deep Kraken God seems to be on the rise, and 'the night' when it'll all end always seems to be just out of reach. Billy's got Dane to follow, the exiled paladin of a Kraken Cult, and together they find allies and try to figure out just who stole the squid and how to put an end to this end of days.
Billy eventually hovers close being a powerful player in this strange conflict. Or at least so it seems. It's even suggested he might just be some kind of prophet, though the specifics of this are left vague and unhelpful. Does he ever actually do anything? Unfortunately, he falls into the trap of being one of those observer-protagonists, and the side characters are much more interesting. He literally has a guardian angel to swoop in at times when things are really getting tough. Even in the final conflict, Billy doesn't really do anything except witness the antagonist's end.
All in all, it was a pretty disappointing book. I'm giving it a bump up from 2.5 to 3 starts because if you like Miéville's books (as I do) there's definitely stuff in here to enjoy. But I did recently find and buy Un Lun Dun in a secondhand bookstore and I don't think I'll be in a rush to read it.
Regular Miéville readers will recognise the linguistic verbiage (the book is about a kraken, so expect plenty of squid puns), the frantic sense of action even when nothing much is happening, the inclusion his activist insights and politics. There's a collection of weird and wonderful ideas, cults, gods, and monsters. Standard fare for Miéville's unique storytelling.
There's a subgenre of book I can now fairly confidently say I'm not interested in: the 'alternate London' fantasy novel. A lot of English authors lean on this trope (Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, Ben Aaronovitch, V.E. Schwab, and J.K. Rowling are popular ones that spring to mind, but I know there's many others out there) and I'm sure there's plenty of novels of alternative New Yorks and whatnot that I can't think of right now.
The alternative London novel is often from the point of view of a hapless muggle who—either because of some innate but as-yet undiscovered talent or because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time—finds themselves entangled in a mess of magic and strangeness on the otherwise familiar streets of ol' London town. It's convenient for the author to have a clueless protagonist so they can ask convenient questions. But the consequence of having a hapless protagonist is that they have to follow around someone knowledgable, someone who can show them the ropes and intervene when needed. They often struggle with agency, usually right up until the very end when, realising their full potential at last, they defeat the strange enemy and master the peculiarities of Underground London.
In Kraken, our hapless protagonist is Billy, a curator at London's Natural History Museum. When their prize specimen, a huge deep water squid, vanishes without a trace, Billy gets embroiled in London's unseen world of cultists, gods and gang warfare. The theft has, though no one ever quite articulates why or how, triggered what seems to be a final apocalypse. The Deep Kraken God seems to be on the rise, and 'the night' when it'll all end always seems to be just out of reach. Billy's got Dane to follow, the exiled paladin of a Kraken Cult, and together they find allies and try to figure out just who stole the squid and how to put an end to this end of days.
Billy eventually hovers close being a powerful player in this strange conflict. Or at least so it seems. It's even suggested he might just be some kind of prophet, though the specifics of this are left vague and unhelpful. Does he ever actually do anything? Unfortunately, he falls into the trap of being one of those observer-protagonists, and the side characters are much more interesting. He literally has a guardian angel to swoop in at times when things are really getting tough. Even in the final conflict, Billy doesn't really do anything except witness the antagonist's end.
All in all, it was a pretty disappointing book. I'm giving it a bump up from 2.5 to 3 starts because if you like Miéville's books (as I do) there's definitely stuff in here to enjoy. But I did recently find and buy Un Lun Dun in a secondhand bookstore and I don't think I'll be in a rush to read it.