Stephen's Reviews > Kraken

Oops...in my excitement, I seem to have Mievilled all over myself. Pardon my gush.

So the ONLY reason this gatling blast of brainstorming outréness is not yet nesting on my all time favorite shelf along with  Perdido Street Station and The City & The City is that my feeble grey matter is still trying to process what…the…French I just read. I grasped the big picture, though my neurons were white-knuckled and straining, but there were so, so, SO many reference gems, idea snippets, bizarre sound bytes and fluttering flashes of “just beyond the real” that I’m convinced I will be picking flakes of fantastic out of the narrative even after completing a second reading of this artwork.

 Not quite as ground-breaking as Perdido Street Station or as technically brilliant an execution as The City & The City, but with more densely packed, hip-literate prose and myth-spiced techno-jargon as both of those books combined. This is word-sensei writing and full-throttle imagination paired with hyper-threaded story-crafting on a scale that only Mieville himself has ever even come close to before.

 This is a hard-core concept porn performance by the biggest, girthiest word-smither working in the spec-fic industry today. Despite my brain gasping for oxygen and begging for a moment of calm in the story’s relentless prose storm, the eyegasms kept coming and coming on almost every page. It has been a while since I have been this impressed by the combo of prodigious imagination and the writing chops to get it all effectively on the vellum.

 This is a roller-coaster into otherness just beyond perception and my captivation meter was pinned on lock down every single minute of the story.

PLOT SUMMARY:

 A plot summary for this book doesn’t really seem fitting, but I will give it the short and sweet so I can move on to the good stuff.

 “London was full of dissident gods.”

 Billy Harrow works at the Darwin Institute where the prized exhibit is a preserved specimen of Architeuthis (i.e., a giant squid). While conducting a tour of the institute, “Archie” miraculously disappears and sets off a countdown to the apocalypse featuring the most imaginative rogue’s gallery in the history of literature (yes, in all of literature). From ink-born tattoo crime lords, to chaos Nazis and the most bizarre pair of supernatural hitmen since writing found paper. 

  THOUGHTS

Mieville’s primary focus in this story is on deconstructing the underpinnings and motivations for religious belief. Actually, it’s much, much more grand and "in your grill" than the why's and wherefores of religious belief (not to mention more basic in its reader applicability), but I don’t want to give hints regarding the actual philosophical boxing match at the heart of the narrative. Thus, since religious belief forms the surface narrative thread and Mieville has a creative explosion discussing a plethora of apocalyptic religious sects and their faith tenets, I will let the explanation suffice.

While addressing big, serious issues of innerness and autochthonal psychology relating to why humans think and act the way they do, Mieville spreads his insight over a canvas that is a most fascinating riff on the magical London memorialized by such pop staples as Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman. However, this is a London that has more in common with New Crobuzon than it does with Hogwarts and Mieville drenches this background in his unique brand of the politically-charged new weird.

For example, at one point the plot picks up that the Union of Magical Assistants (UMA) has gone on strike. In typical Mievilleian fashion, he describes it thusly:

There were pickets of insects, pickets of birds, pickets of slightly animate dirt. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

Not all the familiars were embodied. But even those magicked assistants who eschewed all physicality were on strike. So – a picket line in the unearth. A clot of angry vectors, a verdigris-like stain on the air, an excitable parameter. Mostly, in the middlingly complex space-time where people live, these pickets looked like nothing at all. Sometimes they felt like warmth or a gauzy clot of caterpillar threads hanging from a tree, or a sense of guilt.

That kind of writing and descriptions just floors me and makes my brain juice bubble. And these kinds of paragraphs are all over this work.

Now, is it true that the plot can be rather Gordian in its knottiness and more than a little jumbled for wide swathes of the story? Yes, granted. The narrative is dense and the visibility can at times be limited behind a curtain of swirling fog. My reaction...I could care less, because I trust my navigator to get me to my destination. I just thank Cthulhu that I'm not the one driving.

Bottom-line, this is an experience book, where the journey through clever, gorgeous prose is worth a few scratches of head and the beauty and majesty of the commentary more than outweighs the periodic moments of stunned confusion. Until I've read this again (and maybe again) I will continue to believe that my befuddlement is entirely my fault and China Mieville has done precisely what he set out to do. 

I am a fan and this book has only deepened my respect for this singularly gifted individual. This novel squeezed my brain and left it wrung out, twisted and parched. I am thankful and happy as a result. 

5.0 stars. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!!