Book Review: Kraken

China Miéville

2010

Awards: Locus

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

This book begins as loads of fun. It starts with Miéville at his best: original ideas and a quirky, subtly comic writing style. It reads like a pulp detective novel, with snappy conversations and very short chapters, each one ending in a cliffhanger incident that pulls you into the next.

The book’s hero, Billy Harrow, is a curator in a London museum that has an enormous collection of biologically and/or historically significant dead animals preserved in glass bottles of formaldehyde. Billy is leading an ordinary tour group around the museum on an ordinary day when he finds that the museum’s prize specimen, a giant squid, has disappeared—glass bottle and all.

The police officers that come to investigate the crime are from an odd detective unit that deals with obscure occult religions. The only lead Billy can give them is a description of a man that he noticed on the tour because of the design of his lapel pin: an asterisk with two of the arms elongated and ending in squiggles. But fortunately these detectives know what to do with that information.

What the occult detectives know, and Billy is about to find out, is that London is chock full of obscure gods, ghosts, and other spirit-world powers, and that there are a large number of people in the city who are aware of it and have varying levels of ability to take advantage of it. And that there are also a number of people—including the krakenists, the wearers of the squiggly asterisk pins—who consider the giant bottled squid a kraken, a god. And that there are others who consider the squid to be at the very least a powerful ritual tool—one that can be used to start the chain of events that leads to an apocalypse—and who have the motivation to use it to that end.

At first Billy is an innocent and a pawn in all of this. The police figure he is in danger because of his status as the preparator of the bottled kraken, so they lock him in his apartment to protect him and enjoin him from talking about the incident to anyone. But of course he does, and because of that his apartment is infiltrated and he is almost killed by one set of cultists, and then he kidnapped by another set who think he can find the kraken for them, only to be re-kidnapped by yet another group. Some of the groups and sects and guilds have the world’s (and Billy’s) best interests at heart, and some don’t, and it is hard for him to tell which is which.

Eventually, though, it turns out that Dane, one of the guards at the museum where Billy works, is an elder of the krakenist church, and has secretly been keeping an eye on both the kraken and Billy the whole time. Dane seems to be one of the only people who truly (a) respects the kraken and (b) wants to prevent the world from ending, so Billy throws his lot in with him and goes from being an innocent pawn to being a fugitive believer. The two of them go on the lam, trying to find and save the bottled god kraken before whomever has it can finalize their planned apocalypse.

They are chased the whole time by all sorts of formidable pursuers, including Goss and Subby (terrifying semi-human assassins), the Tattoo (a power who exists solely as a tattoo on another man’s back, who has the power to make people into machines), and the occult police squad. And Billy learns more and more about underworld London, and learns that he has knowledge and powers he never knew he had—powers presumably given to him by his work on the preservation of the kraken.

How could this setup not be fun, eh? The trouble is that after the initial crime and the layout of the various factions, the plot careens from person to person and twist to twist without a sense of a real over-arching plan. We alternately follow Billy, Dane, the detectives, Goss and Subby, and Billy’s best friend’s girlfriend as they race back and forth across London hunting down one person or another. The entire time there are various apocalypses building, none of which is the real apocalypse, but none of which seem all that serious. I also didn’t get to know many of the characters well enough to hate, fear, or like them as I should have. It is a struggle to stay interested in the chaotic chase, and the finale is anticlimactically disappointing.

                                     

None of this is helped any by the choppy, disjointed writing style Miéville adopts more and more in the second half of the book, which is filled with arcane terminology and British-English slang. Reading it requires a vocabulary both deep and locally specialized, not to mention a willingness to overlook sentences with no verb. To wit:

                                                                                               

“Outside in the corridor furniture was tugged skew-whiff by a rubble of piscine bodies. The vivid colours of pelagic dwellers, the drabs and see-through oddities of deep water in hecatomb heaps.”

“Luckily Dr. Harris is a dab hand with Google.”

 “Those rozzers, eh! My name! My name, can you Adam and Eve it?”

“Grisamentum pops his clogs and now we’re all treading a bit softly around the Tat.”

I was predisposed to like a story about a tentacled god, so I was sorry to be so disappointed in this one in the end. I will say, however, that as a book involving personifications of ancient gods and other mythical beings, this is still a much better, less clichéd, and less seemingly self-congratulatory take on it than Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. It uses rarer and more interesting gods than the obvious Egyptian ones, fills in more information about them, and manifests them in ways that are not as trite.

Like, for example, Wati, a relatively obscure Egyptian spirit who has taken it upon himself to be a union organizer for the spirit world, and who can only take earthly form by inhabiting man-made representations of humans such as statues, dolls, and little crucifix Christs. He’s basically on Billy and Dane’s side and tries to help them out, but is constantly distracted by an ongoing strike of familiars that lasts nearly the length of the book.

And some specific bits and pieces of the story are certainly excellent, from a leaf minotaur created by an army of wizards with leaf blowers, to a sorcerer who can read what is going on in the city by pulling up chunks of sidewalk and looking at the entrails underneath. I thought Miéville was particularly clever with a character who has a knack for teleportation, and who has discovered that every time he teleports someone, he isn’t actually teleporting the actual person—he is killing them and copying a brand-new copy of that person into the new location. This man has teleported himself—and thus killed and recreated himself—so many times that he is surrounded and haunted by hundreds of spirits of his own murdered selves.