Kraken was sort of a Christmas gift. At Christmas I was given a book I already had so I went to a bookshop and exchanged it. I had seen China Mieville's books recommended on Reddit so thought I would give one of his books a go. And the dedication page made me laugh.
Who wouldn't want a comrade-in-tentacles?
This was written in 2010 so I'm a bit late to review it but I will try to limit plot spoilers to anything you would read in the blurb anyway.
The story centres on the disappearance of a preserved giant squid, from a display in the Natural History Museum in London. A curator in the museum gets drawn into a shadowy magical underworld of sects and prophecies where everyone is predicting an apocalypse, somehow linked to the vanished kraken. But everyone is looking for it, either to stop the end of the world or to control the destruction for their own ends.
It's clear that China had fun making up different cults and churches and then pitting them against each other. He also develops London itself as a character, a gestalt entity that is both a location and a source of information, if a person knows where to look and how to scry the future from it.
China wears his influences boldly. This book strongly reminds me of the Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman collaboration Good Omens, and also the alternative London Below in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. I suspect if I saw China Mieville's bookshelves, I would see Douglas Adams alongside Pratchett and Gaiman (although he might, like me, have taken Gaiman off the shelves since the accusations against him were made).
There are throwaway puns aplenty and almost too much wordplay. Beyond that, though, China writes in an arresting style with a barrage of metaphors, neologisms and portmanteaus. This section describing a bit of the city is typical of his style:
"A space between two concrete flyovers. Where the world might end was turpe-industrial. Scree of rejectimenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fonts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. Here was an arena of scrubland, overlooked by suspended roads." (p.357)
China is happy to reference TV and other cultural elements throughout the book. I was delighted to see Farscape included in a list of science-fiction shows. (I blogged about rewatching Farscape a couple of years back.) At one point one of the characters has a dream where he is TinTin being attacked by Captain Haddock.
But it's not all pop culture. There are descriptions of magical practices that show some research. A reference to 'tekel upharsin' as a prediction of doom shows some niche knowledge of the Old Testament. The real-life grounding of the fantastical story elements in established media and myths makes them more believable.
There are also a lot of swearwords. Characters swear casually in their conversations, which felt realistic, and there is plenty of 'creative swearing', which is a very British thing, and was often very funny. For example, one character coins "munching wanktoasters" to describe members of an occult fascist sect.
If the warning about language doesn't put you off, I would add a warning that there are a couple of gruesome murders and almost murders. They are quite vivid so I felt it worth flagging up because overall I'd recommend people read the book.
However, London as the best city evvah, gets a bit annoying. There are too many claims made about its uniqueness and special nature, as a locus for magic and the historic depth to its streets. That started to grate after a while.
And in an ironic twist, I ended up reading a large chunk of the book on train journeys to and from London as I was working down there. On the return journey a man sitting opposite me asked if he could take a photo of the book cover because he thought it looked interesting. I'd never been asked that before. It was a slightly weird encounter befitting a slightly weird book.
