Fried calamari, anyone?
Finished: May 13, 2011
Score: 1 star (out of 5)
Well, my luck’s been shit lately, hasn’t it? Third dud in a row, only this one I stuck with until the bitter end, and really I have absolutely no idea why I did. It wasn’t worth it.
Kraken is supposed to be China Mieville’s “funny” novel, his version of Good Omens or, more appropriately, Towing Jehovah. I should have been a bit more honest with myself going in to Kraken, since I couldn’t get past the first 50 pages of the two books I just mentioned. But I was willing to give Mieville a chance. Maybe, I figured, funny Mieville would agree with me.
Mieville is an author who has some equity built up with me. He rose to fame through a trio of books – Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council – set in a gritty, dystopian, quasi-steampunk fantasy world called Bas Lag. Now Bas Lag is clearly the creation of someone who played a lot of D&D growing up as a kid, and Mieville has freely admitted that his fantasy novels are set in a world with races and such originally intended as a campaign setting for gaming. And those three books are compelling stuff, filled with a very evocative setting, interesting characters and political structures meant to mock many of those in the real world.
Iron Council was criticized for being “too political,” a position I find to be incredibly stupid and intellectually boring. Iron Council ostensibly tells the story of a kind of political rebellion that ends in tragic failure. After the release of Iron Council, it was as if Mieville started to focus too much on his critics. That, and he obviously has aspirations beyond what Margaret Atwood describes as “the ghetto” of fantasy and science fiction. This is how we got terms like “speculative fiction” – fantasy/sci-fi carry too much baggage of elves, dragons, robots and spaceships for anyone to consider such books “literary.” This is another stance that I find stupid and shortsighted – Gene Wolfe’s fantasy isn’t literary? – but there is some truth to this as far as book sales are concerned. There aren’t too many George R.R. Martins out there. It takes considerable skill to cross over into the mainstream with a straight-up sci-fi/fantasy work.
Mieville opted to leave Bas Lag entirely, and with 2009′s The City and the City, he began his foray into modern fiction. The City and the City is still a fantasy novel is some aspects, but more along the lines of how The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a fantasy novel. I won’t go into depth here about the book, but didn’t like The City and the City for a number of reasons (or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union), and put it down by page 75.
So, Kraken.
Kraken is a story about…well, there isn’t much of a plot, really. There’s a giant squid put on display at a museum in London. Someone steals it. A taxidermist working for the museum who worked on the preservation of the squid is pulled into a series of events to find the animal. In the process he stumbles into an “unseen” London filled with living Tattoos, golemists, teleporters, wizards who “read” London and derive power from it, an ancient shabti who organizes a strike for the familiars of wizards, and a special arm of the London police who battle the occult. Oh and gods are everywhere. Almost everything is worshiped as a god and has its own church/cult.
The setting, while not exactly unique (it smacks of a modern Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norell, another book I hated), is really interesting. The characters, with the exception of the shabti Wati, are not. In fact they’re developed with such laziness that I found myself wondering why Mieville even bothered including some of them. The occult cops, in particular, were a total waste of time.
Much of the book is spent with Billy blundering around this very strange London discovering all kinds of weird shit, meeting people who don’t have the giant squid and don’t know where it is. This goes on for hundreds of pages. At the middle the book begins to sag from its complete lack of direction. Finally, Mieville opts to turn several boogeymen into villains, throws in some cheap twists and a deus ex machina here and there, a very bad habit of his that has carried over from Perdido Street Station, and ends things with a weak kind of “taadaa!”
A few things are obvious about Kraken. One, it was written quickly. Two, it seems like it was done in too forced of a style to be interesting. Mieville himself says that Kraken is the last book he will write in this style, and I can only think that this is a smart move on his part. Critical reaction to this book is sharply divided, which I find interesting. Obviously there’s something here that other people dig that I don’t. Part of me wonders if Mieville is just another Neil Gaiman, a British author who develops his own devoted following of readers who think the guy shits brilliance onto the page with every novel.
All that said, Mieville did give me three amazing books that I enjoyed immensely. So he’s got three strikes built up. His new book, Embassytown, just came out. It’s his first attempt at pure sci-fi, and it’s getting pretty good reviews. I’ll pick it up when it hits my local library, and then we’ll see if Mieville can redeem himself.
