Kraken

Product Information

I made up my own mind about his looks and I'll make up my own mind about his writing, too, thank you very much.

The cast includes a devout squid worshipper, a foul-mouthed Wiccan police constable styled on Amy Winehouse, and a transcendental union leader who spends much of the plot incarnated in a Captain Kirk action toy. This is the mind-blowing part, the most Miévillian of all the book, that kraken and its significance. But alongside the exuberant displays of imaginative vigour, Kraken is Miéville both paying homage to and poking fun at urban fantasy.

The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

Meet the city which you will not find in the coloured folders, places you will not find in any guidebook. I debunked the teleportation thought experiment in my review of I Am a Strange Loop and the experiment itself was also brought up (in a strange loop! It looked like a great ending then this dude did this shit and talk about deus machina … and I don't even understand exactly what happened or how it worked.British readers and others more familiar with the London vernacular will probably have a better experience. Kraken, by contrast, was a kind of loving valedictory to what I hope is an enjoyable but rather chaotic kitchen-sink excess of the Bas-Lag books. 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.

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. Well, as classic said once there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy . In this context Kraken seems as though Miéville is taking a step back from the artistic agenda that has previously informed his writing, perhaps to flex creative muscles grown stiff in the constraining seriousness of the New Weird. Every few chapters, just when I thought we would make a big break, there would be a new twist or new piece of information.

The result though, while entertaining in a dazzling sort of way, remain ultimately unconvincing, incomplete, half-baked.