Kraken [Unabridged] [Paperback]

China Mieville, I've always said, is a genius. I think I need to get that out of the way before I carry on with this review. He is possessed of the most toweringly wicked imagination, fearsome skills of characterisation and plot development and the ability to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, in my case, on occasion, literally. If I were sad enough to sit and write down my top 10 fiction books of all time, 'The City and the City', 'Perdido Street Station' and 'The Scar' would be somewhere amongst them. I've read his book of short stories, 'Looking for Jake', about five times now. And I hate short stories.

However, even genuises have their off-days, and that seems to be what's happened here. I say "seems" because I can only guess at what prompted Mieville to approach this book in the way he did. This is not China Mieville, this is Clive Barker on acid. It's completely mad, perhaps the result of a bet as to how much weirdness Mieville could cram into 400 pages.

The concept is promising, and indeed a short synopsis would sound equally appealing. Mieville's writing style, whilst an acquired taste due to the author's of chain-of-consciousness prose interspersed with quirky colloquialisms, is rich and beautifully delivered. There's humour too, and several laugh-out loud moments, the politically incorrect outbursts of the virtual retro police officers being a case in point. However, a few dozen pages into the novel things start to go bad and the key problem quickly becomes evident. This problem, in summary, is that anything can happen.

Mieville has created a world entirely without rules and without boundaries. This sounds exciting, especially bearing in mind the author's formidable powers of imagination, but what it actually does is rob the plot of all suspense. Virtually every character possesses a range of occult abilities so powerful, wide-reaching and diverse that no situation provides any type of challenge. Magical abilities, individuals and objects are created on demand, sometimes at the rate of several per page, apparently as a cheap method of furthering the plot.

How is item X, huge and heavy, transported from point A to point B? Well, that's tricky, a nice little puzzle for the reader... Actually, no, it's teleportation. Character X died so how come people are receiving messages from him? That's a tough one, let me think... Don't bother, he just returned from the dead. How do these two baddies enter a house without anybody seeing? I wonder, maybe they - Forget all that, it's easy, someone just folded them up into a tiny parcel and posted them through the letter box. Feeling cheated yet? OK, so how will this police officer find the information she needs from the crime scene? I get it, forget the clever stuff, let's go straight to the invisible flying cartoon pig that knows everything (I'm not joking). And so on and so forth. The sheer quantity of bizarre powers and impossible characters being introduced as the story progresses is on occasion so great that the reader finds themselves lost in a miasma of unconstrained weirdness where plot, characterisation and purpose are not so much secondary as completely lost in the confusion.

There were other problems with the book, not least the bizarrely bi-polar character development of our hero, Billy Harrow, yet in comparison to the anything-goes gung-ho plot-busting surrealism they were rendered almost moot.

Less is more, especially where weirdness is concerned, and I hope that Mieville's next novel, which I'm already looking forward to whatever it may be, bears witness to this ideology.

I still think he's a genius.

I was wondering when China first started writing this. I discovered him with 'Perdido Street Station' and read on from there, I read King Rat after 'The City and the City' and noticed his maturing as a writer. Reading Kraken, over ages, believe me,I wanted to put this book down so many times I can't tell you, but I'm a fan, so I stuck with it. Seems to me that either his Editor has said 'You'll make more money if you dumb down and get on the Gaiman train' , or this was the book after King Rat.
There are of course the Marxist underlays and the quiet jokes to the knowing, but my biggest complaint is that I felt a little bit insulted by this, there is plagerism (and that is an opinion, not an accusation) and the general impression that he wasn't really trying.
I saw England play Algeria last night and felt the same way.
Personally, I blame the publisher, I read Alistair Reynolds 'Terminal World' and felt the same way.
Don't force our greatest writers to churn out pulp, I'll wait for the masterpiece.

First off, it should be known that my biggest fear is the sea; specifically its dark depths and the creatures that lurk within. Like with many people I presume, because I fear this so vehemently, I am at the same time incredibly drawn to it and seek it wherever I can in fiction. Take the scene in James Cameron's The Abyss that sees Ed Harris' character make his slow descent into an abyssal, pitch black canyon on the floor of the ocean. I can watch the scene with ease, but at the same time it scares me magnificently, and compels me beyond belief.

The point to be taken is: I love sea monsters. Miéville's The Scar - an infinitely better book than this one - concerns in large part a gigantic sea monster from another universe called an Avanc; the inclusion and dealing of which I loved (one excellent aspect is Miéville's choice to never describe the creature in any detail; allowing my imagination to run wild with it - making the fear potential increase enormously). So when I saw that Miéville's latest work was to be titled Kraken, I immediately built up high hopes.

All in all though, I'm sad to say that I was let down. I love Miéville (and I haven't even read Perdido Street Station or The City & The City yet), but his latest effort falls considerably short of his abilities in my opinion. New Weird in style Miéville certainly is, but this all too weird for my tastes. From animal servants picketing for their rights to an omniscient invisible flying cartoon pig, this grasps completely in the wrong direction for an altogether ludicrous kind of strange. Add to this a plot full of questions to which we are given all too easy and entirely unsatisfying answers and it doesn't amount to much.

Unused is the full potential of dealing with a sea monster as utterly terrifying and infamous as the giant squid. I'm sure it isn't Miéville's intent to scare here, but I figured I would succumb anyway, due to my phobia, but nothing succeeded in scaring me to any degree, save perhaps the idea of living out Billy's Kraken dreams.

The whole thing just comes off as one big bad joke; or rather a continual and unrelenting series of bad jokes, punctuated with pointless oddness and unnecessary absurdity. The fact that it could be seen as humour does not excuse the strangeness in my opinion.

There is by no means nothing to salvage. There are points, mostly when Miéville is describing the Gods that exist and the cult religions that follow them, that he hits on some gorgeously Lovecraftian ideas and musings, like with an extract of a `holy' text that Billy (the protagonist) reads:

"We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but still able to glow. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us. This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway."

The huge potential of passages like this is never developed further, and all my dreams of being crippled and engulfed by fear are lost with this failing. Kraken is by no means a disaster; it's just not up to Miéville's usual high standard, nor as good an execution as I feel the subject matter deserved. 5/10 (2.5 stars)