Kraken
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'Meanwhile, blogger Damien G Walter enjoyed the literary fantasy of the year, finding in China Miéville's Kraken, a tale of cops and apocalypse in an alternative London, "a prodigious imagination letting rip".' --Guardian, Fiction Recommendations of the Year
Product Description
A dark urban fantasy thriller from one of the all-time masters of the genre
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
115 of 122 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
There's a first time for everything,
By Si (UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Kraken (Hardcover)
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.
22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
So disappointing,
By
This review is from: Kraken (Hardcover)
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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Buy The City & The City instead,
This review is from: Kraken (Paperback)
It's not a bad book, it's just not very engaging. The basic idea about cults / magic / the secret life of London was very good, but I just didn't connect with any of the characters and found the plot to be a little plodding. Go for 'The City and The City' instead - much, much better
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
![[Start the discussion]](http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/x-locale/communities/discussion_boards/start-new-discussion-sec._V192198663_.gif){kind=small}
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
