Kraken

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Maybe the idea of evolution will be permanently blocked somehow, but this isn’t consistent with how the time fire was shown to work. Following the quest of museum curator Billy Harrow to recover his mysteriously vanished prize exhibit, the giant squid Architeuthis, Kraken plunges Billy and the reader into an alternative London of cults and magic. Fundamentalism stems from the enlightenment and is motivated by, almost to the point of obsession, a belief in absolute truth. And while Miéville is far from the first novelist to threaten to obliterate London, he may win the prize for having the most fun along the way.

The plot itself is an almost pointless contrivance that simply serves to hold the weirdness together. With all the awesome side characters and fascinating side plots, this book is too overstuffed with more awesome than this story can take (maybe if he had spread the ideas over a trilogy it would have worked better). Dane Parnell, a security guard at the museum and a member of the Church of God Kraken who seeks to protect Billy. In this way, it would have been nice if Miéville had gone to the trouble of immersing us in his London far more intensively and with more variation earlier in the book. What follows is a journey across London, through a city with dissident gods and magic-workers, where “crime overlapped with faith” as Billy seeks to understand his role in world-changing events and recover the squid.

After reading this novel (and having begun some of his more recent works), I get the sense that China Miéville is not for everyone; I suspect that many of his plots may be weirder than some readers wish to entertain, and his writing style can be byzantine in a way that I find impressive - I LIKE an author that makes me look up words I didn't know - but which might be off-putting to those who wish to completely immerse. Please, dear reader, get used to phrases like this, because they lurk everywhere and creep up on the reader sometimes alone or in small packs, often leaving entire passages alone only to mug the unsuspcting reader when he turns a page. Genuinely interesting and somewhat good, Kraken doesn’t rate highly against the other Miéville books I’ve read. Well, as classic said once there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy . Many characters in Kraken speak in British slang dialects that, as an American, were a little difficult to parse.

And all along, Billy and another neophyte to this world, the innocent Marge, can’t quite believe what they are seeing or hearing. It was slow to develop, and some of Billy's blindness was a bit annoying, but it was all a matter of falling down the rabbit hole, anyway, so I decided to take the ride with him. His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities and explanations.More than his other books, Kraken shows the pulp roots of New Weird, a genre he has helped to define. With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. I suppose this is the China Miéville version of a fun and accessible novel, although this is still Miéville so it never quite abandons traces of horror and his characteristic dense prose. The protagonists are hitting one dead end after another, following this thread to that thread and back again.

Recommended for readers who enjoy complexity and stunningly fantastical worlds, and who have the patience to thoroughly savor all of it. The light tone gives him a chance to deploy a variety of jokes and puns, and while these are of course hit and miss they are, on the whole, an asset. So not only do these cultists pass as normal in London society without difficulty, they interact with each other the same way rival political activists might: they argue, they share drinks, they make temporary alliances, and occasionally come to blows.

He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published a book on Marxism and international law. The beautiful writing and ideas touched both my and heart and imagination, manifold and I feel enriched, happy and inspired from having read it.

The police are part of the real police force, the organized crime seems like it’s supposed to be like mundane criminal organizations, and everyone else just uses the occasional glamor to prevent anyone from noticing their unusual activities. The Tattoo, a former member of the Kray twins' criminal organization who was transformed into a nameless, sentient tattoo during his rise to power as a gangleader. Just when I thought the next important point in the plot would be revealed, he'd unveil a new character. It’s not that it just doesn’t feel odd enough (there is that) … it doesn’t have the same twisted depths of personal injustice.We are overwhelmed with events and actions, we seem to be lost in the jumble of ideas and characters. And, finally, despite the palpable threat, despite the fights and weirdness and humor, I found it hard to care about what is going to happen.