Kraken - china MiEVILLE

Kraken almost feels as if its author, China Miéville - as a literary experiment of sorts -deliberately cooked up the most outlandish premise he could think of, then simply took off with it at full-tilt. The creativity spews messily, as if from a busted spigot. It’s the sort of novel in which you can never have too many narrative plates spinning; there’s always - always - room for one more.

The story follows Billy Harrow, a curator and cephalopod specialist at London’s Natural History Museum, who’s left flummoxed when a prized Architeuthis dux (aka Giant Squid) specimen vanishes without a trace - tank and all. The theft proves to have apocalyptic repercussions as Billy “pierces the veil” and is immediately plunged into a supernatural underbelly of the city he had no inkling existed.

Miéville is part of the so-called “New Weird” literary movement - a fluid subgenre that merges elements of fantasy, science-fiction and horror, that builds on the legacy of writers such as Lovecraft and combines it with the traits of speculative fiction, creating a slipstream of the fantastical within a real-world context. It certainly reflects Kraken’s vision of London as a macabre playground of magic and mystery… a realm of the familiar entwined with the strange and the unknown.  

Billy’s journey initially leads him to the Krakenists - members of the Congregation of God Kraken - a religious order that worships the Giant Squid as a literal God and whose faithful are more than a little perturbed over their purloined deity. But that’s just the start. He also crosses paths with the FSRC (the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit), a secret branch of the London police that regulates magical crime, as well as the Tattoo - a vicious crime lord, who, as his name suggests, is quite literally a living, breathing tattoo plastered onto the backside of some poor SOB he controls like his own personal marionette (a long-dead rival, meanwhile, re-emerges dramatically, having somehow transformed himself into a sentient form of ink).

Miéville doesn’t stop there. We meet the Londonmancers, special seers attuned to the city’s inner workings; the puckish yet terrifying demonic mercenary Goss and his off-putting child sidekick Subby; Wati, a phantasmagoric Egyptian entity (and labor union leader) who can only manifest himself in statues (and action figures) across the city; the Embassy of the Sea, which, as the name suggests, is a literal means of communicating with the ocean; and Gunfarmers, baddies who literally fire bullets that will give birth to baby firearms if left to fester and incubate in a person’s flesh.  

If this all sounds a tad overwhelming, well… it is, and it isn’t. Miéville writes in jagged shanks of prose, as if he can’t commit his words to the page fast enough. The novel has a restless, breakneck energy about it - like a pulpy form of Red Bull-fueled lit, fiercely determined that its momentum never slackens. At first, the effect is somewhat off-putting - the story compels, but its authorial hand feels intrusive. But once you acclimate to the rhythm, it’s hard not to marvel at Miéville’s control of the material. The plate spinning grows more and more frenzied as the plot approaches a certain pinball machine-level of pop-ding fervor (by the time Billy acquires a working replica of a Star Trek phaser and starts battling Chaos Nazis with it, it feels like all bets are well and truly off)… and yet the story’s narrative trajectory somehow never falters. It builds to a climax that both blindsides, yet feels strangely and completely logical - as if events couldn’t have played out any other way.  ​

Of course, this approach means the plot consumes most of the narrative oxygen. Billy spends most of the book as a largely reactive protagonist (his gaping reaction to each fresh story turn mirroring the reader’s own)… but even as he comes to take the heroic initiative he remains a bit of an empty vessel (the sharpest impression is made by FSRC constable Kath Collingswood, who treats just about everything with the same brand of withering disdain - even the impending apocalypse). But Kraken’s hell for leather pacing and fertile world-building make it fruitless to dwell on such concerns. When push comes to shove, its warped funhouse version of London is the only character you really need.