Great Price for $15.95

Kraken Review

A pickled and jarred giant squid has been stolen from the Natural History Museum of London and so begins the wild, tangent-ridden, and utterly delectable Kraken. Seers of London are predicting a fiery end of the world and to avert this the squid must be rescued. Gods of all stripes make appearances while the local police just muck everything up.

Kraken is quite a divergence from Mieville's last effort The City & The City, which was more of a somber and masterfully plotted police procedural. Word on the street is Mieville wrote both at the same time, which boggles the mind a little given how each feel like they weren't written on the same world let alone the same Universe. Kraken is a mad mix of China Mieville at his most weird with a pinch of Alan Moore on his a normal daily dose of acid with a healthy influence of Lovecraft to boot.

Kraken evokes the feel of a caper as the main characters are eluding many while in search of the missing squid and people responsibility for its disappearance. Given what I expect from Mieville nowadays I was actually quite bored for the first 70 pages and then all of a sudden Mieville brings the Weird in force and never lets up from there on introducing grotesqueries, out-there gods, wild concepts, and an inordinate amount of religious fanatics to the fray. Oh, and there are phasers! Can't forget the phasers. And yes they make sense as much as anything does in this story.

In Kraken nothing is true and everything is pure fact. Don't ponder that thought too much or you'll get lost in it. Mieville wants to create a sense of discomfort and surrealism from his readers, but with a bite of humor and satire about religion, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy in general. He also does cooler things with origami than even the best master out there. Kraken often reads as Mieville's bedside dream diary with constant apocalypses and flights of fancy taking off to dark, weird corners to bring his vision of London to light.

Everything boils to a fever pitch that doesn't disappoint, but will still leave you scratching your head weeks later wondering how the hell did Mieville pull that off? Kraken is Mieville's most accessible and fun adult work to-date even if it is a mess, but what a beautiful mess it is to behold. He wants us to wonder: Where the heck is this going? Then he'll change his mind and bring us along for the ride. The get is that he more than succeeds on that front. Mieville is still a master of his craft, he just melts that craft to fit whatever fiendish mold his mind comes up with. Man, now I feel like some calamari.

Kraken Feature

ISBN13: 9780345497499
Condition: New
Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Kraken Overview

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. 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.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery

with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.

All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

Kraken Specifications

"The Soft Intelligence": 5 Underrated Literary Cephalopods by China Miéville

It was Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé who named cephalopods 'the soft intelligence', in the subtitle to their 1973 book Octopus and Squid. At first, the adjective seems vaguely simpering, as if these ambassadors of alterity are in fact safe, unthreatening, cuddly. But immediately comes a strangeness. If they are a, no, the soft intelligence, what are we? Hard intelligence? Soft unintelligence? Why are they soft intelligence singular? Is each but an iteration of some tentacular totality? What strange sentience. An opaque collective.

There are rules to this exercise. No invented species nor chimerical monsters--though this doesn't preclude gigantism nor a little taxonomic vagueness. Thus the 'huge, brown, glistening bulk' of William Hope Hodgson's 'mighty devil-fish' in The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig' would be permissible: haploteuthis ferox, that hitherto unknown squid that assailed the English coast in H.G. Wells's The Sea Raiders is not: still less would be Cthulhu, despite his admirably tentacular visage. And as the effort here is to overturn a few rocks less jostled to see what coils beneath, much celebrated ceph-lit has been left alone. Captain Nemo's nemesis is not here. Benchley's Beast is absent, as is Lautréamont's octopus spirit from Maldoror. The astounding ruminations on the octopus-as-bad-ontology in Victor Hugo's otherwise 'prodigiously boring book' (Sebald) Toilers of the Sea, remain indispensable--but elsewhere.

See China Miéville's full list of underrated literary cephalopods at Omnivoracious, Amazon.com's books blog

Available at Amazon Check Price Now!

Customer Reviews

Twisted complexities and endless exotic flourishes - loce_the_wizard - Lilburn, GA USA
Kraken is one of the latest works shelved under the moniker or "weird fiction" or "urban fantasy." Author and professor China Miéville animates the very city of London, the ocean, and even a dead, preserved squid along with a hoard of strange characters, some clearly good or at least well-intended, some vile and evil, and many somewhere in-between hedging their bets or shifting alliances in this homage to weirdness and magic.

He weaves a tale where squid worshiping, squidnapping, occult detectives, cults and religions of all manner, and a lot of villains that call to mind some of the weird hybridized creatures from the Star Wars movies, divinations, teleportation, and so forth all coexist, but certainly not harmoniously. Apocalyptic backdrops fan the action to a fever pitch, and anyone without a pretty strong willingness to suspend disbelief will likely toss this novel aside pretty early.

Kraken's twisted complexities and endless exotic flourishes nearly exhausted my patience about two-thirds of the way through the novel. Although Dr. Miéville has stated his dislike of Tolkien's fiction, I find it is much easier to stay engaged when the conceits of the imagined world are grounded to some inner consistency as is typical in classic fantasy (starting with William Morris's novels in the 1890s) than trying to keep my bearings as the outlandish, weird, and bizarre characters, events, and settings pile on. Sometimes the character development seems stilted but given the breakneck speed at which the plot unfurls, that's not so much a fault as a given.

I certainly appreciate the work, imagination, and discipline in creating Kraken, but my thought is that the author had more fun writing this novel than I did reading it.

Unique but could have been better - Eva - Midwest, USA
Billy Harrow is a curator at a London history museum when a giant squid he's in charge of goes missing and he gets drawn into the increasingly bizarre investigation of the circumstances surrounding its disappearance. Though I have to admit the story was very unique and unlike any novel I read before, I didn't really find myself caring about what happened to Billy throughout his strange fantastical journey. Yes, the book is filled with colorful personalities and unusual urban settings, but in a way they seemed to get in the way of character development in this novel. Overall, it didn't live up to my expectations for this reason.

visions of cephalopods - ryan hoguet -
"Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while"

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Aug 26, 2010 23:52:06

Books Literature & Fiction

Thursday, August 26, 2010