"Krakens move in mysterious ways."
- Dane
I don't have many bad words to say about China Mieville. The man is something of a genius in fantasy circles, one of the heralds of a style known as the New Weird. And it's all well-deserved. I started reading his works with his second book, Perdido Street Station. It was a wild, grotesque tale of a city full of arcane systems and intrigue. Each creature was described in vivid detail, and while the plot could be distilled down to its base elements and explained as "unoriginal", the sheer warped complexity it came across with made it memorable and easily-recognizable. The one problem I ever had with the book was that so many plot threads went into play at once that whenever I put it down, I never managed to pick it back up without having to read all the way from the beginning. I actually had to pay attention to it. It was like Pynchon or Ayn Rand, but, you know, interesting and not read by pretentious college students everywhere*.
So when I heard his new book, Kraken, was going to be the same Mieville craziness I love but set in modern-day London, I went ahead and preordered the book. I don't do this very often, but I did so because I didn't want to have to look all over for it, and don't even get me started on my complex love-hate relationship with my Kindle. I love it, but there are a lot of things I'd rather just have hard copies of to read. And my verdict on Kraken? Not good. I hate to do this to an author who has so many good ideas and such a frenetic style of storytelling (as opposed to stodgy), and I must give him props for having an urban fantasy novel with absolutely none of the usual tropes: It barely flirts with police procedural, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single romance within its pages, save for the one broken up by a frighteningly effective hitman. Tropes are averted, reality is played with, and overall, there are a load of cool ideas in it. But, and here's the important bit, the book does not work.
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