Kraken | ||||||||
China Miéville | ||||||||
Del Rey, 528 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Alma A. Hromic
His previous novel, The City and the City, was an absolutely astonishing read -- and it would have taken
quite some living up to by the book that followed it. And in spite of the paragraph of praise above, I find myself
ambivalent about Kraken. It's Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, in a lot of ways, but it's Neverwhere
on a bad acid trip. Miéville's couple of badass feared-by-all casual villains who kind of kill for pleasure
and, because they can and in various nasty ways, named Goss and Subby in this book, bugged me at first until I
twigged some switch in the back of my brain and realised they reminded me a lot -- perhaps too much -- of Mr.
Croup and Mr. Vandemar in Neverwhere. No, not carbon copies, not in the least, not that -- but they REMINDED
me, and far too much. And after that first reminder it was hard to leave that connection behind. And Goss and
Subby… lost something by it, were diminished by it, and became more of a caricature than they had, I am certain,
been intended to be.
Other things then sat up and started to complain.
Major secondary characters like Wati are inspired -- but the author lacks the courage, in the end, to take them
through to an ending that was necessary. (If you're spoiler wary look away now -- but Wati's "death" should have
been far more than it was and his "resurrection" was extremely deus ex machina for me. Have the courage to let
dead characters stay dead. Let the reader MISS them.)
I am not sure what Marge's role in all of this was supposed to be because I've rarely met -- despite her actions
in the novel -- a more passive character. She seems to be moving jerkily from position to position without any
particular motivation, even when she and the terrifying Goss and Subby cross paths and any normal person would
have pulled in her horns and sat quiet for the rest of her life hoping that they never crossed paths again. I
mean, yes, she had lost her lover -- but Miéville never really suggested that the relationship was that
intense. I definitely got an impression of a far more casual liaison. And yet there Marge is, facing down the
forces of Doom and Hell… for, errr..., no particular reason at all, really. She's just a pawn to be pushed into
the right place at the convenient time for when it suits the authorial purpose. And yes, I know this is supposed
to be throwing all sorts of faith-like objects into the mix -- but I can't help feeling that everything and
the kitchen SINK has been thrown into the mix, and I found myself either tiring and finding it hard to keep up
or else simply… failing to care. There's TOO MUCH here. The result is that everything is pretty much by default
skated over rather than explored and the reader is left to flounder in it all, in a sea of hints and
assumptions by the author that yeah, well, they ought to be familiar with this stuff already. Well, with some
of it I AM -- but other things are sufficiently arcane, if "realtime," or are just plain and simple the result
of the author's own imagination, and seeing as I don't have telepathic communication with the mind that created
these things it is sometimes hard to follow its leaps where it simply assumes that I know what it is talking about.
And the worst sin of it, for me, is a REALLY disturbing sense of a cop-out ending. A version of "And then
I woke up and none of this really happened." And I really, REALLY hate that in a book. I kind flailed in this
ending, looking for something else, something more, but it all came down to, in the end, a basic (and in the
end rather tired and trite) battle of a fanatic of faith against the bulwarks of science -- and really, none
of the rest of the book was necessary at all, by this stage.
The book -- unlike anything else by Miéville that I have read -- felt like it was pieced together from
distinct and often mismatched parts of at least three different jigsaw puzzles. For a writer whose work has
hitherto always seemed seamless, organic, almost animate in its own right, this is something of a jolt.
It's a good read, as far as that goes. It's Miéville, after all. It's entertaining, and if the devil
is truly in the details there is plenty of devil in here, enough to keep you busy and paying attention… but
in the end… there's too much, TOO MUCH, and it ends on a disappointing note. It's a pity, because with a few
less pieces on the board this might have been a far tighter and more ferocious game of chess than it turns
out to be in the final analysis. As a trip through the imagination of a China Miéville, it's
magnificent. As a novel -- if it had been written by anyone else, and the language only an iota less
scintillating than it is, I would probably have put it down somewhere in the middle of the book and
quite possibly never picked it up again.
Alma A. Hromic, addicted (in random order) to coffee, chocolate and books, has a constant and chronic problem of "too many books, not enough bookshelves." When not collecting more books and avidly reading them (with a cup of coffee at hand), she keeps busy writing her own. Her international success, The Secrets of Jin Shei, has been translated into ten languages worldwide, and its follow-up, Embers of Heaven, is coming out in 2006. She is also the author of the fantasy duology The Hidden Queen and Changer of Days. |
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