Kraken (2010) by China Miéville

 Book Review

Kraken (2010)

by China Miéville

  I checked this 2010 fantasy novel out as an Audiobook after reading the book Miéville just published with Keanu Reeves.  Miéville has been on my list for years, but I'm not a huge fantasy guy, so I needed some kind of bump of interest to get me reading listening.  I also liked the fact that the narrator was John Lee- who has done many (all?) of Kazuo Ishiguro's Audiobooks.  He's probably my favorite English accent Audiobook reader.

  Thus, I didn't let the 16 hour listening time phase me.  I also checked out Miéville on Wikipedia after reading the Keanu Reeves book and realized that he has a degree from the London School of Economics and is known as a Marxist, which is just adorable!   Miéville is classified as fantasy because of the strong element of the supernatural that runs through his work, but it's a fantasy that is firmly grounded in the mechanics of contemporary social sciences.  For example, the character Wati, described on Wikipedia as a "living Egyptian afterlife familiar," is, in this book, a union organizers for the familiars union (the witches cat, for example), and that is one of the plot-lines in Kraken.

  In fact, Mieville's world-building of a contemporary (circa 2010) London resembles nothing as much as the street-fighting days of the early to middle 20th century in places like Russia before the Russian Revolution took hold and Berlin before the rise of Hitler.  London is endemically infested with various cults and supernatural criminals, fighting each other beneath the consciousness of the general public but on the radar of the London Police, who have their own supernatural crime unit.

  Kraken has much of what I actually like in fantasy- it's set in the "real world" with the exception of the supernatural plot elements, it draws not just from mythology but also social sciences like economics and sociology and it is written with consciousness of the actual history of any supernatural elements in the plot.  The Keanu Reeves book had similar traits, and I noticed some obvious parallels, specifically the significant role in both books played by inanimate objects imbued with a supernatural consciousness and the use of magic as a kind of practical fix-it to get out of sticky situations. 

  On the other hand its a 528 page "trying to prevent the end of the world" type plot and it was hard not to feel like the book was about 150 pages over-long.  While I, personally, enjoy the world-building exposition in Kraken because I find it interesting, it's hard to ignore the negative impact the exposition has on the plot mechanics of what is a glorified detective novel.