Re-read reviews: Kraken, by China Miéville
It’s been a while since I read this book, and I forgot how much good stuff is in it! The story starts when Billy Harrow, a curator at the London Natural History Museum’s Darwin Center finds its centerpiece specimen – a giant squid that he had preserved himself – missing. He gets questioned by a very odd set of cops who turn out to be the Met’s cult squad. They are interested in the squid because suddenly all the prophets in the city have been seeing visions of the same end-times…and the squid, which had to have been stolen by magical means, appears to be at the center of it.
I would bet good money that this book drew inspiration from ‘Neverwhere’. Like that Neil Gaiman book, it features a main character who gets pulled into a grubby magical London underworld and is seriously out of his depth for at least the first half of the story, a more knowledgeable companion who at one point gets tortured and brought back to life, and a pair of antagonists trailing them whose humorous banter somehow makes them more threatening. But this is no mere ‘Neverwhere’ clone; this is its own story with some marvelously creative world-building of its own. There are Londonmancers who read the “entrails” of the city; Chaos Nazis; A man turned into a living tattoo who runs a gang of altered humans; Gunfarmers whose weapons grow from the “eggs” they plant in once-living tissue; “Angels of memory” that self-generate to protect museums; a mysterious house that serves as the embassy of the sea and communicates with messages in bottle, and more.
The main characters we follow are Dane, Billy, and Wati. Dane is a Krakenist (AKA Teuthist), member of a church that worships squids, and the muscle of both that group and our little trio. His cult is of course the prime suspect in the squid heist. Billy is one of those main characters that you start to feel annoyed at because of their uselessness but who then redeem themselves very satisfactorily. As a biologist myself, I really liked the real scientific details put into the first chapter as he’s explaining the squid1…and his role as a scientist actually becomes relevant again at the end, when the key to preventing the apocalypse turns out to involve the meaning of the squid. But he becomes not-useless well before that, as he is a smart guy and figures out that magic functions largely on metaphors. This allows him to be able to actually formulate plans that work in his new world, even if he doesn’t have a “knack” himself. And I adore Wati – I would read a whole book about the adventures of this rebel Egyptian shabti and current leader of the UMA (Union of Magicked Assistants2). He doesn’t have a body of his own, but can jump from statue to statue, and he does basically all the heavy lifting when it comes to reconnaissance and communication. And when Goss and Subby (the aforementioned sinister duo) get ahold of his original statue after we’ve seen them murder at least three other characters in creatively gruesome ways…auugh, my heart!
1. There’s also a bit about the influence of science fiction on real science, which is pretty accurate: “Satellite specialists cite Arthur Clarke, biologists are drawn to the field by the neuro- and nanotech visions of entertainers…Philosophers stole many-worlds, grateful to alternative-reality merchants. And, unknown to the mainstream, such invented futures were the seminal viewing for a generation of London’s mages”
2. “He started with the most egregious cases…brooms forced to carry water buckets; clay men made to fight and die...There was an art. He watched organizers of peasant revolts and communard monks, machine wreckers and Chartists, and learned their methods. Insurrection was not always suitable…Wati organized among golems, homunculi, robotish things made by alchemists and made slaves…Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise.”
As you might suspect by now, labor/class and religion are major themes of the book. Besides the UMA strike, which starts out cute with picket lines of feline familiars and ends up rather devastating as both magical beings and human allies just get shredded by Tattoo’s thugs (with police deliberately showing up just a little too late to help)3, we have the character of Jason. Jason is sort of an embodiment of wage labor, and because “who could look that gorgon in the face?” he is a kind of chameleon; if he shows up in your workplace you’ll be sure that he belongs there even if you can’t place his name at the moment. I mentioned in my ‘Midnight Riot’ and Discworld Watch reviews that there is considerable argument to be had over whether police officers are working class or not, and Kath Collingswood illustrates that point quite well. Her accent and intrinsically anti-authoritarian attitude say “yes”, but the way she functions as an arm of the state say “no”. Cops who don’t like authority can be trouble, because for every Sam Vimes who chooses to piss off the actual authorities by always punching up you get ten who ignore civil liberties rules to get the job done. Collingswood is not above roughing someone up to get intel and magic-ing away the bruises. When they realize they need to question Wati her method of finding him is to burn a bunch of police procedurals to conjure up sort-of ghosts who sound like this: “yore fuckin organizer wears that paki cunt wati…right sonny jim yore nicked you pinko cunt. you my son are comin with me dan to the station4”. On the religion front, the cults function almost like a drug – Vardy, a consultant for the “spooky cops”, used to be a young earth creationist and is clearly still jonesing for the feeling you get from that kind of belief. He gets a hit of that zeal of the converted every time he studies a new cult. At the same time, even if the thing believed in isn’t technically true, it can still shape the world in our universe…and even more so in the magical world of the book! These themes clearly come naturally: Miéville himself is a Marxist and leftist political activist who taught English in Egypt and has a BA in social anthropology and a PhD from the London School of Economics.
3. And if you wonder if the description of that strike-break sounds too extreme, check out Woody Guthrie’s ‘Ludlow Massacre’ song or countless descriptions of violent attacks on striking miners and others in the 19th and early 20th century, or this video about the modern real-life inspiration behind ‘Squid Game’
4. “officer officer officer the thing said and Wati heard overseer and pushed back in rage.
Overall recommendation: If you are looking for an urban fantasy that goes beyond secret sexy vampires with really rich characters and world-building and which contains philosophical concepts worth mulling over later…absolutely pick this one up! Note: one of the quotes on the back refers to this as “wild comedy” – but this book is not a comedy. There are funny moments, but this is overall a fairly dark and often bloody drama.
