I don’t know about
you, but Squiddly-Diddly used to irritate the hell out of me. He was quite
clearly not a squid, but an octopus. Actually, he was a hexapus, as he had only
six arms. He was some sort of deformed hag-born cephalapod, and they kept
pretending he was a squid. I mean
– bloody Nora!
Normally, anything
with a cephalapod is enough to rope me in. Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the
Sea, The Little Mermaid, any number of documentaries. Not only did I read Peter Benchley’s Beast, I watched the mini-series. It
made Jaws look like North by Northwest. Actually, put an octopus and a hunchback
into one book and you couldn’t stop me. I’d even pay to see a Nicole Kidman
film if there were tentacles and a hunchback. (Now I feel I’ve just described a
rather distateful Japanese porn film.) The lastest book to rope me in with
promise of many-armed action is Kraken by
China Mielville.
(And while we’re on krakens,
what the hell was a beast from Scandinavian mythology doing in ancient Greece?
And what the hell was it? I know cephalapods. Cephalopods are friends of mine.
You, sir, are no cephalopod. )
Anyway, Kraken takes place in modern-day
London but we almost immediately shift into an alternate London almost entirely
unfamiliar. If it’s ringing bells chiming Neverwhere for you, I was almost
deafened by them, right down to a ruthless pair of timeless killers. A giant squid is stolen from the
Natural History Museum, which is impossible, but it’s gone. Its curator, one
Billy Harrow, soon finds himself in a world of alternative religions, cults,
crime gangs, and magic. There is a
policewoman who is a witch, a talking tattoo rules the underworld with
terror, oral messages are sent by post and delivered by street lights. People worship squids and badgers, bullets and the ocean. And somehow,
at the centre of it all, is a dead squid in a very large glass case and a fast approaching apocolypse.
Mielville’s alternate
London is very different to Gaiman’s. Gaiman’s is on an alternate plane,
Mielville’s is here, we just don’t notice it. And Gaiman creates a magical
place that I imagine thousands of readers have yearned to experience, while with
Mielville, you feel rather glad you don’t know about it. With Mielville, the threatened apocolypse may occur.
My biggest trouble is
I was trying to read a Gaiman book while reading a Mielville book. Here is a
picture of Neil Gaiman:
Here is a picture of
China Mielville:
You’d think their
imaginary worlds are quite different, and you’d be quite right. Miellville’s world is more brutal, more
punk, harder and meaner. Characters die painfully and stay dead, no magic
rebirths. The world at the end of the book is a very different one from the
start, and the main character, and many of his friends and allies, have lost
much.
Kraken, apart from being a fantasy novel, seems to be examining the power of
faith, in having it, in learning it, and in losing it, what good it can do, and
what harm. It being a fantasy, of course some of these effects are more literal
than you would expect in realism, but the ideas provoked are interesting and
worthwhile.
Mielville‘s greatest
weakness, for mine, is his characters. They fail to come alive, which is a pity
for they have great potential. I wanted to love them, but it didn’t happen. He
also seemed to get lost in the world he was creating, losing narrative pace.
There seemed to be a lot of wandering about searching for answers without a
sense of the characters getting somewhere.
Still I did enjoy the
book and it kept me reading. I may read it again, and read it as a Mieville
book from the beginning. I will try another of his novels. He certainly knows
more about squids than Hanna-Barbera ever did.
