"Denizens of the Deep." Kraken

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.