Read This: Kraken

Today I made my debut as the science fiction and fantasy reviewer for Shelf Awareness, an online newsletter that provides “daily enlightenment for the book trade,” and I led off with an endorsement of the new China Miéville novel, Kraken. It’s a sprawling urban fantasy epic that starts with the impossible theft of an eight-meter squid from London’s Natural History Museum and escalates into a quest to figure out which of the city’s many apocalyptic cults is attempting to jumpstart the end of the world.

“The most dazzling moments in Kraken are found in the smaller details, like a religious street brawl between Jesus Buddhists and a cult that worships a war god polecat ferret or the police-function ‘ghosts’ [conjured] up to bring in a spirit being who’s organized a strike among the city’s magical familiars… Miéville’s magical universe has an improvisational core, following a delirious assortment of metaphors through to their conclusions. (He sketches an entire religion from the question of why Noah’s Ark is referred to in the Torah with the Hebrew word for ‘box’ rather than ‘ship.’) Ultimately it’s a crisis of faith: can we believe so strongly in something, he asks, that the universe will bend itself to accommodate that vision?”

As I point out in the review, if you’re a fan of Michael Moorcock or Neil Gaiman, you’ll probably enjoy this, too—but then, if you like them, you may already be hip to Miéville, which is why I also recommend it to non-SF fans who dig authors like David Mitchell.

17 June 2010 | read this |