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 |

Read This: I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow

Shortly after turning 40, Shizuo Oguro quits his routine office job because he needs to find himself, and winds up playing Nintendo in his boxers all morning—until he decides that he’s going to become a professional manga artist. Never mind that his draftsmanship is merely adequate at best, and his stories aren’t even that. Never mind that he’s forced to make ends meet by taking a job at a fast food joint where his co-workers (all barely older than his teenage daughter) jokingly call him “Manager.” And never mind that he doesn’t even seem to have that much ambition… Mind you, if you think he’s going to be able to overcome all these deficits by sheer determination, you’ve picked up the wrong manga, at least if the first volume of I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow is anything to go by. (Maybe things will take an upturn when the next volume comes out in December.)

Imagine if Todd Solondz and Chester Brown teamed up to tell a story about a Japanese man’s midlife crisis. Shunju Aono’s artwork even has the rough, loose feel of Brown; it feels a lot more like the North American “alternative” comics I grew up reading in the ’80s and ’90s than what I’ve usually seen from manga publishers (which is probably, I’ll admit, a function of my own interests and pursuits as much as anything else). And the story isn’t quite as depressing as you might think from my description above: Yes, Shizuo is pretty much a loser, and more than a little desperate, but he’s not (entirely) deluded, and he’s got heart. (Plus, you can tell the people around him, including the father and daughter he lives with, and a sort-of-friend from the burger place, will continue to play a meaningful role in the story.) I don’t want to lay on the “for anybody who’s ever had a dream” jazz, so let’s just say it’s an emotionally authentic story that isn’t going to make you burst into laughter or tears, but can still get inside your head.

16 June 2010 | read this |