Restrain the Kraken

An author I enjoy reading had himself at some point recommended a novel from China Miéville, entitled Kraken. I knew almost nothing of what the book was about, but in trying to investigate whether it was something I might like to read, a friend of mine turned out to have read it. Without quite stating concretely whether he actually liked the book, he loaned me his copy.

I got around 170 pages into the 500 total before I simply couldn't slog through any more. I don't abandon a book lightly, particularly a third of the way in, but this one was simply a mess.

It started out promising, presenting itself as sort of a Dan Brown style museum thriller, more intelligently written. A man working in a British museum, tasked with preserving a dead giant squid in a massive tank, is shocked one day to learn the squid has somehow been stolen from the museum without a trace. Police try to use his expertise on the subject to track down a cult they suspect may be involved. But soon it turns out that the book is actually a fantasy set in the real world. Magic is at play in London, and a number of end-of-the-world cultists are all circling this mysterious squid as an actual god, the Kraken, that will play a central role.

Once this turn happened, the book almost instantly transformed from compelling, intelligent adventure into a modernized version of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It had the same overly dense structure, meandering plots, needless subplots, and an obsession over "the world" more than the characters.

Soon, it reached a point where I was hard pressed to make myself read more than 15 pages a night. And soon after that, I found that in 15-page chunks, the book wasn't making any sense at all. There were so many characters divided into so many plots that I would read about somebody and then not come back to them for days. Worse, the intervening pages weren't always about other characters, but were often just background information on the nature of how magic operates in the world. Incredibly dry stuff. You could read a whole chapter and barely touch on the person the chapter was ostensibly about.

Once I made the connection that I was reading another Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, I closed the cover immediately. Mid-chapter. That other book was an epic, painful slog that took me months to finish. And at the end, it was all a thoroughly unsatisfying waste of time. (I rated it a D.) I weighed the possibility that this was another, similar waste of time vs. the possibility that the book might turn around again to be enjoyable as it was in the beginning. I concluded that with the weeks more I'd probably have to put in, and the many more books on my pile, I was opting out.

I suppose I can only grade Kraken an "incomplete" -- but I did give it 1 star over on Goodreads, if you're looking for a definitive measure. The bottom line: don't read it.