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Kraken
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
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Kraken
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Publisher's Summary
With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.
In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.
As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.
All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.
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Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- WarriorsDawn
- 2018-03-27
Excellent book, sometimes difficult to follow
Loved the premise, characters and plot. The prose was also very good.
The narrator was the weak link of this. Too many characters, not enough distinct voices. Along with that, there were some parts where the POV would switch during a chapter. He barreled right through without a pause which made it hard to figure out what was going on for a moment.
Overall, the book version is likely better, but it's still a very worthwhile listen.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Blythe
- 2018-10-22
So fantastic the plot is like deus ex machina x100
I loved Miéville' s "The City and the City" so when I saw he'd written a book with the protagonist being a mild mannered cephalopod biologist, of course I had to pick it up! Set in London, the book follows Billy, the aforementioned, and the furor that ensues when the preserved remains of a giant squid go missing from the museum where he works. The squid is so huge that nobody could possible have removed it without any trace, and yet, that is what's happened. Adding to the confusion, the dead body of a man is discovered in the museum's basement, stuffed intact into a preserving jar into which there is physically no way he could possibly have fit.
Billy tries to make sense of events, but events simply get stranger and stranger. In a fantastical version of London where magic exists, where gods of all sorts are worshipped on a daily basis, and where warring groups of squid worshippers fight to try and recover the remains of their squid-kraken-god, the plot just gets stranger and stranger.
Although I enjoyed the creativity - and the fact the author managed to work the phrase "squid pro quo" into the novel - and of course I enjoyed the biology and the cephalopods - overall I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as The City and the City. The plot was just SO fantastical that the world had no predictability, meaning each plot twist felt like just one deus ex machina after another. When the fictional world is so unpredictable, so unexplained, and so bizarre that the reader is unable to form a coherent mental image of what's going on, I feel the experience loses me somewhat. Definitely creative, fun, and I enjoyed parts of it, but overall it seemed too unpredictable and incoherent to really grab me. I will definitely try another Miéville novel though!
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 2019-09-22
Urban Fantasy Circus Ride
I came here straight after reading Perdido Street Station and The City and the City. While Kraken doesn't quite hit the same heights as those two novels, I certainly didn't leave disappointed.
The book reminded me forcefully at times of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. Both novels follow a protagonist's journey through a fantastical under-city living within London and at times both novels risk taking the London fetishism a little too far. However, Miéville shows here that he has a wry self-awareness that I haven't seen in Gaiman's work and it serves him well.
Kraken is often very funny but it never devolves into a farce; the story is consistently entertaining (if occasionally hard to follow) and the characters are genuinely likeable. Miéville continues to impress not only with his writing talent but his willingness to explore different styles. John Lee similarly shows off his versatility, nailing the tone of the novel and never leaning into the jokes more than necessary.
Coming off of reading three straight Miéville novels I'm still eager to start another. Do yourself a favour and try out one of the most exciting fantasy authors working today.
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