It is a difficult moment to realize you dislike the book you’re reading. Especially if you’ve liked the author’s work in the past, but most especially if you’re on page 223 of 509. Had you admitted this on page fifty, no problem, and if you’d deceived yourself until 450, fair enough. But there in the middle you’re facing either a slog or an incomplete.
I stuck it out to the end, and in doing learned that I’d been misreading Miéville. What seemed like missteps were intentional choices I happened to dislike. And the difference between a simple error and an unappealing decision is massive when it comes to books. There are simple errors: one previously bald character grows a head of hair in fifty pages, there’s some awful copyediting at one point, and the sentences still have all the fat on. But the larger, more bothersome mistakes are intended. Miéville:
Kraken is very aware of itself and its own ridiculousness, hopefully in an enjoyable way.
This late discovery didn’t change my feeling about the book, unfortunately: the damage had been done. But it did transform Kraken into just a miss, rather than my cue for avoiding China Miéville’s future work.
You might not guess it from the delicate first name and accented surname, but China Miéville is a tough looking dude. Shaved head, massive arms, scowling author photos. The problem is his prose takes after his name more than his looks. Lots of sing song word play, Britishisms (a lot of faffing about, you might say), and indefinite descriptors. Reading through Kraken, I kept wishing the writing would shave its head, get a few heavy earrings put in, and start scowling. Instead there were tragic puns about squids (“squiddity,” “squidnapping,” and squid pro quo) as well as the Londonmancers.
Oh, the Londonmancers. You may be surprised to learn that these are wizards who use London for their magic. OK, so it’s a little on the nose. Is that a crime? Well first, I ask you to please consider this paragraph:
The Londonmancers had been there since Gogmagog and Corineus, since Mithras and the rest. Like their sibling chapters in other psychopoli, the Paristurges… the Warsawtarchs, the Berlinimagi, they had always been ostentatiously neutral. That was how they could survive.
Fantasy is a name game. You can figure out how much pulp is in your fantasy novel by calculating the value of a character’s name in a game of Scrabble, then multiplying by 1.5 for any apostrophes or diacritical marks. Besides betraying a character’s roots in someone’s D&D campaign, names are crucial to verisimilitude. Something as bald as Londonmancer reminds you every time it is used that you are reading something. Suspension of disbelief? You never even achieve liftoff. Nothing comes alive: every character and concept is a curio in an embalming jar.
It took me too long to figure out Miéville wasn’t trying for that. He is a worldbuiilder, and all his previous books depend on the reader beliving in these secondary worlds. But Kraken, which he calls “a comedy all the way through,” is about Miéville goofing around with language – i.e. Londonmancers. Weirdly enough, this kind of comedy can’t afford to take things anything less than seriously.
For starters, the writing is too glib. Miéville claims
The language is more disciplined even if the story is more shaggy.
I disagree. The language compulsively grabs at every available joke. I recently listened to the commentary for Judd Apatow’s Funny People. Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan, and Apatow all sat in to talk about the movie. And as comedians, they were trying to be funny for every second they were talking. They went for bad jokes, small laughs, mild amusement. It becomes distracting. In the same way, Miéville writes in neon. His particular favorites are figures of sound: consonance, alliteration, echoing, etc. Here’s an example, with the text marked up to simulate its effect on my attention as a reader:
She looked around at the fag-end landscape, her head thrumming like a bad receiver, aware with near certainty and very swiftly when the few late-night passerby passed by where they were innocent or guilty of knowledge about thesort of thing that was going on. Spectators hieing for hides. Twitchers if dooms were birds. Her companion stared as she laughed and nudged him, as if she had spoken that aloud.
“Where is the sod? Bit much given this was his idea,” Baron said into her skull.
She had quite enjoyed organising it. It had mostly been Vardy driving, suggesting what to suggest to whom, when and how, what rumors to seed on what bulletin boards, which implications to leave unsaid.
The prose works in this register more or less all the time, which makes it difficult to thresh through the enormous amounts of plot Miéville delivers, mostly for form’s sake. The plot tries to go about six different directions at once and as a result stalls. Characters who I’m never convinced to care about go on searches for secrets I already know. They engage in tiresome sleuthing to solve mysteries I forgot about twenty pages ago. It all feels like rote observance of the plot beats customary in this genre potpourri.
Again, it’s intentional:
It obviously won’t work for everyone, but I always think about books like—and I don’t mean this hubristically—Gravity’s Rainbow. If Gravity’s Rainbow is anything, it’s kind of this dreamlike meander. The idea of saying to Pynchon, “You know, you need to tighten this up,” it would destroy it. Kraken was an effort to tap into that same kind of pleasurable ramble.
The difference between Gravity’s Rainbow and Kraken is that Pynchon knows that you have to commit 100% to the bit. A story from the perspective of a lightbulb, or about a man being flushed down a toilet in a jazz club, are on their face too ridiculous to bother with. But Pynchon deadpans these scenes. Sure, the writing is funny, but the impulse behind it is absolutely sincere. Stephen Tobolowsky gives this gloss of Freud’s definition of comedy:
Comedy is making the meaningless meaningful, or making the meaningful meaningless.
Miéville believes he’s doing the same thing, only he calls it fantasy. He talks about how one of the subplots – a general strike of magical familiars – was inspired by the rebellious paintbrush in Fantasia.
It is a form of workplace resistance, oddly moving in a silly way. Fantasy is about seeing what happens if you treat ridiculous ideas not as absurd but see where they take you.
Problem is, Miéville’s writing doesn’t treat ridiculous ideas seriously. It constantly undermines them, as with the Londonmancers. Or consider the Tattoo. This is the crimelord of magic London’s underground. He is as literally named as the Londonmancers: he’s an animate Tattoo that lives on some guy’s back. Now, nevermind that his henchmen are called knuckleheads because their heads are actually fists. Let’s just focus on his threatening of the ocean.
In Kraken, the ocean keeps an embassy somewhere in the city. It’s a standard house, only it’s filled with water and sealife. When you want to talk to the embassy, you say something at the door and wait for a message in a bottle to crash out of the mail slot. So at some point, the Tattoo actually threatens war against the ocean. The scene is played for laughs – look at how arrogant and powerless the Tattoo is – and it never transcends absurdity.
The trick to enjoying the book is embracing the surreal, literary chaos. I never managed to, because it’s exhausting chaos rather than exciting chaos. Miéville crams the book with two notebooks worth of dream journalling and ideas from his slush pile. Aside from all the references to geek culture (the main character acquires a working phaser from Star Trek at one point), the book is about twenty different things. It’s a comment on the power of language, or metaphysics, or faith, or whatever. This kitchen sink is the worst kind of geekery. It’s taking a box of shit you like, thrusting it at somebody, and asking, “Do you like any of this? Me too! Awesome!”
