Kraken

Kraken starts off slowly and rolls around, but consistently gains velocity as it goes.

I liked Kraken, although it reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (especially when it comes to Croup and Vandemar), but that's Mieville's thing -- he's addicted to language, cities, and the free floating consensual hallucination that attaches the one to the other. Mieville's London is a old, smelly, dirty and beaten place, full of characters of the ages who are halfway between parody and archetype, not so much believable as characters in and of themselves, but providing a panopoly of unlikely abilities and free floating zealotry.

Somewhere in the middle of this, the characterization of the protagonist and his friends is left out. Billy is rarely more than a placeholder for other people's beliefs, and his friends and enemies are hamstrung by circumstance. While "saving the world" doesn't leave you much room for personal banter, I did wonder exactly how on earth Billy could be taking everything on without a crisis of faith of sorts.

I think that the premise itself is responsible. Kraken suffers under the weight of of a predestined future in which something has Really Done Goofed, but in which the various uncoordinated actors, acting in the best intents, are inadvertantly lurching towards it in the process trying to avoid it. This, to my mind, is a cheat. Predestination, like time travel, must be used sparingly else it turns into prestidigitation. It gives the author too much room to waggle fingers around in causality -- it's far too convenient to apply apocalyptic visions when the plot starts to flag, and Kraken is driven by this engine far too often.

Similarly, there's always a moment in China Mieville's books when the fabric of the belief system is stretched a little too far and you think to yourself "hang on, according to the stated rules, there's a deep category error here." And then the flaw in the diamond is revealed, and you wonder why, if it didn't smell right to begin with, that it's presented as a revelation. Sometimes, as in Embassytown, it doesn't quite hang together -- the system is so incoherent that there's no real structure to poke holes in. Other times, as in The Scar, it's brilliantly obvious in retrospect. Kraken is a mix of the two -- I'd like to believe in the ending, but I don't quite, because Kraken contravenes its own rules.

So here's the flaw which surpasseth my suspension of disbelief. As stated by "the sea", the Kraken in the sea is not subject to human observation and understanding, and the Kraken in the bottle is a human construct. This is borne out by the fight between Billy and Grisamentum. If the Kraken in a bottle is a human construct and Billy is a bottle god (representing scientific thalience), then the stated end of the world is Bullshit with a capital B. Darwin's work of Evolution with memory fire does not destroy the Sea, because Evolution as a scientific theory is a human construct. Destroying the map doesn't destroy the territory, and destroying the idea of Evolution doesn't burn the entire world and everything in it to a crisp. it just puts you back two hundred years.

So, good book, but not one I'm going to re-read.