Kraken — An Anatomy

The Squid Is Missing

Billy Harrow curates the cephalopod collection at the Natural History Museum. When the specimen tank housing their most prized exhibit — an Architeuthis dux, a giant squid preserved in formalin — is found empty, with no sign of how it was removed, Billy’s life changes in ways he was not prepared for.

Kraken is Miéville’s most comic novel — a sprawling, playful investigation of London’s occult underworld, populated with competing apocalypse cults, a police unit that investigates magical crime, a pair of assassins named Goss and Subby who are genuinely terrifying despite (or because of) their comedy, and a union of familiars negotiating better conditions.

Miéville Having Fun

The tone is lighter than anything in the Bas-Lag novels — Miéville is clearly enjoying the opportunity to accumulate London mythology without the weight of sustained political argument. The result is occasionally shaggy (the plot follows Billy through the London underground rather than building toward a clear resolution) but consistently inventive and often very funny.

The secondary characters are the best argument for the novel: Collingswood, the foul-mouthed police occultist, and the Chaos Nazis are the kind of creations that linger.

A Cast of Glorious Grotesques

The strongest case for Kraken is its supporting players, who rank among the most memorable Miéville has invented. Goss and Subby, a pair of folkloric assassins who have been killing across London for centuries, are genuinely frightening precisely because their menace is wrapped in nursery-rhyme whimsy and unfinished sentences; they are the kind of villains that lodge in the memory long after the plot is forgotten. Collingswood, the young, foul-mouthed, preternaturally gifted police occultist of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit, very nearly steals the novel out from under its nominal hero. Around them swarm a strike of disgruntled magical familiars, a London-worshipping prophet, the Tattoo (a crime boss imprinted on a man’s back), and the squid-worshipping Church of God Kraken. The book’s pleasures are largely the pleasures of accumulation — Miéville keeps tossing out invention after invention, each stranger than the last, with the evident delight of a writer cutting loose.

London as a City of Cosmologies

Beneath the comedy runs Miéville’s serious abiding subject: the city as a palimpsest of overlapping, mutually invisible worlds. The London of Kraken is not one place but dozens, each cult and faction inhabiting its own cosmology, its own private apocalypse, its own magic drawn from the city’s genuine historical obscurities. The missing giant squid becomes a kind of theological MacGuffin, a relic over which competing eschatologies go to war, and Miéville uses the chase to argue that apocalyptic belief is less madness than a rational response to a future no one can comprehend. It is a lighter, more anarchic register than the dense political allegory of his Bas-Lag novels or the formal control of The City and the City, and the trade-off is real: the plot is deliberately shaggy, accumulating rather than building, and the ending arrives abruptly. Readers who want the weight and architecture of his major work may feel short-changed, but those willing to follow Miéville on a freewheeling romp through occult London will find it his most purely enjoyable book.

Who Should Read It and How

Kraken is best approached as a comic urban fantasy rather than a tightly engineered thriller, and readers who relax into its sprawl will get the most from it. It suits fans of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Neverwhere, of Terry Pratchett’s darker satire, and of anyone who enjoys magic that is genuinely strange rather than systematized into neat rules. It is not the place to start with Miéville — that would be Perdido Street Station or The City and the City — but it is a delightful detour for readers who already know his range and want to see him at play. Come for the worldbuilding and the grotesques, not for a clockwork plot, and the book rewards the visit. It is, in the end, an affectionate love letter to London disguised as a story about a stolen squid: minor Miéville, perhaps, but unmistakably and entertainingly his own.

China Miéville himself is worth knowing as context for the book. A founding figure of the “New Weird” movement and an avowed Marxist whose academic background is in international law and political theory, he built his reputation on the dense, politically charged invention of the Bas-Lag sequence before ranging across genres with each new project — police procedural in The City and the City, young-adult fantasy in Un Lun Dun, science fiction in Embassytown. Kraken belongs to a loose strand of his work set in fantastical versions of contemporary London, and it reads like a writer deliberately loosening his grip, swapping rigorous worldbuilding for sheer comic momentum. Knowing that he can do the serious, architecturally ambitious thing makes the cheerful chaos here feel like a choice rather than a limitation, and it is part of why longtime readers tend to forgive the book its shagginess.

Limitations

The plot is deliberately shaggy — it accumulates rather than builds. Less thematically serious than his major works; some readers want the political weight of the Bas-Lag novels. The ending is abrupt. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Miéville readers who want something lighter and funnier than the Bas-Lag novels, and urban fantasy fans who like their magic genuinely strange.

Our rating: 3.9/5 — Miéville at his most playful: an affectionate, funny portrait of London as a city of accumulated mythologies. Not his best but entirely his own.

Reading Guides

• Perdido Street Station — Full Review
• The City and the City — Full Review