I needn’t have rushed to the bookstore for Kraken, and I wish Miéville had slowed down a bit too. And that his editor had been a bit more involved.

I got a sense of this quite early on: on page 23 a line of dialogue doesn’t quite make sense, and I wasn’t sure at first whether I was missing something or whether it was simply an error. This might not seem too big a deal, but I think that because of the kind of book this is, it is important.

Samuel Delaney apparently noted how science fiction can take “She turned on her side” and make it describe a cyborg powering up. This is, for me, part of the joy of well-written sf or weird fiction: figuring out what the world being described is like, and how it differs from our own. Anything that doesn’t quite fit tells us something about these differences. So when our protagonist is being interviewed by the police, and he asks, “What were those names you said?” of a man who has not said any names, my ears naturally prick up. Telepathy? Time travel? Memory erasure? Two pages later he gets the names, and I get a strong suspicion that our hero has a complicated relationship with the normal passage of time.

Ironically, this turns out in some sense to be true. But that’s nothing to do with the names: the line of dialogue is simply misplaced by two pages. But it took me quite a long way into the book to be confident that this was the problem: because it’s weird fiction, there is always the lurking possibility that he might still turn out to have future-dreams or have been memory-wiped during the interrogation or whatever. (He does have weird dreams. There was something funny about those cops.) In that sense weird fiction is a bit like a mystery novel: meaningless accidents can look like clues.

If this was an isolated incident, I would be grumpy but probably wouldn’t feel the need to tell the world about it. But there are more of these little slips. The most egregious occurs at the end of chapter 53, in one of those quick end-of-chapter perspective switches that remind you of the ongoing existence of some character who has been out of focus for some time, to tell you what they’ll be doing while the following chapter continues to ignore them. This one is introduced (I swear I am not making this up): “So what was up with Marge?”

Miéville is a better writer than that. It has to be a relic, a note-to-self that never got swapped out for the real sentence that was supposed to replace it.1 And “What were those names?” is a relic of a previous version of the scene in which more hints came earlier. The substitution of a “why” for a “how” and the occurance of the word “strived” are even more minor slips. (Although surprising to me, given that Miéville is by now a pretty big name in sf / fantasy / weird fiction. Surely the book was proofread, but apparently still rather badly.)

These are all symptoms of a rather slapdash composition process, though, and not the only such. Some significant figures and events are clumsily telegraphed: one character’s absence is remarked upon repeatedly in the last third of the novel, so that the reader knows to look out for him although the characters do not; another character is named so often in the first half of the novel that it is a relief when he finally appears in person. Others arrive completely unheralded, so that we have to go through some mental gyrations to fit them into the world we have imagined so far. (Two quite important characters die quite late in the piece. Following all conventions of schlock heroism, one of them turns out not to have died after all. More as we would expect from Miéville, the other remains dead. But that one miraculous survival calls into question the kind of story he is telling. Should we now hope for revivals of all our heroes?)

In a similar vein, foreshadowing seems to be only partially successful. A paragraph describes a nasty piece of work: he “might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third.” At this point we’ve already seen him swallow one victim, so I wasn’t very surprised when (ho-hum) a body turned up with “four huge bludgeoning wounds” on the chest, looking “a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist”. But I was surprised, on finishing the book, to realise that nobody got flames spat on them.

All this makes me think that the original composition was rushed, and that there wasn’t enough editorial input. That might explain my general feeling (although here I can’t be as specific as I ought to, so take this with a grain of salt) that the pacing and plotting is off. The final third of the book is a succession of running battles, on the general schema “We think this will help; it’s pretty difficult but we will try; we managed at some cost, but it turns out it didn’t help at all; but we think maybe this will help…” (I think I’m not spoiling too much if I say that “help” here means “avert the Apocalypse” — it’s on the back cover, after all.) Somehow this doesn’t (or didn’t for me) translate to escalating momentum: instead, it ran up too early to high speed, then stayed fast for too long, so that the end when it came was actually rather a relief, I was getting quite tired of all that high blood pressure.

I ought to say something good about the book, which is not hard to do — even sub-par Miéville is worth a read. He is best, unsurprisingly, on the intersection of The Weird and The City: the Londonmancers are a fine creation (one reads the future in the entrails of the city, another moulds city-stuff — bricks and pavement into a hedge, rusted iron into litter and fast food), as is the Tattoo. There is a genuinely creepy museum guardian, and a great twist on Trek-style “beam-me-up” matter transmission. That is, there are plenty of exciting elements in this book. I just wish that they came together into an exciting whole.

And for the second edition: copyeditor.

Notes:

  1. See Douglas Adams on “La, a note to follow Soh”. [↪]