Kraken marks a digression for Mieville from his familiar madcap style. Where before we had come to expect moody, slow-burn plots interrupted by sudden action, and just as suddenly back to introspection, we now get a story that is dramatic, unbroken, and streamlined in punchy chapters and theatrical quick-cuts.

His vibrant, poetical asides into mad science and techno-thaumaturgy have been toned down: no longer a virulent undercurrent, twisting and shaping his world, they have become curiosities and explanations. He has been careful to ensure that he never loses his audience through obscure complexity.

In Kraken, most of the asides outline a freewheeling Kantian magic system built on belief and symbology, the other asides are fodder for his plot twists, which are somewhat obvious, if only because he has avoided the swirling eddies of uncertainty that would otherwise hide their trail.

Like his magic, his world is overtly symbolic, and as his magic is an allegory for the act of writing. We could describe his symbols as structuralist, because their meanings are open to interpretation. Unlike esoteric and hermeneutic magics, which are based upon knowledge, history, and the discovery of secrets, Mieville's system is built around free creation of meanings.

Like Grant Morrison's 'Chaos Magic', his rituals and spells could be anything you make of them. Morrison took this to an extreme in his own London-based Contemporary Fantasy, 'The Invisibles', flooding his plot and characters with so many meanings, traditions, and details that he often loses the thread of his story completely. Contrarily, Mieville never loses the thrust of his story, because his magic is not weighted down with the compulsive details of history.

And yet it has always been those details that subgenre-defining authors drew on to create their vision of a magical London, from Gaiman to Milligan to Moore. Mieville uses historical elements, but never interweaves them through the convolutions of history--the externalized structure of his magic doesn't require it. He does use historical details, but since power comes from reputation, not lore, he need not delve too deeply.

Yet in many ways, his is the same system Gaiman often uses, in American Gods, for example. But for Gaiman, the power of a symbol is not merely the sum of its reputation--it also retains the accrued power of its history and influence. There is an interwoven foundation of esoterica in his magic, even when he bases the power of his magic on modern concepts, as in Neverwhere.

Kraken often evokes Neverwhere, whether by converging influences or homage. The violent, intimidating villain duos who chase the protagonists throughout both books share styles, descriptions, roles, and ironically erudite soliloquies.

The plot-driving behind-the-scenes villains are both incomprehensibly powerful, mysterious, unknown figures, though in Gaiman you do get a motive. Mieville's has no lines, a technique which tends to work better in cthonic horror. He's chiefly a plot-mover, and there is an impressive amount of plot-moving to be done to keep a five-hundred page book steaming along at a clip.

Mieville keeps his plot aloft, and there's never a dull moment, though there are a number of artificially dramatic moments, his short chapters often ending in sudden twists and evoking the cliffhangers of a radio melodrama "Will Abigail survive? Tune in next week!" (cue organ)

This pacing leaves little room for introspection, psychological progression, or denouement, but Mieville's quirky melodrama is no place for psychological sketches, he's writing characters, not people. Like his magic, his characters are symbolic, and chiefly important for their surface qualities. In this book, first impressions will never let you down, so don't look for subtle internal conflicts or psychological shifts.

The characters are vibrant, interesting, and flawed, but not human, they are too perfectly constructed and unchanging. Like figures from Greek drama, we do not get men who are cowards or men who are intelligent, we get characters whose intelligence or cowardice continually define them and establish their roles in the story.

Such characters can grow tedious: their conversations progressing in the same ways, their particular strengths, weaknesses, and insights reappearing over and over. One example is the fish-out-of-water protagonist who spends the first hundred pages belaboring his confusion at the incomprehensible world he has been thrust into. His undifferentiated complaints soon form a somewhat irritating leitmotif. Some character progression and transition wouldn't have run amiss, or, barring that, at least using that reminiscent dialogue to explore new, subtle angles in the world Mieville was building for us.

More than his other books, Kraken shows the pulp roots of New Weird, a genre he has helped to define. The quick, action-packed plot, the melodrama, the cliffhangers, and the idealized characters are all familiar to any pulp fans. The length, however, is not, and Mieville shows the difficulty of trying to stretch his comparatively straightforward story and characters to the length established by introspective novels.

As Hitchcock pointed out, you have to repeatedly build and break a story, or it begins to bloat and sag. With a bit more of the subtlety, introspection, and wild, sensory-overload fervor I've come to expect from him, Mieville might have put his own idiomatic stamp on the Contemporary Fantasy, instead of giving us a fun and light (if unusual and well-written) pulp adventure.

His entrance to the subgenre intives comparison to the giants who have come to inhabit it in its recent boom years. He's written a mature Harry Potter, an intellectual's Dresden Files, a devilishly eccentric Anita Blake. His is a strong, intelligent, and literate vision of the growing and popular subgenre of modern-day magic. Yet we are still waiting for a novelist who can use the strengths of their medium to revolutionize the original vision of the comic book authors who have defined this subgenre for thirty years.

I would like to thank Goodreads and Del Ray for sending me an uncorrected proof of Kraken through the Goodreads First Reads program.

My List of Suggested Fantasy Books