There is no doubt that China Miéville is, at any time, in full control of his writing. But what to make of a lauded author who willingly decides to write a pulp novel? The question lingers through the end of "Kraken", a crime novel-meets-urban fantasy, where warring cults and creepy assassins hunt museum curator Billy Harrow through a shadowy alternate London, which somehow exists on top, or below, the mundane city of the same name. Magic and the fantastic invade the story, revolving around the theft of a preserved giant squid, within the first couple of pages, with very little subtlety: spells are cast, curses spoken, people and things teleported, ghosts interrogated. Miéville hints that the common London simply negates the existence of this: more than once, Billy finds himself ignored by busy passersby while performing some outlandish act. As Miéville flexes his fantasy muscle, some powerful scenes capture the reader's attention, though it remains questionable whether this is indeed more than standard fare to be had from the crowd of other New Weird authors. What ultimately breaks the novel's back is the sprawling, haphazard narrative, easily too long by at least a hundred pages, a fact accounted for by endless exposition and mostly hollow, repetitive dialogue. Police officers drowning what little information there is in their deliberations in insults and slurry language; the protagonists restating the thinnest facts over and over; all of them struggling to wrap their heads around the true motives of their counterparts amid a plot that meanders through so many red herrings and turns it would be a formidable exercise to chain the sequence of events and motivations together after the admittedly rather astonishing finale. The central device which retrospectively shapes the plot is introduced so late in the novel that there is little time for it to reinforce credibility, much different from Miévilles previous work "The City & The City". A story thread dealing with a person trying to catch up with events eats up dozens of pages, but in the end feels tacked-on and could be dropped without any loss to the plot. Endless rants about the theological structure of the cult landscape in shadow-London make the reader trip over lines and paragraphs of imagined apocalypses, false gods and self-fulfilling prophecies, a poor man's "Foucault's Pendulum". Had Miéville wasted less time in imprinting his doubtlessly formidable intellectual skills upon this work, and had any competent editor even touched the writing, this novel could have been a comic riff on classical crime in a fortean setting. As it stands, it is a mess.
Readers with English as a second language, or indeed, having grown up outside of London, should probably stay clear of this work. Londonese abounds in dialogue, jarringly interspersed with what once was Miévilles trademark, the extensive use of rather obscure vocabulary from the depths of the Thesaurus. Here's to hoping that the sparse, elegant style that made "The City & The City" the outstanding novel it is will prevail in China's future efforts.