The novel by British writer China Mieville begins with the disappearance of a huge liquified kraken from the museum - but this is just the beginning of the story.
A British "fantastic fiction" writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" (after early 20th century pulp and horror writers such as H. P. Lovecraft), and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird who consciously attempt to move fantasy away from commercial, genre clichés of Tolkien epigons. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. He has stood for the House of Commons for the Socialist Alliance, and published a book on Marxism and international law.
During the most ordinary tour of the Darwin Center, young curator and mollusc specialist Billy Harrow suddenly discovers that the pearl of the collection, an eight-meter squid in alcohol, has disappeared right from the central hall of the museum along with the glass flask in which it was enclosed. A day later, in the basement of the center, Billy finds a jar with an alcoholized corpse, and the neck of the jar is definitely too narrow to let an object of this size inside. These events, in themselves very surprising, become the starting point for events that are completely incredible and go beyond any reasonable framework. The reality familiar to Billy goes through cracks, through which abysses peep through, about which neither the hero himself, nor ninety-nine percent of the world's population have the slightest idea. The theft of the kraken mysteriously starts the countdown to the fiery apocalypse, and against this ominous stormy background, an epic battle of criminal-magic and crypto-religious gangs unfolds in London, and for some reason they are all convinced that it is Billy who will play a special, fatal role in this story.
The main feature of China Mieville as a writer is an excessive, unimaginable literary generosity. Mieville literally lights up with plots and stories that other, more diligent authors would have enough for a couple of strong trilogies. So, around the plot line connected with the abduction and return of the kraken, a dozen secondary lines are entwined in a dashing spiral, striking with a truly baroque riot of fantasy.
One of Billy's main allies in the fight to save the world, the disembodied spirit of Vati, began his career as an ushabti - this is how figurines in the form of people or animals were called in ancient Egypt: they were placed in the tomb so that the deceased had someone to serve in the afterlife. However, Vati was imbued with communist ideals, rebelled, broke free and organized a trade union of familiars - magical assistants who were forced to help all kinds of occultists on humiliating, semi-slavish conditions. And, as luck would have it, right now, when the universe is dangerously tilted, and Billy needs Wati's help so much, he is up to his ears - leading a great strike of his wards, seeking to achieve fair payment for magical labor. One of the main villains of the novel exists in the form of an animated tattoo on the back of a poor fellow from the city's slums - this pathetic form was given to the former mafia boss by his powerful enemy.
The all-powerful sea, as Billy is to discover, has its own embassy in London, a house filled with salt water from roof to attic, inhabited by fish and communicating with the land through messages in bottles that occasionally fall out through the mail slot. The order and peace in the city is the responsibility of the ancient order of the Londonmans - people connected with it by the closest ties and able to read the future, cutting through the asphalt skin of the British capital. The list of such details, each of which, if desired, can be easily deployed into a full-fledged and self-sufficient book, can be continued almost indefinitely, and together they create inside the Kraken a world of colossal density, depth and - in spite of everything - reliability.
Novels in which both the entourage created by the author's imagination and the story embedded in this entourage would be equally good are comparatively rare in literature. They are rare, including in the work of China Mieville himself, who often sacrifices the beauty of the composition for the beauty of the artistic space he created. The Kraken in this sense is an amazingly harmonious construction: the spacious, thoughtful and at the same time exceptionally picturesque world of the novel contains an intrigue of equal harmony and dynamism. How, while maintaining such an unthinkable pace of the narrative (literally, an unexpected plot somersault awaits the reader on every page), Mieville manages not to lose a single significant detail and reduce all the countless endings to the final - both paradoxical, logical and philosophically significant, to comprehend, in general, not succeeds. So, all that remains for us is to simply rejoice that one of the best novels by China Mieville, albeit with a ten-year delay, nevertheless reached the reader.
This article was sponsored by Dmytro Gudkov
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