In this way, it would have been nice if Miéville had gone to the trouble of immersing us in his London far more intensively and with more variation earlier in the book. I still don't get how or why that worked in the universe he set up, unless the hero is just supposed to be God hisownself. There were circles of striking cats and dogs, surreptitious doll-pickets like grubby motionless picnics; and flesh-puppets, pickets of what looked like and in some cases had once been humans.

They’re people like you and me, just trying to get through the day, it’s just that when they go home they worship a giant squid, or something even less likely.Tan expositivo, una trama lisiada y rara con altibajos a rebosar de personajes y cultos con calificativos dobles y triples. While I originally rated this slightly lower, it grew on me the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to read it again.

I made up my own mind about his looks and I'll make up my own mind about his writing, too, thank you very much. Every few chapters, just when I thought we would make a big break, there would be a new twist or new piece of information. I think most would agree Miéville’s strongest asset is his formidable imagination and here he gives it free reign to populate London’s theological underworld with all manner of bizarre cults, weird creatures, and unusual magic. As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.I was reminded, very pleasantly, of Perdido Street Station, which I also had an almost identical problem with. well no, borrowing and reclothing some of the memorable villains from it and turning them into Goss and Subby. 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.

There wasn’t a sense, as there was in Neverwhere, that this secret London could possibly coexist with the real thing. For such a long novel…far longer, if I’m not mistaken, than Neverwhere…very few such questions are ever answered. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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.The main character reminded me a bit of Richard Mayhew from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, but the two magic-amped assassins chasing Billy, known only as Goss and Subby, reminded me even more of the two unstoppable killers chasing after Richard Mayhew, the Messrs Croup and Vandemar. but wildly creative as well, marrying a marvellous ear for the rhythms of London English to the cracked semi-scientific jargon of occult literature. It deserves to be savoured and gloated over, perhaps even stopping a bit to roll the cadences of copspeak off your tongue to feel its beat. Some more complications, twists and double-blinds and rather less obvious hints at the "last chapter surprise" villains and their goals would have been advisable too, because, at its very core, the plot of "Kraken" is .