Kraken: China Mieville

[poliphilo]

I'd assumed China was a woman. He isn't. He's a shaven-headed bloke who runs with the Socialist Workers Party. He's also knowledgeable about magic and theology in a bull-shitting kind of a way, highly literate and wildly, madly, surreally inventive. Kraken is good fun but also quite difficult- by which I mean that I frequently found myself having to double back and re-read a paragraph to find out what happened in it- something I expect to do with Ford Madox Ford but not with writing in the same genre as Harry Potter- which is why- I suppose- in spite of  the cinematic structure and texture of his work- China hasn't yet cracked the multiplexes.