Kraken

China Mieville
Pan Books

A dark urban fantasy thriller from one of the all-time masters of the genre.
Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?
For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.
A god that someone is hoping will end the world.

Well, what a chore that turned out to be.  I'd tried reading a Mieville book the other year and failed miserably.  At the time I put it down to my ambivalence towards stories with aliens in.  I still think that was the case but I'm pretty sure that his prose style would have finished me off not long into it.

This one, 481 page novel, took me the best part of 4 weeks to get through.  I was determined to get to the end but by god (Kraken) it was a chore.

The story itself wasn't the problem; it's one in a long line of magical London stories featuring various religious cults, magic assassins and elemental avatars.  The characters are solid and the story is inventive enough but the way he writes is like wading through mud.  There was no sense of momentum; you could read for an evening and discover you were only 20 pages from where you started.  I like a book that pulls you through the pages as quickly as it pulls you through the plot and this just wasn't one of those.

I'm glad I read it because I wanted to read at least one of his but this I think will be the only one.