The illustrious Perdido Street Station was an interesting read with a lot of ideas, but well... enthusiastic with clunky young writer prose. Even the the author himself admitted in an interview that the writing was perhaps not quite up to snuff. But China Mieville has grown up. Or rather grown into his skin. And Kraken is just so. Incorporating street slang and meta hipness with egghead meta philosophizing. Mieville has perfected the expository paragraph - compact and communicative, drawing in with clauses and expelling with statement, inserting 411 packages rhythmically into the windup structure and noir dialogues to make the story hum.

Kraken is a grown man's Harry Potter (a comparison that Mieville slyly references), set in a London underworld teeming with magic but dirtier, grittier and much more violent. Mieville's obsession with the urban world and contingent conspiracy is less cut and dry in Kraken than Perdido Street. Reversal and intrigue reveal the man behind the plan, behind the other man behind the other plan and all the cockroaches taking advantage of any weakness in between. This is no criminal mind forcing his vision lockstep into being, but a messy sort of survival, where bits of meaning catalyze and go extinct on the constantly mutating fodder of human belief. Not surprising then, that the battle between Faith and Darwin is the fulcrum on which the story revolves.

There really is a lot of esoteric to chew on in this novel but the cranky, sarcasm and breakneck pace throws you into the fray front-loaded with information; an experience of truth seeing as malleable and consensual, elided meanings, always being made and broken and never really understood till just too late, a messy process that not only rewrites history but revises it as if the former never was.