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A review by timinbc
King Rat by China Miéville
3.0
OK, first book, published when he was 26, probably written when 25. If it had been my first of his books, I might have said that this author has a chance to become first-class but isn't there yet.
There's a moderately good plot with plenty of "Eww!" and "Wow!" moments. There are some stretches of excellent writing.
But there's the inevitable police force, on which even the one half-intelligent guy has no clue whatsoever that there's any chance of anything supernatural going down. But maybe I'm judging that from a 2014 point of view, where there is finally a chance that a cop might say, "Hmm, looks like the work of a giant rat with substantial magical skills."
There's the desperate Bordertown-Doctorow compulsion for the author to prove that he's down with the Cool People of Jungle music. I happen to get Cockney rhyming slang, but I expect some readers were mystified by the amount of it, and the obscurity of some of them.
The ending is the usual, in which an apparently-invincible bad guy is taken out with relative ease in a fairly ordinary way. Many authors do this, and I suppose one can argue that the ending is about the characters, not weapons and killing methods.
Saul Garamond - I kept waiting for characters named Bodoni and Lucida - has a transition from normal to not-normal that seriously stretches the reader's suspension of disbelief, but it didn't quit go over the "oh, come on, really?" line.
Anyway ... if this is the only Miéville you've read, do please go and read Perdido Street Station (first in the weird Bas-Lag series), or Un Lun Dun or Railsea - both aimed at a younger audience but good for grownups too. Then read the rest.
There's a moderately good plot with plenty of "Eww!" and "Wow!" moments. There are some stretches of excellent writing.
But there's the inevitable police force, on which even the one half-intelligent guy has no clue whatsoever that there's any chance of anything supernatural going down. But maybe I'm judging that from a 2014 point of view, where there is finally a chance that a cop might say, "Hmm, looks like the work of a giant rat with substantial magical skills."
There's the desperate Bordertown-Doctorow compulsion for the author to prove that he's down with the Cool People of Jungle music. I happen to get Cockney rhyming slang, but I expect some readers were mystified by the amount of it, and the obscurity of some of them.
The ending is the usual, in which an apparently-invincible bad guy is taken out with relative ease in a fairly ordinary way. Many authors do this, and I suppose one can argue that the ending is about the characters, not weapons and killing methods.
Saul Garamond - I kept waiting for characters named Bodoni and Lucida - has a transition from normal to not-normal that seriously stretches the reader's suspension of disbelief, but it didn't quit go over the "oh, come on, really?" line.
Anyway ... if this is the only Miéville you've read, do please go and read Perdido Street Station (first in the weird Bas-Lag series), or Un Lun Dun or Railsea - both aimed at a younger audience but good for grownups too. Then read the rest.