King Rat

China Mieville

It amazes me, after having read King Rat, that China Mieville didn't start getting widespread recognition until after his third novel, Perdido Street Station. King Rat heralded the coming of a great new writer, and most of the planet ignored it. Their loss.

Saul Garamond comes home one night after a camping trip and immediately goes to bed. He is awakened the next morning by the police, who suspect him of killing his father, who took a plunge out their sixth-story apartment window sometime during Saul's absence. He's held in prison overnight, but during his stay there, a fellow who calls himself King Rat slips into Saul's cell and breaks him out. For Saul is the key to the defeat of King Rat's oldest and most powerful enemy…

Set amid the Jungle craze that hit London in the mid-nineties, and spending a good deal of time in the sewers underneath London, King Rat achieves what Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere came so close to but missed by a hair—taking modern London and making it into a completely new place, filled with wonder and magic. Seeing it from a different point of view (but unlike Gaiman, Mieville gives us a point of view that actually exists inside the fantasy world—the point of view of the homeless). A number of previous reviewers have commented that it helps when reading the novel to know a good deal about Cockney rhyming slang and Jungle music. I know diddly about either, other than that they exist, and still found the novel easy enough to follow (while some of the slang terms I couldn't figure out for the life of me, the context of their use made the meanings obvious).

Like Perdido Street Station, King Rat shows Mieville as more than a capable writer, but one possessed of greatness. He weaves the threads of the novel together perfectly, creating a design that, while obvious, still throw in the odd twist here and there. You've read them before, yet somehow they're still unexpected. After a while, the fantasy aspects of the novel recede into the background, and you're reading an adventure novel (albeit a very weird one); only the best fantasy can do that.

If there is a problem with the book, it's that it's a little too quickly paced. The kind of pacing that works well in horror films—you drop a clue, then within two minutes you show what the clue points to (Hideo Nakata is a master at this)—doesn't translate quite so well to novel form, and there are sections that feel a bit rushed. Of course, this could be an editing problem. Editors are not happy with giving large, expansive canvases to first-time novelists. The seven hundred fifty pages of Perdido Street Station were perfect for Mieville to stretch his wings; the three hundred of King Rat seem a bit cramped. There was more to this tale, I'd warrant, that needlessly hit the cutting room floor.

Still, as fine a novel as any I've read this year, save Perdido Street Station. Mieville may well be the finest new author to come along since Wendy Walker. Get in on the ground floor.