Kraken: an anatomy by China Mieville. 509 p.
Billy Harrow is a curator at London's Natural History Museum. One day he takes a tour group to see the giant squid display...and the squid has been stolen. No one can figure out how--or why. Billy begins his journey into the London that most people never see, starting with the officers of the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit. The members of the Church of God Kraken consider the squid to be God and Billy to be a prophet, because he was the person who prepped the squid for display. Then things start to get really weird, what with the strike by the Union of Magicked Assistants (i.e., familiars), and the knackers and the chaos Nazis and the Londonmancers, and they all think that Billy knows what's going on and he has no idea. But apparently he's going to play an important part in stopping the end of the world....
I enjoyed this a lot. Some reviews have complained about the "meandering plot," but the plot is: Billy is thrown into a world that he knows nothing about, and he tries to figure out what's going on, so of course it's not terribly linear. The real fun of the book is encountering all of the different weird groups and knacks of magical London. And underneath the surface of the story runs some interesting stuff about belief and its effects.
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