King Rat by China Mieville

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With King Rat, China Mieville retells the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, giving an already dark story even more sinister underpinnings. In keeping with the gloomy nuances of the story, King Rat is set in London’s gritty and feral drum and bass scene, and Mr. Mieville makes the music play just as large a part in the story as the characters. And, no, that’s not a good thing.

The novel launches into action almost immediately – Saul Garamond comes home one night and wakes up the next day wrongfully accused of his father’s murder. As is wont in these stories, Saul has an unexpected savior who springs him from his jail cell – his would-be uncle, King Rat; Saul is, in fact, his heir apparent, although that’s hardly a position of distinction. The rats no longer follow King Rat after the Pied Piper led his subjects to drown themselves seven hundred years ago. Such vengeful vermin, these rats are.

Embracing his heritage, Saul begins to live as a rat, foraging dumpsters for food and foregoing baths. He learns how to skulk in street corners while undetectable to the human eye. It’s a good thing he does, because, as is (again) wont in these stories, King Rat’s reasons for breaking him out are not entirely altruistic. The Pied Piper is back in town and Saul, being a rat/human hybrid, is the only one who can resist the Piper when he starts playing his tune. The Piper, naturally, knows of Saul’s existence and goes on a homicidal spree, determined to kill the one person who won’t bend to his will.

Though very ambitious, King Rat, at its core, is little more than a standard good vs. evil story: boy is thrust into manhood, encounters enemies, and kicks enemy ass in a massive showdown. Check, check, and check. However, that, in and of itself, is not what makes King Rat such a sorry read. In theory, King Rat has a lot of elements that should have led to its success. It’s modern but familiar, edgy, and, in some parts, the writing is so confident that the book practically reads itself.

Mr. Mieville clearly enjoys writing about violence, especially the blood-and-guts/evisceration kind. Mr. Mieville seems to best invoke his powers of description when writing about someone’s slow, agonizing death (and there are quite a few of them here). However, self-indulgent torture scenes are not for everyone, and even the reader who doesn’t mind the graphic violence must recognize that the excellence of those few passages cannot overcome King Rat’s flimsy and (let’s be honest) silly plot.

Where the novel really comes short, though, is with the characters. All the characters (and I do mean all, as in each and every single one, minor and major) were flat, uninteresting, and, most damning, annoying. The protagonist, Saul, comes off as whiny and self-absorbed. He is plunged into rathood and sewers before the reader is given any indication of his personality; as a result, he is pretty much a cipher throughout the novel. His reactions, such as they are, feel mechanical and lack conviction. There’s no real sense of any inner turmoil from him, which is an unforgivable oversight; I rather think that the transformations he had to go through – from rat to human, from innocent to presumed criminal, from easygoing schlub to savior of the rat kingdom – can be met with such a lax attitude, regardless of how well-adjusted he may be.

The Pied Piper is quite the blackhearted villain, but there’s no indication of what made him that way, or even what kind of being he is, exactly. Is he a god? A mischievous spirit? A king? A frustrated musician intent on wreaking havoc on all those misguided youths who actually think jungle is a valid form of music? Who knows? Maybe Mr. Mieville does, but he didn’t share the answer, and King Rat suffers for it.

The other characters fare just as poorly. King Rat does nothing to inspire sympathy for his cause, and he is even more poorly conceived than the characters of Saul and the Piper. Fabian and Natasha, Saul’s two friends from the human world, are mere props for Mr. Mieville to extol his baffling hipster fixation on that bastard of all music genres, drum and bass; Natasha even moonlights as a DJ when she’s not at her day job. How’s that for genre-immersion?

So great is Mr. Mieville’s devotion to drum and bass that he actually uses it as the pivot point for King Rat’s climax. Because Saul is a rat/human hybrid, he is immune to the Piper’s command. But it takes more than half-breed immunity to stop a bad-ass flute player, and the Piper has a eureka moment when he realizes, while listening to Natasha spin, that he can layer several melodies at once; multitracking will, naturally, allow the Piper to play two pieces simultaneously, breaking Saul’s human and rat sides.

The Piper chooses to utilize his newfound power at a rave, turning all the attendees, including Saul, into his minions. Just when Saul thinks he is done for, however, he finds his groove and shakes off his thrall:

. . . when you dance to Jungle what you follow is the bass . . .

It was the bass that set the agenda. It was the bass that made the song. It was the bass that united the Junglists, that cemented their community . . .

Writing about music is like sarcasm on paper; it rarely works. The fawning, worshipful passages about drum and bass are embarrassing. It just feels like a desperate effort to establish hipster cred, and it comes as being very self-conscious and contrived.

Drum and bass, by definition, is something mechanical and derivative; it’s difficult for me to understand how anyone can be inspired by that. The same sentiment applies to King Rat. It’s a slick read, but, ultimately, it’s as soulless as the music it venerates.

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Filed under Debuts, Speculative Fiction

Tags: china mieville, dark fantasy, england, fantasy, king rat, New Weird, urban fantasy