Published: 1998
Remember the old folk legend, the Pied Piper of Hamelin? The ‘piper’ of the story has the ability to hypnotise and control the plague of rats infesting the town, impelling the rodents to drown themselves en masse. He doesn’t remain a benign, helpful figure for long though - when the ungrateful townspeople refuse to cough up the agreed fee, it isn’t long before its Hamelin’s children he is leading away to their fate, as transfixed by his music as the unfortunate rodents before them.
Mieville’s King Rat re-imagines this old tale, relocating it to contemporary London. The sinister Piper, suitably updated, already provides an excellent supernatural villain, with his flute-playing ability to command and control not only rats, but other animals and people as well. Mieville is by far from the first to take a folk legend or fairy tale and use it as base material for contemporary fiction – the likes of Terry Pratchett and Jasper Forde spring to mind, albeit using the tales for comedic purposes in their cases. More recently, in film and television, ‘dark’ adaptions of the Grimms’ fairy tales and so on are very much in vogue. But far from being a simple re-telling, there are many other forces at work in King Rat.
Returning home to his dad’s flat in Willesden after a camping trip, protagonist Saul Garamond’s problems do not seem that remarkable: disaffection with life in general; emotional distance from his father. Until the next morning, when he is woken up by the police, accused of the murder of his father, who has been thrown unceremoniously from the flat window during the night. On his first night in the police cell, Saul is broken out by a strange benefactor – a rubbish-stinking, cockney-talking man calling himself King Rat. He may look like a man, but King Rat is just that – a rat. The disgraced King of the Rats, snubbed and detested by his rodent subjects ever since unwittingly leading them to mass murder in Hamelin, hundreds of years before. Saul, King Rat explains, is actually half rat himself, and King Rat wants to take him under his wing and teach him how to live like one, for his own suspiciously oblique reasons. Initially, as he learns to live out of dustbins and run about in the sewers, we are as disgusted as Saul himself. But he can’t deny his true animal nature for long.
Meanwhile, Saul’s friend Natasha is distracted from worrying about Saul’s recent arrest and subsequent disappearance by her music. She’s a Drum and Bass DJ who has recently added an unlikely new element to her music – a flute, played by the weird yet oddly beguiling Pete, who appeared outside of her flat as if from nowhere. It doesn’t take long for the reader to put two and two together, and work out the true identity of the mysterious flautist. Together, Natasha and Pete begin to prepare a special track for the club night that provides the setting for the novel’s climax: Junglist Massive.
King Rat contains a number of elements, then: part supernatural thriller, part police procedural, part fable. Mieville handles all of them with imagination and panache, weaving elements of gothic horror and youth subculture into the mix (even if the latter does date it slightly; ‘Junglist Massive’ sounds very ‘nineties now). It’s difficult to say what genre this best fits into, although it has been described in some reviews as ‘Urban Fantasy’.
I have previously enjoyed some of Mieville’s later works - the fantasy steampunk novels Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Both of these were highly engaging and demonstrated the fertility of the author’s imagination, with their fantastic imagined realms and characters, proving right those reviewers who said of King Rat that it marked out Mieville as an author to be watched. However, in some aspects King Rat is a very different, well, animal. For all its dark confidence, the characters in King Rat, being essentially archetypes in a fable, do not have anything like the depth of the characters in his subsequent novels. Saul is the only one we get any significant insight into, and even that consists largely of the aforementioned teenage existential ennui and difficulty in relating to his father. On the other hand, it certainly avoids the tendency for over-writing that sometimes bogs down Perdido Street Station, for example – that isn’t a luxury that a debut author gets. That isn’t to say the description used here is lacking, though: it is just tighter, more disciplined. His conceptualisation of that other, parallel London, lurking in the back-alleys and dead spaces behind the city's peopled facade is a strong point.
I would recommend King Rat if you’re looking for a contemporary fantasy novel that brings a bit of gothic fantasy into a familiar setting. I suppose a novel which involves sentient animals can never be taken that seriously, but I guess ‘urban fantasy’ is still fantasy at the end of the day. Jungle music provides the sound track to the story but, thankfully, you aren’t required to understand or even like drum and bass to enjoy it (I know I sure don’t). This recommendation does come with a minor, final note of caution however: if you are in any way squeamish about rats, this one is probably best left alone.
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