By China Miéville

Billy Harrow is a curator at the Natural History Museum. He specialises in marine molluscs and has a gift for preservation so when a perfectly preserved giant squid is found it is brought to the museum so that he can work his magic on it, keeping it preserved for the years of research a once in a lifetime opportunity like this can offer.

But dark forces are at work in the occult underbelly of London, the London that you and I can't see or don't notice, a world of bizarre churches, warring cults, magic and hexes and it's a world that Billy gets thrown headlong into because someone has managed to vanish the 8.62 metres of giant squid, and now everybody wants to get their hands on it. Chased by terrifying assassins on one side and the cult police on the other, short of friends and unsure who to trust, Billy has to make sense of this other London, track down the squid and save the world from an impending apocalypse.

I have to wonder sometimes about Mr Miéville. Sure, he tells wonderful stories, creates engaging characters and constructs settings that are on a different level from other writers, being at once familiar and ordinary to the point of mundane but also underscored with that dark and dangerous don't-go-there-at-night feel that hits a nerve with all of us. But having said all that, I can't help wondering sometimes if he's just plain taking the piss.

Let me explain.

Without doubt Kraken is another wonderful read. Miéville has a gift for language, even the profane, that is so enchanting that you can't help but be pulled into the story, and he gifts his characters with such unique and compelling voices that you will happily go along for the ride, even one as happily bizarre as this, but theres the rub. Kraken is also a huge shaggy-dog tale of a story that veers off on tangents and up dead-end streets that, while entertaining as hell, can leave you with the feeling that he's stalling, using a bit of smoke and mirrors so you don't notice that he's stopped actually telling the tale. And in the end, and in the nicest possible way, there isn't much tale to tell.

I'm probably going to stand alone on this one but that's my issue with kraken, there's not much story in there. Yes it's thoroughly engaging, yes you can look at it on many levels, at the debate on the nature of faith, on politics and modern culture, and yes you can laugh at the outlandish sense of humour - Kraken has more than a few laugh-out-loud moments - but I do think it flatters to deceive.

In some sense it was probably a tonic for the man given the dark and politically charged outing that was The City & The City, this is a very accessible novel that while sitting somewhere in that genre, undoubtedly pokes fun at the mish-mash of what is known as 'urban fantasy'.

But what makes the book a winner is the setting and the characters. Miéville clearly loves London and has great fun taking it apart and reconstructing it for us in newer and more imaginative ways, in the case of Kraken ways you can't help wishing were real, he then populates it with a truly diverse and imaginative cast comprising a devout worshipper of the squid 'special forces', a trio of nut-job police from the Cult Squad with an especially belligerent and foul-mouthed female police constable, the spiritual leader of the familiars union who actualises in statues and action figures and on the villain side a pair of nasty assassins generally known as "Goss and fucking Subby" who are cruel beyond measure and just about unkillable and who work for the Tattoo, a gangland boss who exists as a ..erm, tattoo, and runs his crew as living ink on someone's back.

So buy the book, read the book, revel in the language and the setting and the characters and all the wonderful stuff that helped his last novel win China Miéville an unprecedented third Arthur C Clarke award but don't expect a big story, it just isn't there, but what is there is more than enough fun for anyone.

Kraken is published by Macmillan and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.

China Miéville's website is the rejectamentalist manifesto.