King Rat [Anglais] [Broché]

Saul Garamond returns from a journey in late evening and sneaks into his bedroom to avoid a confrontation with his estranged father. He awakes to the intrusion of police and the news that his father has been murdered and he is the number-one suspect. Forgotten in a jail cell, he is freed by a peculiar, stinking, and impossibly strong stranger--only to find rescue may be worse than imprisonment. The plot moves through subterranean and rooftop London quick as a techno beat, as Saul discovers his curious heritage and finds himself marked for death in an age-old secret war among frightful inhuman powers.

China Miéville's urban fantasy novel, King Rat, is an impressive, even daring, debut. It is a Lost Prince story that avoids both black-and-white morality and the standard fantasy-novel adoration of royalty. Furthermore, it is inspired by the unlikeliest of sources, the Rat King legend and the Pied Piper of Hamelin fairy tale. Finally, King Rat, powered and propelled by the rhythms of jungle/drum-'n'-bass music, is a fantasy novel set in the 1990s that genuinely captures the 1990s. --Cynthia Ward --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In the past decade, contemporary renderings of traditional fairy tales have become a staple of fantasy fiction. This flashy riff on the Pied Piper theme marks a notable extension of the trend and an auspicious debut for its author. Saul Garamond is a restless young Londoner, aimlessly adrift, when he is wrongly imprisoned for the murder of his father. Saul is snatched from the authorities by a mysterious savior named King Rat, who claims to be both the deposed leader of the rodent army driven out of Hamelin 700 years before and Saul's real father. Raised as a human, Saul has much to unlearn before King can teach him to become a worthy opponent of the Rat Catcher, who framed Saul for murder and is still pursuing King. Meanwhile, the Rat Catcher forces his friendship on Saul's composer friend, Natasha, by posing as a flautist who hopes to work his melodies into her "drum 'n' bass" dance music and turn London's hip-hop underground into his unwitting stormtroopers. Though the plot is predictable and Saul's efforts to get in touch with his inner rat are clearly patterned on the Star Wars school of messiah-making, Mi?ville pulls the reader into the story through the kinetic energy of his prose. From the novel's opening image ("The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs"), the narrative crackles with a mesmerizing melange of impressionistic description and street slang that powerfully limns the squalid London cityscape. Paced at the rhythm of the Jungle music it evokes, this dark urban fantasy proves nearly as irresistible as the Pied Piper's tunes.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

An intruder wantonly murders Saul Garamond's father. Thus left to sink or swim on the streets of contemporary London, Saul is befriended by King Rat, ruler of the subterranean realm of the rodents. Saul comes of age in that brutal environment, which is depicted in equally brutal, even stomach-turning detail. He learns too late that King Rat is not the least bit altruistic. For him, Saul is a means of settling a centuries-old score between the rats and a certain musical rat catcher who once visited a town called Hamelin. Mieville's folkloric expertise is high, and his depiction of the grungier side of urban life is vivid and extensive, not to mention well-worded. Overall, however, the novel lacks the balance of more finished purveyors of urban realistic fantasy, such as Charles de Lint and Barbara Hambly. It is the maiden effort of a gifted young Englishman who appears to have learned a great deal about realism but somewhat less about reality--at least, so far. Roland Green --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Distinctive grunge fantasy from a British newcomer. Saul Garamond, bewilderingly arrested for the murder of his father, is spirited out of jail by an oddball who claims to be the King of the Rats. Saul's mother, apparently, was King Rat's sister. She fled rat-kind, preferring to join humanity, and married Saul's father. As King Rat conducts him through London's reeking underbelly, Saul finds latent rat-abilities stirring: he can eat garbage, move soundlessly and unseen, squeeze through impossibly tiny openings, and climb vertical walls. One individual alone daunts King Rat: the Piper of Hamelin, who, playing his flute, can force all rats, even King Rat, to dance to his tune. The Piper murdered Saul's father, mistaking him for Saul. But why? Saul, being half-rat, half-human, is immune to the Piper's summonsso the Piper must kill him. King Rat was the sole survivor of the debacle at Hamelin, and the rats have refused to obey him since. Having enslaved Saul's musician friends Natasha and Fabian, the Piper forces them to record new and irresistible musicand challenges Saul and King Rat to a showdown. Provided you can ignore the troublesome flaw: a bold, pounding, down-and-dirty debut. A working knowledge of Cockney rhyming slang helps. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Something is stirring in London's dark, stamping out its territory in brickdust and blood. Something has murdered Saul Garamond's father, and left Saul to pay for the crime.But a shadow from the urban waste breaks into Saul's prison cell and leads him to freedom. A shadow called King Rat, who reveals Saul's royal heritage, a heritage that opens a new world to Saul, the world below London's streets--a heritage that also drags Saul into King Rat's plan for revenge against his ancient enemy,. With drum 'n' bass pounding the backstreets, Saul must confront the forces that would use him, the forces that would destroy him, and the forces that shape his own bizarre identity.

"This is a riveting, brilliant novel. The language sings, the concepts are original and engrossing." --Charles de Lint

"A genuine contribution to London's subterranean mythology. King Rat is as sharp as a Tokyo comic. It's humane and delinquent. And it bites." --Iain Sinclair

"[Mieville's] prose melds James Herbert's nihilistic violence with the metropolitan paranoia of Martin Amis, circa London Fields, and he shows a talent for authentic dialog and cinematic set pieces. Most striking, perhaps, is the meticulously crafted topography of a brooding London peopled by despondent youth and bizarre night creatures and rife with the rhythms of drum 'n' bass." --The Times (London)

"King Rat: a story so compelling you almost haven't time to notice how fine the writing is; a dark myth reinvented for our time and for London in particular with great wit, style, and imagination." --Ramsey Campbell

"[An] extraordinary debut novel. . . . China Mieville is a remarkably eloquent new writer who has produced genuine magic here." --Locus

"King Rat goes down as sweetly as week-old garbage, to leave the reader eyeing speculatively the manhole covers of Soho and Battersea. A knotted, toothy, thought-provoking read." --M. John Harrison --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

China Mieville is a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics. He lives in London.