introduction
by TIM MAUGHAN
I’m pretty sure I’d never heard the term urban fantasy when I first picked up a paperback of China Miéville’s King Rat. It was the late nineties and I was still firmly obsessed with the realist, near-future science fiction that had followed in the wake of eighties cyberpunk—an updated fairy tale about anthropomorphic rodent deities seemed like the last thing you’d catch me reading. But the reality was I grabbed a copy the first time I saw it on a bookshop shelf, because it was the book all my friends were buzzing about. The book that I watched being passed between them, that one worn and dog-eared copy doing the rounds at smoky after-club sessions in basement apartments, but somehow never coming my way. The book that they would always say what, you not read it yet, you gotta read it man and it’s proper mental mate when you asked them about it, as though they didn’t want to tell you any more. But push them and they’d reveal why it was such an essential read, in almost hushed tones, like it was an incredible secret that defied belief: It’s about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, fam … but set in the drum and bass scene!
And it did seem to defy belief at that moment. The decade leading up to that point had felt like the most fantastical and science-fictional period in popular music in the UK—an ever-growing chunk of the nation’s youth had rejected mainstream culture to spend their weekends taking designer drugs and dancing in the crumbling ruins of their cities’ once-great industries. Dancing to music that was soulful but utterly synthesised, funky but unforgivingly futuristic, and that had been created from thrift store technologies by Black and queer kids on the other side of the Atlantic. Kids that had seen their own cities crumble in the same way. New York, Chicago, and perhaps most importantly Detroit—where true pioneers were crafting a new folk music from drum machines and synthesisers they could afford only because they’d been rejected by traditional musicians for sounding “too artificial,” just as they watched the same technological innovation wash away Motor City factory jobs in a wave of automation. Folk music played on instruments that look and sound like robots, made by people displaced by them. In many ways it felt like the perfect encapsulation of William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk quote, “The street finds its own use for things.” And as such it was infuriating and confusing to me that the science and speculative fiction I was reading was seemingly so oblivious to it, and to what was happening. And it’s also why I—too impatient to wait for that crumpled copy to be finally passed to me through a cloud of post-rave weed smoke—bought King Rat on sight.
Drum and bass—or jungle, as it’s also known—did not originate in Detroit, although its roots certainly did. No, jungle was strictly a London thing—at least at first—formulated in bedroom laboratories in crumbling, brutalist social housing projects, and broadcast across the city and out to the suburbs from illegal pirate radio transmitters on their roofs. If the music coming out of Detroit and Chicago was birthed from the first cheap analogue drum machines, then jungle heralded the first cheap digital samplers—a style crafted almost entirely from snippets from other records. And just as the hip-hop pioneers before them had raided their parents’ record collections for soul and blues vibes, the UK’s jungle producers raided theirs, finding instead thunderous reggae basslines, Jamaican vocal refrains, and disjointed, looping jazz motifs. As Miéville himself describes it:
This was Jungle.
The child of House, the child of Raggamuffin, the child of Dancehall, the apotheosis of black music, the Drum and Bass soundtrack for a London of council estates and dirty walls, black youth and white youth, Armenian girls.
The music was uncompromising. The rhythm was stolen from Hip Hop, born of Funk. The beats were fast, too fast to dance to unless you were wired. It was the bassline you followed with your feet, the bassline that gave Jungle its soul.
But King Rat—almost certainly the first speculative fiction novel to embrace drum and bass—is not science fiction. At its essence it’s fantasy in its purest form—the retelling of an ancient fairy tale, characters from a story meant to scare children into compliance transported to 1990s London. As such the inclusion of jungle in the book sounded jarring to me at first, a weird authorial choice even, until I actually sat down and read it. It then—as it does now, revisiting the book twenty-four years later—made perfect sense. Drum and bass is the spine that holds King Rat together, the connecting tissue keeping its elements in place, the relentless, rolling beat that keeps it moving. It’s also what makes it—one of the novels that would help blueprint and define the urban fantasy genre for decades to come—still stand head and shoulders above the crowd that would follow it. It’s what makes the book dance to a very different drum. While urban fantasy would spend the next twenty years trying to re-create its central hook—the transplanting of mythology and monsters into contemporary city settings—King Rat still feels like one of the genre’s few novels that truly love and celebrate the modern city in which they are set. While too many urban fantasy books feel like they want to escape into the past, as though the present-day city isn’t fantastical and mysterious enough, Miéville’s use of jungle in King Rat presents London as far more than a gothic horror playground for genre tourists, or a photoshoot backdrop for appropriated cosplay fantasies.
Of course the London of King Rat—like the cities of all Miéville’s books—is more than just a single, monolithic identity. It’s almost a cliché to talk about his work—whether it’s The City & The City or Embassytown—as containing secret, hidden cities nestled within publicly visible ones, and perhaps it’s more accurate to talk about how Miéville understands that cities are built and defined by conflict, by how different communities, cultures, and infrastructures rub up against one another. Or, as is often the reality, like to pretend that they don’t. In King Rat we’re shown this via movement and travel, as we weave through traffic on bicycles, scurry through hidden sewers, leap from rooftop to rooftop. As we follow each route a new map of the city is revealed to us, fragment by fragment, while those following other pathways seem purposefully oblivious to them, even as they overlap and intersect. Even the train that brings Saul home to London in the novel’s opening pages seems to slip into the city undetected:
Flanked by air, it progressed over the outlands of North London, the city building up below it as it neared the Holloway Road. The people beneath ignored its passage. Only children looked up as it clattered overhead, and some of the very young pointed. As the train drew closer to the station, it slipped below the level of the roofs.
And into this infinitely varied city rides a singular villain, the Pied Piper. Miéville’s use and framing of the Piper was incredibly savvy and smart for the time—the mythic character had already been used as a metaphor for rave culture by cynical tabloid newspapers and lazy politicians for over a decade, a shadowy figure come to steal your children, to lure them away into dark, unknown spaces, dancing to his hypnotic music as they go. But for Miéville he’s not just the opposite of that—a force for crushing dissent and enforcing uniformity and compliance—he’s also the one real threat that could bring London down. He represents capital:
“What is he?” breathed Saul.
“Him greed,” said Anansi.
“Covetousness,” said Loplop.
“He exists to own,” said King Rat. “He has to suck things in to him, always, which is why he’s so narked at me for having pulled a disappearing trick. He’s the spirit of narcissism. He’s to prove his worth by guzzling all and sundry in.”
“Him can charm anything,” said Anansi.
“He’s congealed hunger,” said Loplop. “He’s insatiable.”
“He can choose, see?” said King Rat. “Will I call the rats? The birds? The spiders? Dogs? Cats? Fish? Reynards? Minks? Kinder? He can ring anyone’s bell, charm anything he fancies.…”
The Piper is money. He is the wave of gentrification that swept through every major city at the beginning of the twenty-first century, attempting to sanitise and rationalise everything it touches, to seduce and displace communities, to make the hidden visible just so it can have a price tag slapped on it. This is King Rat at its most prescient, Miéville seeing not just the writing on the wall, but those who would come and paint over it for profit. The oligarchs and the property developers that would lead London astray to the tune of easy money, that would use the threat of crime to put cameras on every corner, and noise pollution laws to shut down the very nightclubs where drum and bass was born. This Piper doesn’t want to lure your kids to a rave, he wants to shut it down, to make sure they stay in line and don’t make too much noise, lest they offend their new, richer, neighbours. I can remember returning after a few years of living abroad to find Central London seemingly deserted at night—bars and restaurants closing at 9 P.M., few people on the streets, the apartment block towers shrouded in darkness, left empty by their out-of-town owner-investors—and wondering if the Piper had finally won. That maybe he had come—hired by the landlords and investment bankers—to lure away the last of the party people, to make London and its long history of counterculture finally submit.
Or maybe I’m just getting old. The London of my youth—the London of King Rat—doesn’t exist in the same way anymore, and to wish that it did would be to regretfully pine for times passed just as King Rat himself does. A quarter of a century has passed, and it’s impossible for me to look back on those years—at London, at the music, at the parties, at the spirit of resistance and rebellion that ran through them all—without an almost paralysing mix of hauntology, nostalgia, and regret. So many dreams of a new world lost, so much political potential crushed by money and greed. But that’s just me. On revisiting King Rat it’s clear that its spirit of defiance still feels vital and essential. It belongs to another generation now, one that will hopefully pick up this reprint and be intoxicated by its righteous and joyful stand for egality and diversity, that will learn to resist the Piper’s tune, and will dance to a different drum.
one
The trains that enter London arrive like ships sailing across the roofs. They pass between towers jutting into the sky like long-necked sea beasts and the great gas-cylinders wallowing in dirty scrub like whales. In the depths below are lines of small shops and obscure franchises, cafés with peeling paint and businesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. The colors and curves of graffiti mark every wall. Top-floor windows pass by so close that passengers can peer inside, into small bare offices and store cupboards. They can make out the contours of trade calendars and pin-ups on the walls.
The rhythms of London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zone between suburbs and center.
Gradually the streets widen and the names of the shops and cafés become more familiar; the main roads are more salubrious; the traffic is denser; and the city rises to meet the tracks.
At the end of a day in October a train made this journey toward King’s Cross. Flanked by air, it progressed over the outlands of North London, the city building up below it as it neared the Holloway Road. The people beneath ignored its passage. Only children looked up as it clattered overhead, and some of the very young pointed. As the train drew closer to the station, it slipped below the level of the roofs.
There were few people in the carriage to watch the bricks rise around them. The sky disappeared above the windows. A cloud of pigeons rose from a hiding place beside the tracks and wheeled off to the east.
The flurry of wings and bodies distracted a thickset young man at the rear of the compartment. He had been trying not to stare openly at the woman sitting opposite him. Thick with relaxer, her hair had been teased from its tight curls and was coiled like snakes on her head. The man broke off his furtive scrutiny as the birds passed by, and he ran his hands through his own cropped hair.
The train was now below the houses. It wound through a deep groove in the city, as if the years of passage had worn down the concrete under the tracks. Saul Garamond glanced again at the woman sitting in front of him, and turned his attention to the windows. The light in the carriage had made them mirrors, and he stared at himself, his heavy face. Beyond his face was a layer of brick, dimly visible, and beyond that the cellars of the houses that rose like cliffs on either side.
It was days since Saul had been in the city.
Every rattle of the tracks took him closer to his home. He closed his eyes.
Outside, the gash through which the tracks passed had widened as the station approached. The walls on either side were punctuated by dark alcoves, small caves full of rubbish a few feet from the track. The silhouettes of cranes arched over the skyline. The walls around the train parted. Tracks fanned away on either side as the train slowed and edged its way into King’s Cross.
The passengers rose. Saul swung his bag over his shoulder and shuffled out of the carriage. Freezing air stretched up to the great vaulted ceilings. The cold shocked him. Saul hurried through the buildings, through the crowds, threading his way between knots of people. He still had a way to go. He headed underground.
He could feel the presence of the population around him. After days in a tent on the Suffolk coast, the weight of ten million people so close to him seemed to make the air vibrate. The tube was full of garish colors and bare flesh, as people headed to clubs and parties.
His father would probably be waiting for him. He knew Saul was coming back, and he would surely make an effort to be welcoming, forfeiting his usual evening in the pub to greet his son. Saul already resented him for that. He felt gauche and uncharitable, but he despised his father’s faltering attempts to communicate. He was happier when the two of them avoided each other. Being surly was easy, and felt more honest.
* * *
By the time his tube train burst out of the tunnels of the Jubilee Line it was dark. Saul knew the route. The darkness transformed the rubble behind Finchley Road into a dimly glimpsed no-man’s-land, but he was able to fill in the details he could not see, even down to the tags and the graffiti. Burner. Nax. Coma. He knew the names of the intrepid little rebels clutching their magic markers, and he knew where they had been.
The grandiose tower of the Gaumont State cinema jutted into the sky on his left, a bizarre totalitarian monument among the budget groceries and hoardings of Kilburn High Road. Saul could feel the cold through the windows and he wrapped his coat around him as the train neared Willesden station. The passengers had thinned. Saul left only a very few behind him as he got out of the carriage.
Outside the station he huddled against the chill. The air smelled faintly of smoke from some local bonfire, someone clearing his allotment. Saul set off down the hill toward the library.
He stopped at a take-away and ate as he walked, moving slowly to avoid spilling soy sauce and vegetables down himself. Saul was sorry the sun had gone down. Willesden lent itself to spectacular sunsets. On a day like today, when there were few clouds, its low skyline let the light flood the streets, pouring into the strangest crevices; the windows that faced each other bounced the rays endlessly back and forth between themselves and sent it hurtling in unpredictable directions; the rows and rows of brick glowed as if lit from within.
Saul turned into the backstreets. He wound through the cold until his father’s house rose before him. Terragon Mansions was an ugly Victorian block, squat and mean-looking for all its size. It was fronted by the garden: a strip of dirty vegetation frequented only by dogs. His father lived on the top floor. Saul looked up and saw that the lights were on. He climbed the steps and let himself in, glancing into the darkness of the bushes and scrub on either side.
He ignored the huge lift with its steel-mesh door, not wanting its groans to announce him. Instead he crept up the flights of stairs and gently unlocked his father’s door.
The flat was freezing.
Saul stood in the hall and listened. He could hear the sound of the television from behind the sitting room door. He waited, but his father was silent. Saul shivered and looked around him.
He knew he should go in, should rouse his father from slumber, and he even got as far as reaching for the door. But he stopped and looked at his own room. He sneered at himself in disgust, but he crept toward it anyway.
He could apologize in the morning. I thought you were asleep, Dad. I heard you snoring. I came in drunk and fell into bed. I was so knackered I wouldn’t have been any kind of company anyway. He cocked an ear, heard only the voices of one of the late-night discussion programmes his father so loved, muffled and pompous. Saul turned away and slipped into his room.
* * *
Sleep came easily. Saul dreamed of being cold, and woke once in the night to pull his duvet closer. He dreamed of slamming, a heavy beating noise, so loud it pulled him out of sleep and he realized it was real, it was there. Adrenaline surged through him, making him tremble. His heart quivered and lurched as he swung out of bed.
It was icy in the flat.
Someone was pounding on the front door.
The noise would not stop, it was frightening him. He was shaking, disorientated. It was not yet light. Saul glanced at his clock. It was a little after six. He stumbled into the hall. The horrible bang bang bang was incessant, and now he could hear shouting as well, distorted and unintelligible.
He fought into a shirt and shouted: “Who is it?”
The slamming did not stop. He called out again, and this time a voice was raised above the din.
“Police!”
Saul struggled to clear his head. With a sudden panic he thought of the small stash of dope in his drawer, but that was absurd. He was no drugs kingpin, no one would waste a dawn raid on him. He was reaching out to open the door, his heart still tearing, when he suddenly remembered to check that they were who they claimed, but it was too late now, the door flew back and knocked him down as a torrent of bodies streamed into the flat.
Blue trousers and big shoes all around him. Saul was yanked to his feet. He started to flail at the intruders. Anger waxed with his fear. He tried to yell but someone smacked him in the stomach and he doubled up. Voices were reverberating everywhere around him, making no sense.
“… cold like a bastard…”
“… cocky little cunt…”
“… fucking glass, watch yourself…”
“… his son, or what? High as a fucking kite, must be…”
And above all these voices he could hear a weather forecast, the cheery tones of a breakfast television presenter. Saul struggled to turn and face the men who were holding him so tight.
“What the fuck’s going on?” he gasped. Without speaking, the men propelled him into the sitting room.
The room was full of police, but Saul saw straight through them. He saw the television first: the woman in the bright suit was warning him it would be chilly again today. On the sofa was a plate of congealed pasta, and a half-drunk glass of beer sat on the floor. Cold gusts of air caught at him and he looked up at the window, out over houses. The curtains were billowing dramatically. He saw that jags of glass littered the floor. There was almost no glass left in the window-frame, only a few shards around the edges.
Saul sagged with terror and tried to pull himself to the window.
A thin man in civilian clothes turned and saw him.
“Down the station now,” he shouted at Saul’s captors.
Saul was spun on his heels. The room turned around him like a funfair ride, the rows of books and his father’s small pictures rushing past him. He struggled to turn back.
“Dad!” he shouted. “Dad!”
He was pulled effortlessly out of the flat. The dark of the corridor was pierced by slivers of light spilling out of doors. Saul saw uncomprehending faces and hands clutching at dressing-gowns, as he was hauled toward the lift. Neighbors in pajamas were staring at him. He bellowed at them as he passed.
He still could not see the men holding him. He shouted at them, begging to know what was going on, pleading, threatening and railing.
“Where’s my dad? What’s going on?”
“Shut up.”
“What’s going on?”
Something slammed into his kidneys, not hard but with the threat of greater force. “Shut up.” The lift door closed behind them.
“What’s happened to my fucking dad?”
As soon as he had seen the broken window a voice inside Saul had spoken quietly. He had not been able to hear it clearly until now. Inside the flat the brutal crunch of boots and the swearing had drowned it out. But here where he had been dragged, in the relative silence of the lift, he could hear it whispering.
Dead, it said. Dad’s dead.
Saul’s knees buckled. The men behind him held him upright, but he was utterly weak in their arms. He moaned.
“Where’s my dad?” he pleaded.
The light outside was the color of the clouds. Blue strobes swirled on a mass of police cars, staining the drab buildings. The frozen air cleared Saul’s head. He tugged desperately at the arms holding him as he struggled to see over the hedges that ringed Terragon Mansions. He saw faces staring down from the hole that was his father’s window. He saw the glint of a million splinters of glass covering the dying grass. He saw a mass of uniformed police frozen in a threatening diorama. All their faces were turned to him. One held a roll of tape covered in crime scene warnings, a tape he was stretching around stakes in the ground, circumscribing a piece of the earth. Inside the chosen area he saw one man kneeling before a dark shape on the lawn. The man was staring at him like all the others. His body obscured the untidy thing. Saul was swept past before he could see any more.
He was pushed into one of the cars, light-headed now, hardly able to feel a thing. His breath came very fast. Somewhere along the line handcuffs had been snapped onto his wrists. He shouted again at the men in front, but they ignored him.
The streets rolled by.
* * *
They put him in a cell, gave him a cup of tea and warmer clothes: a gray cardigan and corduroy trousers that stank of alcohol. Saul sat huddled in a stranger’s clothes. He waited for a long time.
He lay on the bed, draped the thin blanket around him.
Sometimes he heard the voice inside him. Suicide, it said. Dad’s committed suicide.
Sometimes he would argue with it. It was a ridiculous idea, something his father could never do. Then it would convince him and he might start to hyperventilate, to panic. He closed his ears to it. He kept it quiet. He would not listen to rumors, even if they came from inside himself.
No one had told him why he was there. Whenever footsteps went by outside he would shout, sometimes swearing, demanding to know what was happening. Sometimes the footsteps would stop and the grill would be lifted on the door. “We’re sorry for the delay,” a voice would say. “We’ll be with you as soon as we can,” or “Shut the fuck up.”
“You can’t keep me here,” he yelled at one point. “What’s going on?” His voice echoed around empty corridors.
Saul sat on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
A fine network of cracks spread out from one corner. Saul followed them with his eyes, allowing himself to be mesmerized.
Why are you here? the voice inside whispered to him nervously. Why do they want you? Why won’t they speak to you?
Saul sat and stared at the cracks and ignored the voice.
After a long time he heard the key in the lock. Two uniformed policemen entered, followed by the thin man Saul had seen in his father’s flat. The man was dressed in the same brown suit and ugly tan raincoat. He stared at Saul, who returned his gaze from beneath the dirty blanket, forlorn and pathetic and aggressive. When the thin man spoke his voice was much softer than Saul would have imagined.
“Mr. Garamond,” he said. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that your father is dead.”
Saul gazed at him. That much was obvious surely, he felt like shouting, but tears stopped him. He tried to speak through his streaming eyes and nose, but could issue nothing but a sob. He wept noisily for a minute, then struggled to control himself. He sniffed back tears like a baby and wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve. The three policemen stood and watched him impassively until he had controlled himself a little more.
“What’s going on?” he croaked.
“I was hoping you might be able to tell us that, Saul,” said the thin man. His voice remained quite impassive. “I’m Detective Inspector Crowley, Saul. Now, I’m going to ask you a few questions…”
“What happened to Dad?” Saul interrupted. There was a pause.
“He fell from the window, Saul,” Crowley said. “It’s a long way up. I don’t think he suffered any.” There was a pause. “Did you not realize what had happened to your dad, Saul?”
“I thought maybe something … I saw in the garden … Why am I here?” Saul was shaking.
Crowley pursed his lips and moved a little closer. “Well, Saul, first let me apologize for how long you’ve been waiting. It’s been very hectic out here. I had hoped someone might come and take care of you, but it seems no one has. I’m sorry about that. I’ll be having a few words.
“As to why you’re here, well, it was all a bit confused back there. We get a call from a neighbor saying there’s someone lying out front of the building, we go in, there you are, we don’t know who you are … you can see how it all gets out of hand. Anyway, you’re here, long and short of it, in the hope that you can tell us your side of the story.”
Saul stared at Crowley. “My side?” he shouted. “My side of what? I’ve got home and my dad’s…”
Crowley shushed him, his hands up, placating, nodding.
“I know, I know, Saul. We’ve just got to understand what happened. I want you to come with me.” He gave a sad little smile as he said this. He looked down at Saul sitting on the bed; dirty, smelly, in strange clothes, confused, pugnacious, tear-stained and orphaned. Crowley’s face creased with what looked like concern.
“I want to ask you some questions.”
two
Once, when he was three, Saul was sitting on his father’s shoulders, coming home from the park. They had passed a group of workmen repairing a road, and Saul had tangled his hands in his father’s hair and leaned over and gazed at the bubbling pot of tar his father pointed out: the pot heating on the van, and the big metal stick they used to stir it. His nose was filled with the thick smell of tar, and as Saul gazed into the simmering glop he remembered the witch’s cauldron in Hansel and Gretel and he was seized with the sudden terror that he would fall into the tar and be cooked alive. And Saul had squirmed backwards and his father had stopped and asked him what was the matter. When he understood he had taken Saul off his shoulders and walked with him over to the workmen, who had leaned on their shovels and grinned quizzically at the anxious child. Saul’s father had leaned down and whispered encouragement into his ear, and Saul had asked the men what the tar was. The men had told him about how they would spread it thin and put it on the road, and they had stirred it for him as his father held him. He did not fall in. And he was still afraid, but not as much as he had been, and he knew why his father had made him find out about the tar, and he had been brave.
* * *
A mug of milky tea coagulated slowly in front of him. A bored-looking constable stood by the door of the bare room. A rhythmic metallic wheeze issued from the tape-recorder on the table. Crowley sat opposite him, his arms folded, his face impassive.
“Tell me about your father.”
* * *
Copyright © 1998 by China Miéville.
Introduction copyright © 2023 by Tim Maughan.
