The Rouse by China Miéville review – a mighty achievement from the ‘new weird’ author

Twenty years in the writing, this paranormal epic of cold war espionage and family tragedy is a quantum leap in terms of ambition and moral seriousness

China Miéville’s epic new novel is presented as being “20 years in the making”. It is quite a testament to how extravagant – even Stakhanovite – his imagination is that during that period he also produced six novels (including The City & the City and The Book of Elsewhere, co-written with Keanu Reeves), two novellas, two series of graphic novels, a children’s book, a volume of short stories and two works of nonfiction, on the October Revolution and the Communist Manifesto.

It does not mean that these works were, as Graham Greene called The Third Man and Our Man in Havana, “entertainments” – Embassytown, to my mind, is the best translation of deconstructionist philosophy into science fiction – but certainly The Rouse is a quantum jump in terms of ambition, moral seriousness and stylistic bravado. It means that rather than classifying Miéville with “the new weird” or “speculative fantasy”, he ought to be compared to Roberto Bolaño or Mircea Cărtărescu. This new novel is equally maximalist, dense, disorienting and discomfiting, reflecting how surreal our reality seems to have become.