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. Readers acquainted with Miéville’s other work might be disconcerted by the first hundred pages: broadly speaking, they are social realism.
We are in 1970s London and Maur, short for Maureen, gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Ewan grows up reading Rupert Bear and Starlord comics, watching Steptoe and Son and Rentaghost, and having Chinese takeaways with obligatory background racism. It is canny rather than uncanny, with the exception of a cameo from the truly odd 80s comedian Roy Jay doing his “slither-spook” routine, possibly on The Bob Monkhouse Show. (Now an internet meme, it is unforgettable and queasily sinister – and on YouTube.) Eventually Ewan, at a loss in many ways, decides to join the army.
Then Miéville drops the bombshell just before the 100th page: Ewan dies, supposedly by suicide, at an army base. The novel – all epilogue – now begins, for more than a thousand pages. The descriptions of Maur’s grief are phenomenal.
So she did the bargaining. I understand he won’t come back but I need everything to stop for just a second … What I need is I just need a moment when this isn’t all there is. To have anything else, or nothing, in my head.
All I’m asking is just let me have one single minute ever again when he isn’t dead.” Maur, it transpires, is not the only grieving parent with a connection to Shackingham Barracks, and she finds a support network for those who are similarly bereaved. There seems to have been a spate of suicides, rather like the Deepcut controversy; something is being covered up. She falls in with an investigative journalist, Jock; a fellow bereaved parent, Cybill; and eventually a renegade ex-army operative named Stallo.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
