China Miéville On The “Completely Defining” Book It Took 20 Years To Write

It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miéville’s writing incorporates all manner of historical and linguistic snags, at once erudite and irreverent, challenging but inviting. A Miéville novel or story collection is like a rabbit hole, prompting the reader down stray paths of unexpected inquiry and discovery. It’s never a bad idea to read one of his novels with a dictionary nearby, not because his work is abstruse or opaque, but because, in order to fully step into the worlds Miéville creates, one has to learn a slightly new language. This is, in fact, a microcosm of the premise of his 2011 alien novel Embassytown. Many readers are happy to put in the work. He has won the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards and reached the New York Times bestseller list, most recently with the excellent novel The Book of Elsewhere, co-written with Keanu Reeves. Scan through the timeline of his career and one will find all manner of surprises, from a children’s book to a contribution to the Pathfinder RPG to non-fiction, with a book of Marxist theory, a history of the Russian Revolution, a book about the Communist Manifesto, as well as Salvage, a bi-annual literary political journal co-founded by Miéville alongside other leftist writers like editor Rosie Warren and Richard Seymour. Miéville’s political and historical forays, alongside his talents as a master of the strange and inexplicable, inform his new novel The Rouse, a 1200-page epic that incorporates every rabbit hole he’s ever traveled down and then some. The Rouse follows a British woman named Maur from the 1970s into the present day. Maur is many things: a mother, an artist, an activist, a haunted fighter. After her only son’s inexplicable death while serving in the British army, Maur unwittingly stumbles down a dark, ancient path in order to find answers. Who was her son? What was he involved in? Why are there so many other parents of deceased soldiers in the exact same predicament as her? The Rouse untangles multiple narrative and historical strands, traveling from the early 20th century through the Cold War into the GWOT and finally present day. Shadowy government forces utilize covert, even supernatural tactics to fight anti-imperialist splinter cells. This is a world of black ops and shamans, where the revolutionary legacy of Patrice Lumumba intertwines with unfathomable eldritch horrors.

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