M.R. James

China Miéville’s new novel is 1,264 pages long. Following his breakthrough ‘New Weird’ masterpiece Perdido Street Station (2000), Miéville was a productive writer: eight big novels in a decade. Then after 2011’s Embassytown he seemed to fall quiet: a couple of novellas, a history of the Russian Revolution, little else. There were rumours that he had retired from authorship altogether. But not so. We can now see what he’s been doing over the past decade and a half: writing a very, very long novel. The first 190 pages of The Rouse tells the story of Maur (short for Maureen: though why she doesn’t go by ‘Mo’ like every other Maureen in history isn’t made clear), who gets pregnant as a teenager.

All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems not to have referred to cats before the late 19th century but to hares, either a pet one (William Cowper had three, of whom Puss was sweet-natured and Tiney ‘the surliest of his kind’), or one being hunted in Surtees. Dogs always occupied a special place, with names and a position in the household. Cats were more marginal, accepted for their useful function of mousing but only gradually being awarded a position of affection.