Too much and much too long: The Rouse by China Miéville, reviewed
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.
