The Goldsmiths Prize exists to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The Rouse by China Miéville dramatically does both. There has never before been a novel remotely like it. It is, says Miéville, long the leading light of the “New Weird”, the book of his life, twenty years in the making: his magnum opus, his white whale.
Classic supernatural fiction, from MR James to HP Lovecraft, has always been short, more suggestive than comprehensive.The Rouse, though, is a ghost story on an epic scale, coming in at no less than 1246 pages. In draft, it was twice as long again. “It ended up accreting more and more and more until it became about everything,” Miéville admits.
