China Miéville's epic new novel, *The Rouse*, is being presented as "20 years in the making." Which would be an impressive feat of patience and endurance for most writers, but for Miéville it's more like a side project he kept in a drawer while also producing six novels, 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. The man apparently treats sleep as a rumor.

To be clear, those other works weren't lightweight throwaways. Graham Greene famously called *The Third Man* and *Our Man in Havana* "entertainments," but Miéville's *Embassytown* is, by this reviewer's estimation, the best translation of deconstructionist philosophy into science fiction. So when we say *The Rouse* represents a quantum jump in ambition, moral seriousness, and stylistic bravado, we're not comparing it to a beach read. We're comparing it to a body of work that already made most literary fiction look like it's not trying hard enough.

The novel is a paranormal epic of cold war espionage and family tragedy. It's being described as equally maximalist, dense, disorienting, and discomfiting as the works of Roberto Bolaño or Mircea Cărtărescu. Which is a nice way of saying it's not a breezy read, but it does reflect how surreal our reality has apparently become. So if you've been looking for a book that makes you feel like you're losing your grip on consensus reality while also being a genuinely mighty achievement, congratulations, this is your stop.

The takeaway here is that Miéville should probably no longer be classified under "the new weird" or "speculative fantasy." He ought to be compared to Bolaño or Cărtărescu. Which is a promotion, we think. Or at least a lateral move into a more prestigious category of incomprehensibility.