China Miéville’s The Rouse Is a Haunting Magnum Opus
The Rouse follows a secret British effort to weaponize ghosts amid the Cold War and decolonization. A supernatural spy thriller, a Marxist meditation on history, and a stylistic triumph, China Miéville’s novel is a masterwork two decades in the making.
In his stunning new novel about occult espionage during the Cold War, China Miéville suggests that every ghost story is also a story about politics, economics, and history. (YouTube)
China Miéville’s The Rouse is a book that should not exist, and yet here it is. It should be read cover to cover, and then immediately read a second time. For twenty-one years, Miéville wrote and rewrote it while publishing shorter works at an impressive pace: four novels; two novellas; a history of the Russian Revolution; a book-length essay on The Communist Manifesto; an out-of-left-field collaboration with Keanu Reeves; a children’s book with Zak Smith; countless articles and reviews. Each of these now seems like a stepping stone on Miéville’s path toward his great project.
Into The Rouse’s 1,200-plus pages have gone a lifetime of writing as well as a lifetime of reading — Miéville’s influences range from pulp horror to high modernism, from Marxist theory to esoterica. From the bones of this personal canon, he has developed the most ambitious and successful synthesis of genre fiction, formal experimentation, leftist political commitment, and metaphysical inquiry produced in English since Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
The novel weaves together two main threads, both written in an extraordinarily close third person. One begins in 1970s London and concerns Maureen Towns, a downwardly mobile single mother to a reserved, awkward, and increasingly violent son named Ewan. Through Maur’s eyes, we see Ewan grow fascinated with guns in his adolescence, join the military when barely out of his teens, report “see[ing] stuff” during a deployment to Sarajevo, become involved with shadowy acronymous divisions, and then finally turn up dead in the woods outside his barracks. When his death is ruled a suicide despite the two bullet holes in his temple, Maur begins to investigate and soon joins forces with other parents of soldiers who perished under mysterious circumstances.
The other thread opens in the 1950s and covers half a century in the life of Steven Allardyce, operative of R Unit, a secret task force charged with investigating supernatural events at the far-flung outposts of the British Empire. With Allardyce, we come to understand the R Unit’s history, mandate, and methods through glimpses and innuendos; Miéville does not hold our hands, and much is left up to the reader to reconstruct. To give the gist: for centuries, from John Dee’s Elizabethan alchemy to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Victorian séances, the Brits have demonstrated a unique talent for all things paranormal. In the twentieth century, those scattered traditions are brought together under one concrete-reinforced roof — R Unit’s base of operations — paid for by tax dollars and pursued with scientific rigor. R Unit’s research centers on “revenants” (ghostlike beings that emerge when a person dies) and “apports” (powerful objects that give their holders the ability to interact with and influence revenants).
It is difficult to fathom how quickly the British Empire fell. Though the process stretched from the 1947 Indian Independence Act to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, the collapse was all but complete by the time Rhodesia became independent in 1965. Allardyce and his comrades deploy to most of the key conflict zones, moving from site to site so quickly that readers and characters tend to lose track of where they are on the map. In Malaya, the Suez Canal Zone, the Congo, Kenya, and elsewhere, the unit’s job is to take consolation prizes: local knowledges and practices, apports to add to their collection, and revenants they enlist through a ritual known as “the Rouse.” All this constitutes what one character calls “a new era of exploration” — a journey into another “dark continent” amid the loss of Britain’s military and economic hegemony.
The Cold War being the Cold War, the Russians and Chinese soon assemble their own supersecret paranormal units, setting off an arms race complete with clandestine skirmishes fought with apports. As the 1960s roll into the ’70s, however, R Unit’s most dangerous adversary proves not to be another state actor, but a left-leaning postcolonial terror cell of powerful mediums known as the KH. Whereas Allardyce and company view their Russian counterparts with begrudging respect and acknowledge that the commies at least have comprehensible political goals, they can only conceive of the KH as a death cult intent on summoning an ancient being (called, among countless other names, “Old Pal”) to usher in the actual, literal apocalypse.
Stakes that high justify ever more brutal acts in the field and increasingly dangerous experiments in the lab. What these stakes do not justify, at least in the eyes of the army brass and their accountants, is more funding for supernatural research. In the lean years around the oil crisis and the rise of Thatcherism, R Unit is sidelined and all but shuttered; nobody in the government wants to hear about impending global doom when there’s a budget to balance. Allardyce is one of many who quit in frustration and go “freelance,” working as mercenaries for various military and private enterprises while continuing to pursue esoteric knowledge, apports, and the KH through the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the present day.
Like the masterworks from which Miéville has clearly taken inspiration — Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Libra, Dennis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke — The Rouse flirts with but ultimately resists making history into a conspiracy. One can easily imagine a less serious (or a less Marxist) writer casting all the great atrocities of the later twentieth century, from the Malayan Emergency to the Bosnian Genocide, as mere cover for the real war beneath the surface: a battle between cadres of warring spiritualists in which the rest of us are mere pawns. Though his characters might slip into such narratives to justify themselves, Miéville refuses to let us off so easily. Despite its self-regard, R Unit remains a small branch of a (relatively) minor military power, subject to the frustrations of bureaucracy and politics — which are in turn downstream of properly global economic trends, neoliberalization chief among them. These forces have as little to do with ghosts as they do with personal ideologies.
The Specter of Anti-Communism
Around page 800, Miéville writes that “talking about politics without talking about haunting meant not telling the truth.” This may be as close as we get to the novel’s thesis statement. He leaves it to us to fill in the dialectical inversion: that talking about haunting without talking about politics (or economics, or history) is equally false. Old Pal may be a timeless entity, but we are never allowed to forget that its summoning is the result of processes triggered by twentieth-century capitalism and warfare — the accumulation of thousands of apports in centralized hordes, the scientific rationalization of their study and usage, and so on. Old Pal is less like George R. R. Martin’s White Walkers than it is like the atomic bomb or climate change, which are almost never mentioned in The Rouse but hang over its events like the shadow of a shadow: possibilities woven into the fabric of reality, but only actualized once capital made the technological advancements necessary to discover them.
To be clear, The Rouse is emphatically not an allegory for atomic power, climate change, or any other particular threat, nor is it propaganda for nuclear disarmament, degrowth communism, or any other particular program. Such reductive readings are always tempting when dealing with works of such unmanageable scale. Indeed, the members of R Unit are faced with a similar problem of linguistic excess — the enormous catalogue of myths, rituals, and terms they have pilfered from history books and indigenous tribes — and are also driven to impose abstract order on the field. Like pop structuralists, they want to boil down all competing stories into a coherent monomyth, to read each as the expression of a single phenomenon experienced across times and cultures, which would be the key to all mythologies. Likewise, they seek to “reduce” the apports themselves, filing or melting them down into increasingly dense secretions with the goal of wielding the primitive core of “apport-ness” as a weapon.
Miéville is often described as a writer of “weird fiction,” a subgenre that has long been preoccupied with the hubris of such quests for totalizing knowledge. Think of all the H. P. Lovecraft stories about a scientist who pursues his investigations until an encounter with some indescribable monster destroys his mind. Think of Victor Frankenstein. Or, if you’d prefer to go further back, think of Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality, an allusion that comes up throughout The Rouse. This is a book in which “everyone who knows something knows less than they think, and none of them can be trusted,” as Mark Bould puts it in Boston Review. In a world where haunting and history are inextricable, the only admissible stance is rigorous epistemological humility. This requires us to reject not only naive positivism but also deterministic Marxism — to embrace a long historical durée without guarantees and a world that even the most precise description will never exhaust. Still, Miéville insists, we cannot cease to act and speak.
“It’s all metaphor” is Allardyce’s mentor’s rule of thumb for speaking about the revenants. But the metaphors we use to discuss them help determine what facet of their spooky being we encounter, without canceling out any of the others. The middle third of the novel includes hundreds of pages in which characters debate their preferred metaphors and explore their consequences; each character’s fate is inseparable from the set of metaphors they favor. In the lab, the revenants appear through the language of mathematics, as “functions” or “vectors”; on the battlefield they are “roused,” a metaphorical invocation of their status as conscripted soldiers. In different local contexts they are “lespries,” “haints,” “hantus,” “gallas,” or “fantasmi,” each name indexing an entire culture and mode of relating to them. And what is a culture, The Rouse seems to ask, but a system of practices for relating to the dead?
Experiences of meeting the dead always exceed attempts to contain their meaning, however. When Maur grows adept at detecting spiritual presences, a narratorial voice that is both hers and not-hers reminds us that “there can be no verb for her new sensing action any more than there can be a noun for what it apprehends.” Across the novel’s scenes of visitation, similes pile up inside other similes. Descriptors accumulate, standing in contradiction without overwriting one another. Sensations become abstract and abstractions are felt in our bones. Consider this bravado passage in which Allardyce witnesses a helicopter navigate the thick Malayan jungle with help from a revenant:
The Sycamore turned as if to regard them. It ascended. They stood in the pillar of its turbulence, a storm not formless but of infinite configuration, a helix of dead matter and those rotor words.
At the limits of the trees the chopper veered, and while the others applauded as it pulled away for the city, Bowler and Allardyce looked into the whirlwind, the gusting dead centre of the hole in the forest, at debris still turning. On Bowler’s face, a look almost of recognition. What gyred was darkness like a standing rock or old animal skin, like something emptied and refilled, an outline, cyclone visitant, eyeless, watching.
Miéville provides us some guideposts for dealing with this deafening swirl of words and images: not to reduce but to multiply; not to elide differences, but to live within the gaps between discourses; not to defer choosing one metaphor over another, but to choose without grounds for choice. This is the task left to Maur, Allardyce, and all the others who are sensitive to the revenants. A Uniteer puts the matter like this: “If you ask a question and you don’t hear an answer, and I don’t mean you you, I mean anyone, you have to work out if nothing said anything or if something didn’t say anything or if something said nothing. And if it’s the last, how to make sense of it.”
How to read the signs without the cipher key, without even knowing if a sign is present or absent, or if this absence is its own kind of sign? How to maintain a state of absolute expectancy without concrete expectations? This is the dilemma of the spiritualist in a scientific age, but it is also the predicament of the revolutionary subject in a nonrevolutionary time. Like the protagonists of The Rouse, we have no choice but to wait for some tremors from beyond our circumscribed present — for some cracks to peer through, if not to crawl out of.