THE ROUSE

A sprawling but fast-moving tale about the most inhuman concoctions of the military-industrial complex.

Ewan is a preternaturally quiet child, a fact that his single mother, Maur Towns—Maur being short for Maureen—has remarked on from the moment he could speak. But then, after a childhood spent drawing pictures of guns and tanks and planes, Ewan rebels against Maur’s hippie-ish lifestyle, enlisting in the army and becoming an elite soldier. It doesn’t end well. As Miéville writes, “There was a person and she had a baby and she grew up and the baby grew up and he died.” But did he? In a novel that expertly blends horror and mystery, Miéville introduces a parallel story that tracks the military career of one Trooper Allardyce, who fights his way around the world, an expert at killing—and at reviving the dead. As he explains to Maur, once their storylines meet, “Mostly…the dead are memories. No good to anyone. But if you’re the right sort of person and you die just right? Then get up at once, the bugle’s sounding.” It’s a military necromancer’s dream: an army of corpses. Maur is horrified, naturally enough, as she tells Allardyce, who now sports the name Stallo: “Those were people.…Soldiers or something. That void army you talked about? Whoever they were, it wasn’t revenants, that was people.” One of those ex-people, of course, is Ewan, of whom the principal villain of the piece explains, “Your son was a soldier…He took an oath, and I do him the courtesy of taking that seriously.” Miéville’s inventive story has its share of violence, but the psychological dimension is the main attraction, in the end morphing into a ghost story—and, as Stallo says by way of valediction, “Ghost stories don’t work that fucking way…They’re not about justice.”

A smartly imagined, genre-bending story that readers may find all too real.