Beatcroft

A big scary book with enormous ghostly heft…China Miéville’s The Rouse.

I’m currently dipping in and out of the collected M.R. James ghost stories and the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology for a possible project, but was thoroughly waylaid by this vast tome. It’s cheapest on Kindle and you can set your own font/type size, which in my ageing state is pretty essential. I’ve been screwed by too many publishers squashing tiny text into a single hardback, and it’s significant that the review copies of The Rouse went out in two volumes. No eyestrain for critics!

Anyway, here’s my review, in case you hate Amazon and despise Facebook, where it already wanders like a glib, malevolent djinn…

 

Something strange in your neighbourhood? Who you gonna call?

Listen, this massive (1200-odd, sometimes very odd) pages book is a terrific, very disturbing and deeply serious piece of work, but it’s impossible not to see messrs Murray, Ackroyd and Ramis haunting its pages.

Unit R is the British military’s paranormal unit; however it’s in the business not of busting ghosts, but of harnessing the power of the dead. This is a plot device used by many other writers  – Charles Stross’s The Atrocity Archives series springs to mind- but never with such erudite delving into every conceivable mythology of revenants and demonology. Except, weirdly Christianity, which is represented only by some mild blasphemy and a posh, treacherous Anglican RAF padre.

It’s much more than genre techno-summoning, though. The overarching tale of parental grief is superbly, upsettingly rendered as is the grim interplay of post-colonial Cold War espionage and revolutionary dissent. The use of glimpsed, half remembered 70s television moments (that infamous child murder scene in Michael Caton-Jones’s TV version of Frederic Lindsay’s Brond pops up) is matched by a sustained meditation on the horror and influence of 70s ‘light entertainment’ notably the sustained and detailed involvement of the very peculiar (and real) comedian Roy (“spook! Slither!”) Jay. Look him up on YouTube if you dare.

There are some unforgettably disgusting scenes, much glumly unerotic sex, a lot of abstruse lore, obscure language and Joycean stylistic pyrotechnics. It’s very long, but never tiring enough to stop you reading.

After you finish, you won’t be afraid of no…(don’t mention the ‘g’ word.) you’ll be absolutely terrified of anything Bob Monkhouse recommended, back in the day. Or worse, night. Don’t cross the streams!