A 1,264-Page Novel Just Won A Major Literary Prize, Challenging Everything We Hear About Shrinking Attention Spans

China Miéville’s The Rouse: 1,264 Pages, Twenty Years, A Prize Nobody Expected To Go This Long

Somewhere around page 1,100 of China Miéville's 'The Rouse' a blank page arrives bearing the words "The End". An enormous epilogue follows it. The novel runs to 1,264 pages in the Picador edition; it took the better part of twenty years, and on 4 November it won the Goldsmiths Prize, the longest book to do so in the award's fourteen-year history. The panel was unanimous and emphatic. In their own words, the judges ended in no doubt at all that the novel is everything the prize exists to recognise.

The opening is deceptively straightforward. Maur is a single mother in London in 1973 whose son Ewan joins the RAF and dies young in circumstances nobody will explain to her.

The book then divides into two narratives printed on different tones of paper, Maur pursuing her son's death down one track and a soldier called Stallo down the other, serving in a covert unit attempting to weaponise the dead in Britain's post-colonial wars. One reviewer has called it Gothic Marxism. The timeline fragments and loops without signposting; found texts and prose poems interrupt it, and…

Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle