This year, for Bingo, I suppose I decided I had to truly go all in on the Cat-squasher square. So I decided to read Ice by Jacek Dukaj ( tranlated by Ursula Phillips) and The Rouse by China Mieville. Each of these books is in it's own way a big, dense, undertaking, and not merely on pagecount. Each took me close to a month if not more to pick my way through. Neither necessarily ended up as my favorite book, but they've both reminded me of the joys of reading something a bit on the big and rambling and messy side.
I will be avoiding any major late game plot spoilers in discussing the two books, but to the extent that, being big weird books, there might be some premise related surprises that you get to in the first couple hundred pages, I am likely to mention those.
Ice
Bingo Squares: Cat Squasher (HM), Politics, Translated, Vacation Spot (if you like a winter landscape)
Ice is set in the early twentieth century, in a world where the Tunguska event, rather than simply being a big boom deep in Siberia, sent waves of cold into the world, freezing it both physically and metaphysically. The world wars don't happen, Russia doesn't fall, instead it's politics freeze in a strange stasis. Strange beings known as gleissen freeze their way through the world relentlessly, patches of eldritch cold that may or may not be alive. Weird physics abounds and creates new strangely strong materials. We follow a mathematician from Russian controlled Poland conscripted to travel to the depths of frozen Siberia and try to find his exiled father who seems somehow.
The novel roughly splits into three major parts. First, after a short introduction Benedykt Gierosławski (our protagonist)finds himself aboard the Trans-Siberian railway at the behest and on the dime of the Ministry of Winter. He becomes entangled in the claustrophobic politics and dramas of his fellow travellers, a grab bag of inventors, soldiers, nobles, and politicians who argue philosophy and strange physics. Here we meet Nikola Tesla, dispatched to harness the odd physics of this new world. The second embeds Benedykt in the politics and dramas of the Siberian capital of Irkutsk, here a world bound in frost at the heart of a fabulously profitable boom in materials production and export. This is perhaps the most stunning setting of the novel, strange materials and soaring buildings hold the wealthy while the rest of society lives in the strange cold, at the mercy of the random path of Gleissen freezing up through the floor. Finally, the novel spurts out into the actual cold wilderness as Benedykt finally seeks out his quest and then does many fun weird things with it.
At a premise level the novel mixes a rather straightforwardly science fictional alternate history with a maximalist character driven novel of ideas. However the formal level is also fascinating. Apparently in the original Polish the entire novel is written in both a somewhat outmoded grammar reminiscent of the time period and simultaneously employs a strange grammatical mode that avoids really having a subject. Thus, in translation, the novel uses a fascinating and at first frustrating grammar, many sentences phrased as almost imperatives, to elide the usual indications of what the subject is. This sounds more annoying or stilted than it actually is and while the novel's grammar always leaves one a bit on edge you do mostly ease into it (and it mostly refers to other characters besides Benedykt in normal ways). Similarly, the texture of terms used reflect both the interesting intermixture of Russian and Polish influences in both home and Siberia, and the strange new language of cold technology and materials.
A fascinatingly knotty novel full of big ideas, weird physics, weird philosophy, and stunningly strange scenes and settings.
The Rouse:
Bingo Squares: Published in 2026, Cat Squasher, The Afterlife, Politics.
China Mieville is back with his first solely authored piece of fiction in quite a while. I cut my teeth in r/fantasy writing a giant post about all his prior solely authored fiction, and I find myself pleased to be back with his writing, even if its very different from what it ever was before. I swear I'll read the Keanu book at some point guys.
This books starts with about 100 pages or so of what seems to be purely realist fiction following a young single mother in London, Maur as she raises her son Ewan, a troubled boy who then drifts away from her, joins the army, is involved in strange things and then she learns that he has died on bases in tragic circumstances.
Thus, about 100 pages in one is hit with EPILOGUE.
The epilogue is then 1100 or so pages to go. The rest of the novel flickers between the story of Maur in the present, trying to understand the death of her son and slowly being drawn into the plot of a very strange thriller, and the much earlier story of Steve Allardyce, a soldier in the British military in the middle of the twentieth century who finds himself recruited into a strange unit that deals with ... well ... what does one call them ... some sort of phenomenon or function that might be mapped a bit possibly onto the remnants of the life of soldiers and who we might call back to duty. So to speak. Yeah, ghost soldiers. More rightly, a whole weird ecology of maybe the afterlife the slips into the cracks of the world in weird and disturbing ways.
Formally, the novel is a fascinating beast. It is a pleasing physical object, making use of its immensity and its typography in the chilling moments. It often deploys blank space on the page in a way reminiscent of the most effective formal moments in something like House of Leaves.
If Maur's story seems to mostly focus on more immediate forms of grief, and the subsequent bewilderment and unknowability of even those closest to us in life, Allardyce's story is a more far reaching and rambling thing that reflects on how we might fit as pieces in a machine. Allardyce is a fascinating character insofar as he simultaneously doesn't really buy the bullshit he's fed from above about the good of the nation, but he puts this skepticism aside in its own compartment and simply continues to go on doing and serving. This paradox is remarked on my many around him, who seem baffled by the fact that he can be so intellectually curious and skeptical at the purely intellectual level but seems to have no issue completely divorcing it from his actions.
As someone who has read a bunch of Mieville, I want to make a few points. This novel continues a trend in the overall arch of Mieville's career that he has become less and less formally straightforward. He always had prose that was fun to read and engage with, and the situations described were deeply weird, but a lot of his early work is ultimately fairly straightforward genre fiction of one type or another in the kind of story it tells. He might make a very nice cake out of very weird ingredients but it was very recognizably a cake. Last Days of New Paris and This Census Taker arguably broke that mold, with more weird and ephemeral kinds of storytelling. On the other hand, it is I think pleasing in that there was in my mind a sense that his early works had a kind of maximalist throw-many-things-in-even-if-a-bit-much energy that was quite joyful and the restraint of his latter works left me a tiny bit cold. Here a maximalist return throws quite a lot in.
Thoughts on Both, Together, and the Nature of a True Cat-squasher
I deeply enjoyed both of these novels. And yet, I am unlikely to view either as precisely my favorite. Both do drag at points. There are long sections spent on drama that doesn't compel, or yet another iteration of a class of conversations or interactions or explorations that I wasn't feeling. I'd churn through a couple hundred pages in a week then only proceed by 50 the next...
And yet. I'm not sure I'd have it any other way. Maybe this is me being a doormat or refusing to criticize but for all that it can drag I do think one of the fundamental joys of these books was never quite knowing when or if they'd pack in another idea. When they'd let you absorb a character or setting via repetition. You'd get to sit with a character, see how they bang up against various iterations of various themes. You'd never quite know where you were in the rhythm of plot or narrative because the books don't match any of those standard pacing structures. You'd simply accept what was coming (or not, and slowly march through).
Poor cats. I had fun.
