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This Census-Taker, by China Miéville
Download PDF This Census-Taker, by China Miéville
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For readers of George Saunders, Kelly Link, David Mitchell, and Karen Russell, This Census-Taker is a stunning, uncanny, and profoundly moving novella from multiple-award-winning and bestselling author China Miéville.
In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a profoundly traumatic event. He tries—and fails—to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.
When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.
But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?
Filled with beauty, terror, and strangeness, This Census-Taker is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.
Advance praise for This Census-Taker
“A thought-provoking fairy tale for adults . . . [This Census-Taker] resembles the narrative style, quirkiness, and plotting found in the works of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, or Steven Millhauser.”—Booklist
“Brief and dreamlike . . . a deceptively simple story whose plot could be taken as a symbolic representation of an aspect of humanity as big as an entire society and as small as a single soul.”—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for China Miéville
“Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension . . . Miéville is dazzling.”—The New York Times
“[Miéville’s] wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
- Sales Rank: #129950 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-12
- Released on: 2016-01-12
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .90" w x 5.90" l, 1.25 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
Review
Advance praise for This Census-Taker
“A thought-provoking fairy tale for adults . . . [This Census-Taker] resembles the narrative style, quirkiness, and plotting found in the works of Karen Russell, Aimee Bender, or Steven Millhauser.”—Booklist
“Brief and dreamlike . . . a deceptively simple story whose plot could be taken as a symbolic representation of an aspect of humanity as big as an entire society and as small as a single soul.”—Kirkus Reviews
Praise for China Miéville
“Even when he is orbiting somewhere in a galaxy too far away for normal human comprehension . . . Miéville is dazzling.”—The New York Times
“[Miéville’s] wit dazzles, his humour is lively, and the pure vitality of his imagination is astonishing.”—Ursula K. Le Guin
From the Inside Flap
A boy ran down a hill path screaming. This running, screaming boy has witnessed something terrible, something so awful that he cannot even properly articulate it. All he can do is run. His story is investigated, but no evidence is found to support it, and so in the end, he is sent back. Back up that hill path to the site of his terror, to live with the parent who caused it. The boy tries to escape. He flees to a gang of local children but they can't help him. The town refuses to see his danger. He is alone. Then a stranger arrives. A stranger who claims his job is to ask questions, seek truth. Who can, perhaps, offer safety. Or whose offer may be something altogether different, something safety is no part of. In This Census-Taker, multiple award-winning writer China Miville offers a story made of secrets and subtle reveals, of tragedy and bravery, of mysteries that shift when they appear to be known. It is a stunning work, full of strangeness and power.
About the Author
China Miéville is the author of numerous books, including Three Moments of an Explosion, The City & The City, Embassytown, Railsea, and Perdido Street Station. His works have won the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award (three times). He lives and works in London.
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 51 people found the following review helpful.
Mieville's oddest entry so far - you decide if that's good or bad (I weigh in on "good")
By Kilgore Gagarin
I didn't know where this book was going as I was reading it, and when I finished it I didn't know where it ended up. Mieville usually writes novels and short stories that are structurally pretty traditional. This is the first work of his that I've read that seems to be intentionally playing with the reader by changing person (first person, second person, third person) and tense (past, present, future). In the end, I was struck with a sense of wonder and surreal unease - what did I just read?
Bear with me on this comparison here to the works of Philip K. Dick (PKD). I once told a friend that if you started out reading Dick's The Man in the High Castle you would find a coherent, fairly traditional (and outstanding) novel. You might then proceed to read other works by Dick and I'm pretty sure you'd be totally confused (a lot of his work is undeniably confusing, non-linear, and even insane). The Man in the High Castle spoils the reader into thinking PKD's other works would be similar. This is not so.
The opposite happens, too. If you read some of PKD's oeuvre before The Man in the High Castle, you'd think all of his works are experimental, surreal, philosophical, and confusing. When you then read The Man in the High Castle, you might think as I did, "Where did THIS come from?"
And so it is with Mieville and this novella, This Census-Taker. If you've never read Mieville, don't start with this book - it will just confuse you and might keep you away from his more accessible creations. Do come back and read it after digesting several of his other works. If you have read a lot of Mieville, this will be an interesting adventure. For me, it was a literary treat that kept me spellbound.
Mind, I wouldn't compare the literature of PKD with Mieville, except in the above context. In fact, this book reminds me more of something written by John Crowley. Both Crowley and Mieville (at least in this book) create a sense of unease merely by the style of their writing.
So I see this described as a "novella" and I wonder what the definition of that means since this comes in over 200 pages. But it is a novella, at least in the sense that the story arc, even at 200 pages, is fairly limited in complexity. In the end, it doesn't really matter.
The setting of This Census-Taker is rural and small town, another deviation from Mieville's usual urban settings. The village and hills of This Census Taker are at the one end of the urban-rural spectrum. A typical Mieville work is also explicitly surreal and fantastic. There is no concrete magic or technology here. There is a bridge. There is a hole in the ground where trash is dumped. There are goats. There are street urchins. There is a murder. Maybe several? Maybe none? Nothing jumps out and grabs you as true fantasy. Yet it still comes across feeling fantastic. When it's "just" fiction.
There is a plot. There is a protagonist. There are characters. You see them through a film of traditional language that shifts subtly, often without even realizing that it is happening. Everything starts with the title: "This Census-Taker." Why not "THE Census Taker"? Why not "A Census Taker"? "Tale of the Census Taker"? Or just "Census Taker"?
In the end, no matter where you go, there you are.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
In the shadow lee of geography
By Roger Brunyate
Note Miéville's title: "this" not "the". A slight change of the particle that makes the subject both more particular and more peculiar, knocking it out of kilter. And so it is with the writing. Miéville paints a world built of familiar elements yet where nothing is quite right. There is some history here that we do not know: a legacy some collapsed civilization, of Luddite destruction, warfare and lingering suspicion, laws mysteriously enforced from some distant seat of government. This is a world where even that most precise of bureaucratic functions, the taking of a census, can seem as inscrutable as witchcraft.
The only other Miéville book I have read, THE CITY & THE CITY, imagined a divided capital where the two populations, the two ideologies, are not separated by a wall as in Cold War Berlin, but share the same streets unseen to one another, on opposite sides of a Möbius strip. But that was a complex urban construct; this one is simpler. I found myself thinking of some broken-down mining town in West Virginia, although Miéville includes tropical references too. Anyway, a town nestled between two mountains, built around the bridge crossing the chasm between them. It has some amenities -- market stalls, street lights that occasionally work -- but also derelict buildings, industrial detritus, and a tangle of disused railway lines. The people on the mountains are "uphillers," living apart from one another on rocky holdings, visited by the townsfolk only to trade.
The short novel begins with a boy of nine (the narrator, here referring to himself in the third person) running down a mountainside to tell the people below that he has seen his mother murdering his father. We never know his name, though we do find out more of his story, when three temporary constables come up to investigate. His father in fact is alive, but his mother has gone. She has left a note, but the boy is not convinced it is her writing. Besides, he has seen his father killing animals apparently at random and throwing their bodies into a cleft in the rock; might he not have murdered his mother too? But the views we have of him directly are kind and loving, though remote. He is apparently a foreigner, a figure of suspicion and awe. People come to him to have keys made; he asks what they are for, draws them out, cuts them from scrap metal, polishes, and delivers them. These are keys for no physical lock, but talismans, unlocking prosperity, good fortune, desire.
Miéville uses words like a wizard, summoning visions of mystery through the smoke of despair. He jumps around between past and present, just as the boy jumps from "he" to "I", thinking in one language and writing in another, not one book but three. The book in our hands is his second, juggling half-forgotten personal histories, whether his own or inherited. His third book, which we never see, contains his secrets. His first is numbers. We don't see that either, but we know its purpose: "to encompass and itemize for a goal, to make it yours. With such intent, everything will be more concrete, the boundaries of the counted city circumscribed more precisely, or you may be more or less lost, or as lost as before." The reader may be lost too; Miéville ends as he began, in mystery. But look through the book again, and you will see how each part enfolds every other, an organic inflorescence, deepening rather than explaining. You may not know much more when you finish, but if you let it, your imagination will have taken you to strange new realms. As the boy's does, imagining the passage of his departed mother:
"If she took the revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she HAD to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography."
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
He had the authority to make this count
By Phil 413
There's something weird about the uphill boy's family. It's more than weird; there's a dark, chilling menace that hides from somewhere within this bizarre family unit, showing itself unexpectedly. The only thing giving the boy any hope for a shred of security is his mother. His father is a key-maker, and seems to shift between detached indifference and a distant, possible affection but more likely tolerance, for the boy.
When the boy witnesses random acts of violence he can't make sense of, his mother tries to shield the boy, pushing him to try and befriend a gang of orphaned children who lived under a bridge in town, but ultimately the boy runs in search of any kind of help. A boy (Drobe) and girl (Samma) who lead the children want to help the boy, but do they have the power to overcome the unspeakable evil that threatens the boy? Can a teacher, or police officer, or a man the boy calls the hunter, help him to escape?
Where did this census-taker come from, the boy's father wants to know. And what does the record-keeper want, who says he has the authority to make this count? The boy must make the choice whether to allow the census-taker to help him escape the dark, seemingly bottomless hole that haunts his dreams and his life, or whether to succumb to the darkness within.
The best thing about this story is the tone - although the boy is the major storyteller, and his voice comes across as sweet, innocent, infused with a desire to survive, there's still an eerie undercurrent flowing through the story - a delicious creepy suspense that kept me reading. It was really intriguing how the author so effectively expressed so much darkness and menace while telling the story through the voice of this young boy.
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