This Census-Taker review – China Miéville yet again redefines fantasy

In an eerily apocalyptic landscape, a boy flees from family trauma: the extraordinary new tale from a master of the fantastic

Any story that, on its very first page, redefines its protagonist from third to first person, flips forward in time to offer a view of him from elsewhere, makes a subtle alteration of tense, and announces that the character’s age in the story is a matter of speculation even to the older self doing the narrating, is going to be a story about perception, whatever else it is. It is going to be about seeing, as well as about the things seen. China Miéville’s extraordinary new book begins with a screaming child running down a mountain to tell anyone who’ll listen that his mother has killed his father. Or is it that his father has killed his mother? Somebody has killed somebody, anyway; but the faces at each end of the horrible action seem to be troublingly unfixed in place. From the title onward, with its implied question about who it is that is saying “this”, the rules of the book’s little world are subject to disturbing fluctuation. Though only a novella, This Census-Taker bends, flexes and manipulates invention on a scale that would keep a more conventional imagination occupied for hundreds of pages.

Yet it is also, in its way, a story dedicated to a plain, and even remorseless, realism, with a harsh truth to impart that the teller cannot evade, any more than children ever get to opt easily out of the given landscapes in which they find themselves. The setting here is an unspecific but eerily well-realised terrain of soft apocalypse, experienced through a child’s eyes as the inevitable order of the world. A shrinking town of old concrete clings to a bridge joining two bare, almost treeless mountains. Half the streetlights work. In abandoned cinemas and factories, the inhabitants breed chickens, pick through junk, suck mildly narcotic blood from the legs of giant beetles. Street children fish bats from the night air for food, using bamboo poles. It could be somewhere in provincial China now, with a faint twist towards the surreal; or the UK, after a couple of centuries of resource depletion; or anywhere where dry earth and shredded plastic bags are the ordinary ground underfoot.

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