China Mieville “This Census-Taker” (Del Rey, 2016)
If I were to bother with doing SFF power rankings, China
Mieville would be near the top. He’s one
of the writers that you can give to your MFA friend sure that the technical
elements will be strong enough to keep your friend interested. I tend to think of him as the 21st
century Gene Wolfe, writing dense challenging texts that can be dense and impenetrable
or exciting (or both). He seems to move
around the genre, tackling different styles and concepts with each project.
This Census-Taker is a step back to what may be the central
area of Mieville’s world, the Weird. A
boy, now a man, tells us of his past and who he is.
Of course this IS China Mieville, so things are unsettling
as both vague and specific. Tenses
change continually. I found myself
struggling to contextualize and make sense of the narrative. What was actually happening? How much was due
to having an unreliable narrator?
Unfortunately I found this one of Mieville’s books that I
just bounced off of. I found it
impossible to form an emotional connection to the story, or to really even care
about what happened. It’s a beautiful
technical piece, but one that I found less than engaging.
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