China Miéville’s work is invariably clever, inevitably dense and usually interwoven with hard-left political and social concerns, but its author rarely loses sight of the delightfully mind-warping possibilities of his chosen genres. Last year’s story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion, offered brief slices of imaginary futures in which icebergs floated above London streets, archaeologists hauled crystal statues from the Mediterranean earth and urban hipsters attended parties wearing the heads of butchered animals. Railsea (2012), his most recent full-length novel, was a rewrite of Moby-Dick in which steampunk adventurers roamed the deserts on locomotives hunting giant ferrets and moles; previous work has featured twin cities occupying the same geographical space (The City and the City, 2009) sentient tattoos and chaos Nazis (Kraken, 2010), and intoxicating alien languages spoken at Festivals of Lies (Embassytown, 2011). His readers learn, often joyfully, to expect the unexpected.
Things are rather different with This Census-Taker, a novella so downbeat that it’s practically inscrutable, which marks time between Miéville’s recent collection of stories and the appearance of a full-length novel this summer. Narrated by an imprisoned bureaucrat, it is set in a society half destroyed by technological or human cataclysm: one character mutters that there have been ‘two wars… one inside, one out’, while another recalls that the people of a previous era were scared of all the engines, and they smashed them up. In the town near the narrator’s home, ‘unseen turbines’ spin to power street lights, but poverty and dilapidation are everywhere. A market sells ‘cuts from exotic animals’, including giraffe, and gangs of feral children throng the central bridge.
Against this backdrop, speaking sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, Miéville’s narrator gives an account of a childhood spent in the hills above the town with his put-upon mother and his mostly emotionless father.
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