This Census Taker, China Mieville
Jul. 20th, 2016 12:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraSo this is not Mieville at his breathtaking best (Embassytown or City &the City), when he manages to focus on something and punch you with it. And it's also not Mieville in exuberant kitchen-sink mode (Bas-Lag books, Kraken) where the entire contents of his most recent ideas notebook are getting dumped in the stew. This Census Taker isn't really like anything I've seen out of Mieville before - unexpectedly sparse, intensely atmospheric, cryptic and disturbing. Mieville famously once claimed he was going to write a novel in every genre, and I think this is his take on horror. Much more spoilery discussion behind the cut below. But first, would I recommend it? I'm not sure. I think it's an *interesting* work, and goddamn can Mieville write and sustain a mood, but it's also frustrating. More like something you'd write a lit paper about than a fun bit of genre reading. My lit paper below. :) (And vocab list, maybe, Mieville makes me resort to the dictionary more than any other author. Vatic, pinchbeck, bibelots, scends.) But first, a general content spoiler, for anyone who might consider reading it but would want to be warned about certain subjects: animal harm, domestic violence.
I'm not kidding about spoilers below. Spoilers for everything.
So I think there are three interesting things going on here - the horror story, the puzzle story, and the intersection of those, the origin story. I said above that I think this is Mieville's take on horror, but you can also read it, in a very slanted Mieville way, as his take on a superhero origin story - the narrator as a Robin figure, who is rescued from familial tragedy by a wandering vigilante and trained to become his latest successor, replacing a previous, now-lost Robin. With all of the normal center of that story (the training, the fighting together, the capture) pushed (almost) entirely offstage, you could definitely ask, "can this possibly count as that", but then, I do not at all put it past Mieville to set out to write a version of a genre that makes you ask "can this possibly count", or to say, no, look, subtract the puzzles and an origin story is a horror story.
The puzzle story is probably very interesting if you're willing to pore over it more than I did? Is Samma the girl in the bottle, where the bottle is the town; who is the predecessor, the captors, who is the in-world audience for which parts of the text, are there more clues in the text than "this census-taker is rogue", etc. I recall that Mieville was very interested in this sort of code game in Railsea - lots of anagrams in that one, if I recall - and I'm not opposed, but it's also a lot easier to play in a paper book than an e-book, all that flipping around. I intend to see what the internet thinks as soon as I finish this review.
As for the horror story, for me that's the strongest part of this novel (labelled a novella but I suspect the wordcount is too long). The power of what Mieville does here - in putting The Big Scary Thing right up front, *witnessed*, and then spinning this cloud of denial around it, so that it still feels tense and mysterious and uncertain, so that that tension feels like a complicity - I mean, the real horror here is that they send the boy back up the mountain, right? For awhile I thought there was going to be Something in the hole - some eldritch thing that had to be fed, something that came out and walked and made clicking noises, some hideous gallimaufry assembling itself from rubbish and victims. You know Mieville likes a gallimaufry. But the real horror of the hole is just that it enables the pretense that there is no horror, the inaction, and so the one truly heroic act of the story (if you think it's a story with heroes) is the refusal to let the hole keep its secrets. An act of witness. I thought it was a frustrating ending, in a lot of ways? Kind of like Lost syndrome, so many mysterious little things and so few real answers. But it also felt very in keeping with the story, that it's so simple, really just the things done by these few characters on an almost-empty stage. Nobody even has names. Absolutely no special effects. Just violence, and the horror of not naming and reacting to it.
I'm not kidding about spoilers below. Spoilers for everything.
So I think there are three interesting things going on here - the horror story, the puzzle story, and the intersection of those, the origin story. I said above that I think this is Mieville's take on horror, but you can also read it, in a very slanted Mieville way, as his take on a superhero origin story - the narrator as a Robin figure, who is rescued from familial tragedy by a wandering vigilante and trained to become his latest successor, replacing a previous, now-lost Robin. With all of the normal center of that story (the training, the fighting together, the capture) pushed (almost) entirely offstage, you could definitely ask, "can this possibly count as that", but then, I do not at all put it past Mieville to set out to write a version of a genre that makes you ask "can this possibly count", or to say, no, look, subtract the puzzles and an origin story is a horror story.
The puzzle story is probably very interesting if you're willing to pore over it more than I did? Is Samma the girl in the bottle, where the bottle is the town; who is the predecessor, the captors, who is the in-world audience for which parts of the text, are there more clues in the text than "this census-taker is rogue", etc. I recall that Mieville was very interested in this sort of code game in Railsea - lots of anagrams in that one, if I recall - and I'm not opposed, but it's also a lot easier to play in a paper book than an e-book, all that flipping around. I intend to see what the internet thinks as soon as I finish this review.
As for the horror story, for me that's the strongest part of this novel (labelled a novella but I suspect the wordcount is too long). The power of what Mieville does here - in putting The Big Scary Thing right up front, *witnessed*, and then spinning this cloud of denial around it, so that it still feels tense and mysterious and uncertain, so that that tension feels like a complicity - I mean, the real horror here is that they send the boy back up the mountain, right? For awhile I thought there was going to be Something in the hole - some eldritch thing that had to be fed, something that came out and walked and made clicking noises, some hideous gallimaufry assembling itself from rubbish and victims. You know Mieville likes a gallimaufry. But the real horror of the hole is just that it enables the pretense that there is no horror, the inaction, and so the one truly heroic act of the story (if you think it's a story with heroes) is the refusal to let the hole keep its secrets. An act of witness. I thought it was a frustrating ending, in a lot of ways? Kind of like Lost syndrome, so many mysterious little things and so few real answers. But it also felt very in keeping with the story, that it's so simple, really just the things done by these few characters on an almost-empty stage. Nobody even has names. Absolutely no special effects. Just violence, and the horror of not naming and reacting to it.
