Racheal's Reviews > This Census-Taker

4 stars because this was completely what I was in the mood for- eerie and dark and unlike anything I've read before. It is oddly captivating, almost hypnotizing, as you piece together the details of a strange boy's life in a strange world.

Reading this after Another Brooklyn was an odd bit of synchronicity in that the two books have almost nothing in common, yet they both deal with memory and its ambiguity, with how childhood ignorance can shape so much of our early memories. Here it's the mutability of details and the strange, alienating way the narrator switches between referring to his younger self as 'I' and 'the boy' and 'you' that deftly portrays dissociation.

While Another Brooklyn feels like it's making a statement on the nature of memory, though, this feels like it's being used more stylistically to wrong-foot the readers (which it does very well). Damn, China Mieville is good at taking control and creating atmosphere.

He's also very good at keeping a tight hold on staying inside the particular peculiarities of the characters and the world he creates.

I was put in mind of this review of Crimson Petal and the White that I read probably 10 years ago that talked about how the book includes a lot of details about Victorian England that Dickens or another writer of the time would never have had to include, would never have consider including, because they were just facts of life. And that's a pretty fundamental difference that I've been thinking a lot about lately-- if you're an author writing about people, places, and times far removed from our own, how do you choose to do it?

I think so much of writing something foreign is a balancing act between easy readability and (for lack of a better term) authenticity. How the characters choose to think about the world, what they notice and how they react to something.

For instance, if you were writing a zombie story, the characters' reactions are going to be completely different if they're dealing with a zombie outbreak that just happened versus one that's been around for a long time and they were born into. If it's a world recently fallen, it makes sense that the character's reactions and viewpoints are as ours would be. But if it's a distant future and it's from the perspective of people who were born into this new world, their experience is necessarily foreign, though the degree can vary. Their taboos are different. Their priorities are different. This can make for a difficult, alienating read, but it can also provide character development on a whole other level.

Mieville obviously thinks all this stuff through and did an exceptional job of making me believe in this person and this world despite it all being vague and gently wakadoo. Overall I look forward to reading more of his works!