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This Census-Taker

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This Census-Taker

By: China Miéville
Narrated by: Matthew Frow
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About this listen

In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries - and fails - to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape.

When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over.

But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether?

A novella filled with beauty, terror and strangeness, This Census-Taker by China Miéville is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.

 Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction

Critic reviews

A short, dark fairytale, Kafka rewritten by David Mitchell, and may well be the best thing you'll read all year. (Alex Preston, 'Fiction highlights for 2016')
Miéville's solid, world-creating imagination is shown to powerful effect in this novella . . . a vague and misty (and, incidentally, superb) tale about the need to get things absolutely straight.
Harrowing beauty and existential disorientation . . . it's a Miéville book, after all. As I write this I can very clearly picture two scenes from this story about a boy who witnesses a killing in his isolated rural home. Not a word is said aloud in either scene, but the interpretative stakes in both are high enough to give you a nosebleed. (Helen Oyeyemi)
Miéville's brain-twisting, inventive use of language pins the indefinable to the page, reading this slim book feels like gasping a lungful of air, holding it throughout the letting it out slowly, wondering what just happened. A challenging, thought-provoking read.
Miéville creates a beautiful landscape in an uncertain country and era . . . Wonderfully rendered . . . What we're allowed to see and to know takes on an incredible power. This Census-Taker takes root quickly, and you won't soon forget it.
A stark and subtle fable that manages to be both lapidary and nebulous at the same time. "Haunting" does not do justice to its exquisitely eerie properties . . . This is the most poetic of Miéville's books so far . . . It can be appreciated just for its complex psychology and emotional impact - it is by far his most plangent book, suffused with a tight-lipped melancholy. (Stuart Kelly)
Gripping and tantalisingly elusive . . . akin to trying to remember an important yet only half-understood event.
Miéville is regarded as one of the most interesting and freakishly gifted writers of his generation. He has an astonishing facility - rare in writers of imaginative fiction - for invention . . . The prose is as precise ad the writing done by a monumental mason, but it has been chiselled into a realistic depiction of fog. It is eerie but solid.
Powerful . . . [China Miéville's] imagination is powerful, his outlook original and he's an amazing teller of stories; yet he never loses his grip on the "reality" of his characters, and he observes the literary rules of his so-called genre only by breaking them. (Kate Saunders)
China Miéville has a gift for turning the strange into the given, and this elusive little world is conveyed with precision and vividness. The result is an ingenious novella that lingers in the mind like an unsettling dream.
All stars
Most relevant
This book isn't at all what I expected from listening to the excerpt. I feel as if it was a long prologue for a larger book, that till now hasn't materialized It has an explanation as to where the census taker has come from and delivers a Childs view of what is happening and the naivety through isolation comes across. I felt it is a story that could have been told in a 500 word essay and am therefore left unsatisfied. I don't think I'll be purchasing another book by this author. The narrator was good and would listen to him again.

Not what I expected

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I'll confess to only having got part way through this which is unusual for me but that felt like enough. It's not the worst book I have ever read by any means but what started in a promising way quickly descended into something completely different to what I would have expected from this author. It felt poorly thought out and meandering rather than the tight kind of story line which might have developed well in such a short audio book.

In addition I didn't take very well to Frow's narration style which felt fairly wooden and passionless.

By all means try this one if you want to but this feels like a significant departure in style for Mieville so if you do spend a credit on it don't expect to have "China in your hands".

China Takes a Wrong Turning?

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This is just a comment on the audiobook, not the story itself.
It's written in lots of short segments/chapters, which jump around between times and places. I imagine (but can't say for sure) that in the book they're separated by a page break or a symbol. However, in the audiobook, it flows really quickly between the segments. I found that a few times this was quite disorienting and difficult to follow. All it would take is a couple of extra seconds between each segment, just to help understand when it's a new bit if you aren't looking at the screen.
Perhaps this is an intentional, stylistic choice by China Mieville, but I would have liked something to help me to tell, simply and quickly, that it was a new segment and the location or time might suddenly change.

Audiobook production could be clearer

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