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China Miéville, This Census-Taker: A Novella (Picador, 2016, 160pp, £12.99)
Picking up a new book by China Miéville, one now expects, as a matter of course, that it will be something different from anything that this author has done before. Prior to This Census-Taker, Miéville had published nine novels - or ten, if one counts the haunting, underrated novella The Tain (2002) - and, though each unmistakably bears his stamp, no two of them are very similar to one another. The sort of radically new direction that most good novelists are lucky to manage once or twice in a career, and that many never manage at all, is something that Miéville has managed in book after book after book.
Yet even the reader thoroughly familiar with the entire Miéville oeuvre to date may find This Census-Taker even more different, in some ways, than expected. This is particularly true of the indeterminacy of its setting. There is no novelist at work today for whom the creation of setting and environment is more important than for Miéville; and generally, in his fiction, we have a pretty clear idea of where we are. King Rat (1998) and Kraken (2010) are set in London, while Un Lun Dun (2007), as its title implies, is set in an ontologically parallel city that is London's counterpart and negation. Bas-Lag is an invented world (but not, evidently, a planet) about which we learn a great deal in Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002) and Iron Council (2004), though we suspect that the author knows much more about this world than he has chosen to reveal in those three long novels. It is not possible precisely to locate on any map the twin cities Beszel and Ul Qoma, in which The City & The City (2009) is set, but they certainly seem to be somewhere in Eastern Europe. Embassytown (2011) is set on the planet Arieka, located near the edge of the known universe.
But where is This Census-Taker set? No completely clear answer is forthcoming; and, indeed, those who enjoy Miéville's Action mainly for his lucidly detailed and three-dimensional world-building - so that, for instance, we can hardly believe that Bas-Lag exists 'only' on paper and in the author's imagination -...
