Yesterday was an overcast, snowy Sunday--the perfect kind of day to curl up with a fantasy novel. I pulled This Census-Taker off my shelf and read it in one sitting. The act of reading this novel was enjoyable, but I was left with so many unanswered questions. The prose is lovely, as is the mood. Mieville plays with POV in this book, alternating, sometimes within the same sentence, between first, second, and third POV, so that the reader is never quite sure who is talking to who, about who. And while it's great to see a book that breaks the "rules" of form, as many people have been discussing lately , it does beg the question--who is allowed to break the rules of craft? Who is paid to publish a novel in which we don't know who the main character is, where we don't know where we're sitting on the timeline (and never come to know by the end of the novel), and never find the answers to any of the above questions?
This is the writing blog of Audely Bensen.