This Census-Taker by China Miéville (2016)

What dreams, what wishes are carried into this world from the moment of birth? What happens when they seem unreachable? Succombing to delusion might be one path to take to survive lost, stolen, or broken dreams, wishes. But in This Census Taker, the boy China Miéville writes stays sound if only through the continuous observance of himself and of others.

"...I saw my father walking up toward me. I stopped. Sometimes if you stand very still and close your eyes you see rocks behind your eyelids. Or you realize aghast that the shapes of things are other than you understood." (p. 61)

He lives on a desolate mountain, its beauty hidden by the pallor of the ominous and terrifying unknown, not dominantly from the Earth's elements, but from something unnamed but heinous about the townspeople that live beneath the mountain, out from its foothills, and within his own family up on the mountain, his house, his father and mother. This is felt, in the environment that surrounds him, by a sense of confusion and loss, though, despite this, the boy doesn't allow his existence and his reality to go without question.

"I would risk questions. 'What's in the ravine?'

'Down there? Oh...' she said, seeming exhausted by my interruption. 'I don't know. I don't know. I can't tell you what's down there.

'I've been all the way to the sea,' she said. 'I was at the coast. There's a...' She sketched something with her hands: a tower. 'I was in an office. They were training me; I was doing papers for them. I could still do it if you paid me.'" p. 54

...

And as he continues to keep watch of this environment, its living ghosts on the mountain (his neighbors, eccentric characters, minding their own business, always), he finds what he sees with his own eyes is barely speakable: like when he caught his father killing his mother while remaining unseen by them. Or when he found his father carrying murdered animals to a secret pit in a cave to dump each one into a dark, deep hole, knowing it was his father, now him being haunted every so often by the sound of suffering animals being shot, or worse, tortured.

In shock, the boy seems to barely believe his own senses, and, after a time, remains subdued and quiet to himself and everything that surrounds him. Who to tell? Going through the book a second time allows a distinction to be made - that through the boy's narration of his own story, as an adult - his experiences become clearer, sharper, and more articulable than what can be discerned about his younger self's crushed and shattered spirit, with a better understanding of his will. Of that, the very beginning of the book has much to say.

What to do after these events but become a wanderer of your own domain similar to an animal? Worse, to feel less than human? As he wanders, there are signs calling to him everywhere, and though he makes no immediate meaning of them, he keeps them in his memory, a record in his own mind to refer to again later. He finds, growing from the pines of the mountain trees, spindles like jaws that kaleidoscopically open and close, clawing at air. He finds, on the stony, earthen ground, an eggshell cracked open at the top with tiny, smaller eggshells cracked open in the same manner inside of it. And when walking into the town for a shopping trip with his distant mother (before her disappearance) he sees, among the squalor, a man who grew a baby lizard inside of a bottle and fed it until the lizard became too big to escape its' glass cage. Numb to fear, he becomes curious, even fascinated, but even as strangers become acquaintances (a boy and girl from town who took to him for playing, and keeping - twice after he runs away for a time), he remains alone, despite his wishes.

"The days changed and the view from what had been her window became mine. I climbed into its frame as I had once in the attic that I didn't want to enter again. When the wind made my house lean and creak at night, I'd look up and imagine that the sounds were made by my mother shaking the walls in the upper room, staring at where the blood had been, that my father had cleaned away. I still tried to keep her face from my mind, and sometimes I succeeded and she looked at me with my father's face or the rotting doll's." (p.111)

He knows little of himself being watched and thought of from afar. If there's any real indication of this, it is how the boy is regarded. Before being brought back to his house on the mountain by his father after one run-away, the two go into the town square for food, but, with all eyes on each other, every shopkeeper refuses them food. Perhaps for knowing the violent story that trickled down from their mountain, not wanting to be associated with the kind of economy the gossip - indeed, of murder - held. With the boy and his father back at home, the townspeople come up anyway, for want of the keys his father makes with his machinic tools to purchase. The mysterious keys lead to places unmentioned, leaving it up to the boy's imagination to fathom, and according to the story, this never occurs.

"I ran to where I'd buried the bottle. It was too heavy to bring... I didn't smash the bottle but I did at last upend it and scatter the bones." (p. 199)

Word goes round, from the mountain to the town and the town to the mountain, of the murder, the disappearance, the routine-like normalcy of uneccessarily violent culling, and of thievery. (The boy's father, as a gift in return for coming back home and promising to stay, gives him two female goats to tend to, one becoming his friend and good pet. The goat is gone one day. Whether or not the boy heard the shots or believes it was stolen might be determined by a closer, second reading.) Finally, after a while, a man turns up finding the unlooked-after boy and speaks to him about his circumstances in earnest. The boy speaks up too and shows this man, who calls himself the census-taker, the pit. The man goes down in to investigate while the boy waits for hours in the pit's cave until the census-taker comes back up. After deliberating, with profound heaviness, he offers the boy a job, in another place, a city, with new language to account for people near and far.