On Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:28:06 +1300, Titus G <
noone@nowhere.com> wrote:
On 29/09/2026 04:51, Bice wrote:
After my second reading, when I thought I had finally worked out what
was really going on in the story, I read a review from someone who had
a completely different take on the tale's backstory and a different
explanation for the events in the book, and his version made more
sense than what I had come up with.
I would be interested to hear those two differing theories.
The census taker is counting or accounting for people only from his own >polity. People capable of magic who were responsible for the troubles >resulting in the post apocalyptic primitive society?
That was an element of the theory from that review that I read.
It's been over six years since I read the book (in April of 2020), so
a lot of the plot details have since escaped me, but here's what I
wrote up in my book log after reading it:
WARNING, SPOILERS!!!
WARNING, SPOILERS!!!
WARNING, SPOILERS!!!
The story is strange and strangely told. It starts with a young boy
who lives on a mountaintop with his parents running into the village
at the foot of the mountain and screaming this his mother has killed
his father. But then he immediately changes the story and says his
father killed his mother. The town's law-enforcement representatives
climb the hill with him to investigate, but can find no evidence of
foul play. When the father produces a letter that he claims his wife
wrote, and which states that she's running away because she can't take
life on the mountaintop any more, the police are satisfied and leave
the boy to live with his father.
Now, that's just the tip of the iceberg (or mountain, as the case may
be). The setting seems to be some sort of post-apocalyptic world. The
story is narrated by the boy, but jumps between first person and third
person, and eventually even second person, as if he's telling the tale
to himself. The book initially backtracks to when the mother was
alive so we can learn more about the boy's family and their home.
There are flash-forward chapters to the boy as an adult, but those
parts make little to no sense until you've read the rest of the book.
The boy's father is a locksmith, but the keys he makes seem to have
magical properties, such as the ability to control the weather or bind
people from leaving places.
The boy witnesses his father killing animals, and possibly people, and
throwing them into a pit in a cave near their house. No one believes
this except for the homeless children of the village, who try to
figure out a way to get the boy away from his father so that he can
live with them.
Much of the story relates vague things that the boy heard or saw and
leaves it up to the reader to try to piece together the meaning behind
them. Possibly the vaguest part is a story about a team that came
from the father's original home city to take a census, looking for
anyone who was born in that city and their children. Elements of this
keep cropping up, including a young girl who is helping with the
census but who tries to steal her boss' records, believing that he is
a criminal.
Things come to a head near the end of the book when a census-taker
comes to the boy's house. He intentionally came while the father was
in town, so he could talk to the boy alone and investigate the story
of the mother's murder. But this particular census-taker is the one
whose young assistant tried to steal his records and convict him of a
crime. That assistant has mysteriously disappeared.
The ending of the book (including the flash-forward chapters) are...inconclusive at best. The boy runs off with the census-taker
(after the census-taker, presumably, proved the murder), and works for
him as an adult. But he's confined to some sort of room with guards
outside the door, and he's working on three books - one with census
data, one with his secrets written in code and one that he "inherited"
from the census-taker's previous assistant and is trying to finish for
her.
Did the boy just imagine the census-taker and kill his father himself?
Is that why he's in jail? Is he just imagining working on the census?
We know he liked to draw people and animals on the walls of his attic
and count them.
Or was the census-taker eventually found guilty of taking the law into
his own hands, as the girl had tried to prove, and killing the boy's
father? Did the boy get put in jail too as an accomplice?
One of the theories that I read on Goodreads made a lot of sense than
my theories. The father who makes the magical keys seems to have some
sort of otherworldly power. The census-taker(s) are only interested
in people who came from the father's home city, and their children.
Could it be that some (or all) of the people from that city had
supernatural powers, and were somehow responsible for the apocalypse
that knocked the world back into the stone ages? And that's why
they've fled and spread out across the world? That's why the
"census-takers" are out hunting for them? Maybe their powers drive
some of them mad, causing them to commit murders, which is why the
father frequently killed animals and eventually his wife. In an that
case, the particular census-taker in this story was told to find and
kill a dangerous "mutant". And maybe he was also told to keep an eye
on any children, in case similar powers and dangerous drives arise in them...which is why the boy is under guard at the end? The only
argument I can think of against this reading of the story is that,
after killing the father, the census-taker was originally going to
leave the boy living alone in his house. It was only after he
realized that the boy couldn't take care of himself that he took him
along. And why would he make a potentially dangerous mutant his
assistant? Kind of a shame that those pieces don't fit, because the
rest of it explains the story fairly well.
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