By Thomas Marks , 09 Dec 2010 -The Telegraph
At its simplest level, Hand Me Down World is a migration narrative that traces its African heroine’s gruelling passage from Tunisia to Berlin in search of her abducted son.
But its idea of displacement reaches movingly beyond geographic transit to offer a delicate exploration of how our words voyage away from our thoughts, and how we seek asylum from actual experience in the crafted realm of memory.
While that may sound a bold claim, it’s borne out by Jones’s masterful handling of his material. For two thirds of this novel, his protagonist remains enigmatically voiceless. She is anonymous too, though some know her as Ines, a name borrowed from a local as she washes ashore on the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa.
Jones challenges his reader to piece together Ines’s identity from a series of fragmentary testimonies spoken by characters who have aided or exploited her quest: a fellow hotel maid, who recalls Ines’s seduction by the furtive German tourist who later snatches their child; a guarded truck driver, who smoothes over the brutal price of hitching a lift with him; an “elderly snail collector”; an insomniac chess player; a proud Alpine hunter.
Only much later do we realise why these character statements have been collated by a mysterious “inspector” and it’s not until Ines finally speaks, bluntly and boldly, that we fully grasp the extent of their oversights and omissions.
The novel flags slightly with Ines’s arrival in Berlin. There, she becomes a domestic servant for an ageing blind man, Ralf, establishing a strange ménage with him and his Antipodean lodger, Defoe.
Although there is some fine writing here about encroaching blindness and the fragility of memory, Defoe’s extensive narrative is something of a longueur, lacking the discomfiting concision of what precedes it.
Jones doesn’t attempt to ventriloquise the local idioms or speech tics of his narrators. His writing is more subtle, leaving questions about translation and verisimilitude suggestively open as if to acknowledge the linguistic hurdles faced by a newcomer to Europe.
His own lyricism gently colonises the novel’s many voices: the sea is a “blue-green stew”, while late spring brings “Africans in the sea, popping up like corks”.
Hand Me Down World unfurls the story of one of those nameless Africans with extraordinary sensitivity.
Hand Me Down World
by Lloyd Jones
320pp, John Murray, £14.99
Published by Penguin Books in New Zealand and Text Publishing in Australia
Top to bottom - UK cover, NZ cover, Australian cover
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