The outcome of her search for her son is only later revealed. But it is this sense of inertia, observation dominating plot, that forestalls wholesale raving.įor two years, Ines works for blind Ralf as housekeeper and guide, stealing from him out of necessity and strategically having sex with both him and his lodger Defoe. We're left secretly wishing the novel would put on a little speed or deliver a few surprises. While there's an urgent emotional imperative at stake, and a vivid though occasionally tourist-driven portrait of Berlin, there are times when the reader seems to be wading through treacle. As Jones says, it's a tale partly told "sideways". The vacuum at the centre is both intriguing and alienating, the novel's pulse also a stasis. The author's own simple yet lyrical voice is too distinctive to allow him to fall into full mimic mode, but then he never attempts to dazzle linguistically in a novel that has its own subdued tenor.Īs is later revealed, there are chasms within the narrators' tales: acts of exploitation, violence and altruism are omitted as individual perspectives or wilful distortions clash in a fascinating exploration of how we project our emotions, assumptions and needs on to others, especially on the faceless and dispossessed.Īs the story progresses, with its impenetrable protagonist ("All her attention went into not occupying space") and at times heartsinking mosaic narrative form, there is a problem with pace. This ventriloquism is impressive without being entirely successful. The narrators include a truck driver, a snail collector, some Alpine hunters, a pastor, a selfless French anarchist and a blind man and his assistant.
A ragged line-up of other strangers then help or hinder this quiet, watchful woman, offering varyingly reliable accounts that are revealed to be testimonies told to an inspector who is piecing together Ines's journey to Berlin through Italy, Switzerland and Austria. The initial section is related by another member of the hotel staff, whose contact with Ines ends there. As she says, "It never occurred to me that the authorities would help." She makes the crossing to Sicily along with other impoverished refugees, is abandoned at sea, and reaches the shore "bitten as a sodden sea cucumber", while others are left to almost certain death. Jermayne is from Berlin, and that is where she must go in search of her child. In fact, her world has irreversibly tilted and her mind is now set on a single course of action. Ines's response is to be "still, very still". Here she is seduced and impregnated by a businessman hotel guest called Jermayne, but a few days after their son's birth, Jermayne removes the child and hands him to another woman in a waiting taxi, and then disappears. His African protagonist, who never reveals her true identity or country of origin but borrows the name "Ines", begins the novel as a hotel worker in Tunisia. New Zealander Jones spent a year on a writers' residency in Berlin, where he was inspired by a report he read about the hazardous sea crossings of illegal migrants. Lloyd Jones's 2007 Booker-shortlisted Mr Pip, winner of a Commonwealth Writers' prize, was a much-loved oddity, but its follow-up is still stranger, more subtle and less immediately appealing. Hand Me Down World is the story of a nameless woman whose history, emotions and responses are foggily obscure, and yet we will follow her to the end, hopelessly in the thrall of her overriding motive: to be with her abducted child. At its centre is a quest, its solution easily found, undertaken by a character who is little more than a void. T his is, to make a bold claim, an extraordinary novel.