jesse ball, 'census'
A man is driving his old taxi-cab north. With him is his son; they’re making ‘one last trip’ together before terminal illness takes the father away. Although their world contains recognisable places, like North Africa or Stuttgart, the country through which they’re travelling is anonymised, laid out in concentric circles that radiate from a central town, A, to a rural outpost, Z. It seems like a vast maquette. The father, who narrates, has the task of measuring it by counting its people: he’s exchanged his surgical practice for the job of census-taker.
This is the Census that gives Jesse Ball’s new novel its title and plot device, and it deserves the portentous single-word cover – all bravado, like a movie poster – because in this world, to those in the know, the census has a vast dystopic power. It’s like something out of Pynchon. Most of the citizens the travellers meet regard it with uninterest or gentle suspicion, but the head of the local branch knows that its power goes deeper than the commoners know. ‘When I examined you and hired you for this work’, he tells the father, ‘I did so not because I felt that you could become a census taker, but because I know that you already are, already were a census taker.’
The task of the census, muses the father while passing through D, is ‘to call out of the people one meets that which is indeed most peculiar to each’. This aligns its work with therapy, and love, and Census is an attempt at both. The son suffers from an unspecified disability, which affects his communicative powers and disturbs the people he meets; a kindly craftsman in D worries the boy will ‘go into a fit’ if spoken to, while a household in F – ‘not gentle… not nice’ – pretend not to understand what he says.
This character is, complicatedly, Jesse Ball’s brother Abram. In a short preface, untitled so that you take it at first for a chapter, Ball explains that Abram had Down’s syndrome, and died twenty years ago aged only 24. He had a ‘magnificent and beautiful nature’, which Ball wanted to paint in words. Instead of writing a book about a brother, though, he decided to
write one about a father on the point of death, who travels somewhere with his adult son … somehow, in the administration of those details, in and between the words, I could effect a portrait of Abram, as the son, and in doing so, would allow others to see what such a boy is like, or can be like.
Handling a life always involves the ‘administration of details’, but it’s a phrase that displays its own awkwardness. Census is full of mis-readings, clumsy talk, the frustrations of trying to connect. At one point, the father bemoans his ‘failure to obtain the quintessence’ of some of the people he meets. ‘Speaking’, he says, ‘is such a confusion’.
It’s tricky to find parallels between the two pairs – Jesse-and-Abram, father-and-son – because the novel adds a new and anomalous figure: the son’s mother, the father’s wife. She corresponds to nobody real in Ball’s life, so she’s never integral to the novel’s non-fictional heart; she dies before page one. But as man and boy drive north, they meet people along the way who remember her. She was a strikingly weird performer, of a sort only obliquely described: an old review, for instance, described her as ‘a very strange clown’, while a man who saw her thinks of her as a ‘physiotelepath – telepathic not with mind but body’. Before she died, she had wanted to tour the country with her husband and son, and later they, bereft, realised that the census ‘could somehow stand in’ for her, so here they are. The census, like the mother, is a mysterious force, helping people scratch at their own, and each other’s, quintessence.
Ball’s writing is a blend of delicacy and panache. Like a mind only half-alert to itself, Census shimmers between a spectrum of moods; its prose has a versatility that can equally do heartfelt (‘Living things are so remote. Our hearts leap and our bodies wait helplessly in space’), and slyly ironic (‘when you see some false thing, some shabby town in place of the vale you long for, well, burn it, burn it! Pile the skulls!’). It’s remarkable that while the father struggles with his job of recording, part of which involves musing on what it means to record, his creator sculpts all those various tangles of thought into another kind of record, the testament of a brother’s love. Words might confuse things, but confusion, for now, has given Ball’s pair something to share, and through that, a safe place to dwell. ‘There is so much that was terrible,’ the man reflects after his son has gone, ‘and of it, I can never say how much of it he felt’. Small mercy.
[for the Telegraph, 7/7/18]
