Hand Me Down World by Lloyd Jones
Penguin, $40
Lloyd Jones' new novel will unavoidably face the towering legacy of Mister Pip: international acclaim, a Man Booker short-list placing, awards, local admiration, sales and a degree of controversy. I wanted to read this book away from the Mister Pip hullabaloo and let it speak for itself. Like a 10th child.
I was immediately hooked by the resonating title and by the light-footed sentences in the first pages. I like the idea of a second-hand world that we inherit through word of mouth, other stories, other lives, memory, history and so on.
Interestingly, Jones sets up an immediate parallel with Mister Pip in that he adopts a persona at arm's length to his own - that of a woman. Young, black, African. This caused discomfort for some readers of the previous book. How can an older white male imagine himself inside the head of a younger black woman?
You can argue that throughout time writers have harnessed imagination to step into the shoes of another and that literature would be impoverished if we only ever wrote from within our own. Writing out of another's shoes might depend upon research, imagination and a universal core of human behaviour (we love, we die, we give birth, we fight, we communicate).
You could also argue that in some cases stepping into the shoes of another is to colonise. The writer is in danger of getting it wrong to the point where a character is recognised as neither female nor black nor young.
For me, the issues Hand Me Down World raises form a significant but sideways engagement with the book. This is a book that grows on you, first and foremost as story, with its lingering aftertaste.
A nameless woman is used in a scurrilous trick by a couple wanting a baby. She travels in search of her missing child from an African coastal town to Berlin. She meets a carousel of characters on the way from the truck driver to the elderly snail collector to the chess player to the alpine hunter and guide.
As I read, I was reminded of a slow moving European movie with much less dialogue than a Hollywood blockbuster. I liked the miniature stories - the way random people had a fleeting impact on the life of an individual. A bit like Fellini and a bit like Calvino.
The nameless woman is like a hollow in the text about whom we know so little. She can speak three words of French. She eats voraciously without heed for taste. The other characters get to fill her in for us in minuscule degrees.
The nameless woman will also do anything to achieve her goal. She ends up sleeping rough with a charitable Frenchman. She ends up caring for a blind man and does an exemplary job of making tea and arranging flowers but is hopeless at returning the world to him through language.
Mister Pip highlighted the power of reading, whereas Hand Me Down World highlights the power of story. We are all made of skin and bone and blood, but this novel shows how we are made of story, how the stories that others tell about us begin to jostle with the stories we tell about ourselves.
As the novel's structure flips back over on itself, this unexpected and exquisite bumping of story, of one version against another, releases whiffs or pockets of truth. We can never be sure of the truth of the woman in the details of her life, but we can be sure of the fundamental and universal drive in the width and depth of her maternal love (not that we need to say that this goes for all women, of course).
We can also recognise a faith in humans to do good that is immeasurably pleasing.
Jones has written a book that may or may not gain awards and international acclaim, but he has written a book to be admired, to be discussed, to be treasured.
He may not wear the shoes of a young black woman who has lost her baby, but by the end of the novel I recognised the dimensions of loss. I was moved. I was enthralled. This is a writer who knows how to tell a story, deftly, surprisingly, magnificently.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.
