Truly unique and highly recommended, Jesse Ball is an author to watch. This story of a father and his Down Syndrome son is a moving portrayal of paternal love, innocence and the nature of empathy.

A wonderful exploration of the paternal bond, the wilderness of fulfilment, and political extradition. Census is beautifully written, and I loved it.

This short novel has a very interesting premise in which a widower is told that he is terminally ill and he wants to make the most of the time he has left with his son who has Down syndrome. He takes a job as a census taker and travels from city to city with his son. I found some of the prose a bit too experimental and reminiscent of Samuel Beckett for my taste, but it was worth persevering with. Above all, it offers a good insight into how people with Down syndrome view and interact with the world and it is a moving tribute to Ball’s brother.

A dying man takes a road trip with his son who has Down’s syndrome; he wants to mark their last few weeks together so becomes a census taker, travelling in an old car where, if there’s nothing better, they spend the night.
This structure gives the author the opportunity to link a range of odd characters and strange settings together, and provides the space for the narrator, a former surgeon to muse on life, parenthood, bereavement and bringing up a child with Down’s syndrome; both the challenges and the happiness.
A deeply moving short novel, based on the author’s own brother, told in simple, clear prose.

This title was reviewed on Splice on April 9, 2018: https://thisissplice.co.uk/2018/04/09/in-his-effect-jesse-balls-census.

I really couldn't carry on reading this. The copy was bad and I couldn't make any sense of it!

This was my first experience of a Jesse Ball novel. I did however come across him in Granta magazine’s "Best of Young American Novelists" where he wrote a short story called "A Wooden Taste is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste is the Word for Dam a Wooden Taste is the Word for" which was startlingly original enough for me to think I needed to read more and therefore to not turn my back on a chance to get an review copy of Census via NetGalley. My thanks to the publishers for approving this request and sending this copy for me to read.

Census is a remarkable book. The plot is simple: a doctor receives a diagnosis that tells him he does not have long to live so he decides to make a journey with his son who requires round-the-clock supervision. He registers as a census taker and travels, literally in this case, from A to Z. "Literally" because all the towns are named after letters of the alphabet and he lives in A and travels alphabetically to Z. This is the first sign that all is not quite "normal" in the world of Census.

A lot of the book is recognisably our world. But it is all slightly skewed. Take, for example, the idea of a census. Our unnamed narrator explains the census as follows:

"It is often true in this business of the census that one discovers one lacks the power to cal out of the people one meets that which is indeed most peculiar to each. Of course, it is this very task that the census requires, and so my failure to obtain the quintessence of any individual interviewed is a very real failure and one that redounds to me again and again. I must, in speaking to a person, know what is special about that individual, and that data must pass through me back to the offices of the census in such a way that what is most particular, most special about the nation, and indeed of all nations, some aggregate of all the particulars of its human population, that this could be known and felt"

Our narrator and his son travel from town to town taking this unusual census and marking each person with a tattoo to show they have been counted. The journey is both an encounter with a multitude of human experiences and a way for a father to say farewell to his son. It includes flashbacks as our narrator looks back on his life and his relationship with his wife. It includes bizarrely normal encounters with people. And it includes the narrator’s son who clearly has problems.

It is in this inclusion of the son that the story hides its power. In an introduction, Ball explains that his brother died twenty years ago and suffered from Downs’ Syndrome. He goes on to say:

"But it is not easy to write a book about someone you know, much less someone long dead, when the memories you have of him are like some often trampled garden. I didn’t see exactly how it could be done, until I realised I would make a book that was hollow. I would place him in the middle of it, and write around him for the most part. He would be there in his effect."

Once you have read those words, this sets up the rest of the book and, I think, makes it a very different book than you would experience if you skipped this introduction. Because you read with an awareness that Jesse’s brother is there even if you can’t see him. It makes it a very emotional book.

The only reason I have not given this 5 stars is that the cormorant is a recurring motif and, as a keen birdwatcher, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the facts given about cormorants were wrong (they DON’T have waterproof plumage, which is why you see them standing with their wings spread so often to dry them out, they CAN fly easily and the cormorant and the shag are DIFFERENT birds). However, I could easily be persuaded to increase my rating to the full 5 stars if someone can show me how these apparently wrong facts actually fit into the overall story as deliberate.

Ball writes very economically. His narrative jumps around from topic to topic which makes the whole far greater than the sum of its parts, but I think this is the plan and one of the main attractions of Ball’s writing. The overall impression is a powerfully emotional story calling for compassion and tolerance.

An absorbing and refreshing read. I need to read some more of Ball’s work.

The book reminded me very strongly of China Mieville's "This Census Taker" both in title/subject matter but also very much in style. (to the extent I was surprised not to see some form of acknowledgement of this I can only assume entirely coincidental link).

Where the book really exceeds is in its portrayal of a the experience of living with a family member with Down's syndrome as outlined in an incredibly moving foreword to the book, where Jesse Ball beautifully explains his own relationship with his brother and the way in which he felt he could only convey the wonderful experience of that relationship by writing a book where that character would be the hollow at the centre of the novel, around which the novel is written.

Just a quick note on the Netgalley version - which I found badly formatted and which made my reading of the book difficult. I suspect I could upgrade my view of this book to 5* if reading a hardcopy..

A beautiful, sparse novel that works really well with the unnamed characters and places. It felt poetic and nostalgic and I thought it was a beautiful insight in to father and son relationships and loving someone to the end. Dystopias are one of my favourite genres and this one really resonated.