REVIEW ORIGINALLY POSTED ON ABOOKORTEN.CO.UK Jesse Ball’s novel is narrated by a widower, who find out that he is terminally ill. He leaves his job as a doctor and takes to the road as a census taker, accompanied by his adult son who has Down’s syndrome. This is a novel of love and tenderness with a raw edge, and a pared back stacatto style which drew me in from the first page. While the subject matter could be taken as sad, Census is never sentimental. Its pages are punctuated by sentences of absolute breath-taking power which knocked my feet from under me. Although it’s relatively short, this wasn’t a quick read for me, simply because the power of the prose required as much time to linger over it and savour certain sections as poetry. In vignettes, the narrator travels across the country, as a sense of something not quite right starts to make itself felt – this is not quite our world as we know it. What it means to be a census taker in this universe is not what we might expect. More than a recording of names, dates of birth and places of habitation, the narrator and his son witness little slices of the lives of those they meet and record; the result is a book with an overarching story about a dying man and his son but equally filled with tiny lives. Many other stories are drawn in and moved out, often outlined with spare but precise dialogue. The atmosphere Ball creates is idiosyncratic – it reminds me of absolutely nothing except itself, which I loved. And while this is a book which touchingly draws out the lived experience of loving someone with Down’s syndrome, as the author loved his brother, it is far from a polemic about life with special needs. The message about lives through a different lens is gentler and more long-lasting than that.