The Invisible Ones

Ray Lovell wakes up in a hospital bed, half-paralyzed, barely able to speak, and delusional to boot. Fragmentary memories haunt him. Tests show he’s been poisoned, but by whom and when? As his memory begins to return, he knows he was hired by a Romany (formerly called Gypsy) man to find his daughter, Rose Janko, missing since shortly after her marriage 7 years earlier. He suspects her husband’s family has killed her. Ray knows he’s being hired as much for his name as for his skill as a private investigator. His father was Romany who left life on the road, married a gorjio (non-Gypsy) and settled down to a permanent address and job as a postal worker.

The Invisible Ones is told by 2 narrators in 2 times. The novel opens with Ray in hospital in August, but moves back and forth between that time and several months earlier, when the events that put him there come into play. The second narrator is a Romany teen named JJ, and he provides a fresh perspective on life for a British Romany in the late years of the 20th century. He lives with his mum, a single woman, in a trailer, and camps out with his uncle, cousin, great-uncle and grandparents in an extended family group. His part of the narration opens with a trip the family is taking to Lourdes to pray for a miracle healing for his cousin, young Christo Janko, who at 6 is weak and sickly. It becomes apparent early on that Christo’s mother was the missing Rose, and that the family claim she ran off with a gorjio man.

The family Rose married into is pure-blood, “the pure black blood,” as the Romany themselves put it, but that blood seems to carry a disease that kills the young males of the line. Throughout the novel, the theme of blood appears again and again—both in the sense of bloodline and in the physical reality. That the family is hiding something is apparent early on, but the extent of the secret is revealed bit by tantalizing bit. Ray is tireless in his search for the missing Rose, and when human bones are discovered in an old camp-site, he thinks he’s found her. Meanwhile, JJ invites a girl from school over for tea and realizes how shocked she is at his living conditions–it opens his eyes to all sorts of things. He finds hidden things in his Uncle Ivo’s trailer that he can’t explain. And his long-lost great-aunt, who’s left the family in disgust, meets Ray to discuss what she knows of Rose’s disappearance.

The Invisible Ones is a great novel—you won’t be able to put it down. It’s suspenseful, a mystery novel, but what makes it so fascinating is that it’s very character-driven, and introduces the reader to a new culture hidden within a familiar one. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.

Elizabeth can understand the call of the open road; she’s even been known to threaten to run away with the Gypsies. Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.