FICTION: The Bad Book AffairBy Ian Sansom Fourth Estate, 355pp. £7.99
IF YOU find the phrase “vegetarian Jewish librarian” even mildly amusing, you’re off to a flying start with Ian Sansom’s Mobile Library series. And if the image of this gentle soul driving around the staunchly Protestant north coast of Antrim solving crimes, mysteries and domestic altercations while providing the locals with regular helpings of Mills Boon and guidebooks to Prague actually makes you smile – well, you’re laughing.
The Bad Book Affairis the fourth instalment in the Israel Armstrong series, and it opens on a scene of devastation and disarray. A body lies on a metal-framed bed in an unsavoury room, "dirty quilt pulled up around him, broken-backed books everywhere, empty bottles of wine and Jumping Jack cider stacked around like giddy sentinels. . ." A vicious murder? A creepy crime scene? No, just business as usual in the converted chicken coop which is home to Sansom's slacker anti-hero.
Murder is not a major player in the Mobile Library stories. The premise for this one is that the teenage daughter of a politician from the town of Tumdrum has gone missing – shortly after borrowing A Clockwork Orangeand Lady Chatterley's Loverfrom the library's under-the-counter collection. It's clear, though, that her horribly mutilated body is never going to turn up in a ditch. Not when the focus of the opening chapter is the delightfully ham-fisted election campaign being waged by her father, the Independent Unionist Maurice Morris, whose idea of moving and shaking is to turn up in Zelda's café to shake hands and talk tray bakes with his putative constituents.
The latter constitute the comic milieu through which these books move, with a cast of regulars which includes Israel's politically incorrect sidekick, Ted; Minnie, the motherly coffee waitress; Sinister Sergeant Friel, and the saintly – if faintly epicurean – Reverend Roberts. There's also Israel's landlord, old Mr Devine, an irascible, down-at-heel farmer with a beautiful, if somewhat frayed, daughter. The pace is stately, the digressions baggy, the style colourful and cartoonish – think Number One Ladies Detective Agencycrossed with Give My Head Peace.
It could all descend quite easily into tooth-grinding folksiness or sickly-sweet sentimentality, but is (mostly) held in check by the use of wide-ranging cultural reference points, from Prison Breakto Neil Gaiman via Alvar Aalto. Much is made of Israel's "otherness", but Sansom has a way of neatly inverting these "outsider" jokes – as illustrated by the following exchange between Israel and Ted on the subject of teenage Goths, of whom Israel has just expressed a pathological distrust.
“What’s wrong with trench coats?” said Ted. “You don’t like people wearing trench coats?”
“No. It’s just . . . People wearing long black coats and . . .”
“Who are those people in Israel?” said Ted.
“Jews?”
“Yes, them. The ones in the long black coats and the hats.”
“That’s different. That’s religion.”
The trouble with Tumdrum, of course, is that it's essentially – as the author regularly reminds us – humdrum. The challenge for Samson is to provide enough variation to keep the reader interested as well as amused. He has excelled himself on this occasion with Maurice Morris's wife, Pamela, in a cameo so cool she seems to have strayed in from the set of an old film noir. The tone of The Bad Book Affairis, in any case, much darker than that of its predecessors; beneath the surface banter, the book's "real" story is that Israel is hovering on the brink of depression.
The hapless librarian has been hit by an emotional triple whammy: the arrival of his 30th birthday and a nagging feeling that he has achieved absolutely nothing in his life; the break-up of his relationship with the glamorous Gloria; and the death – possibly by suicide – of his best friend in Tumdrum, 82-year-old Pearce Pyper. None of which is even remotely funny. But the darkness gives Israel an appealing edge and The Bad Book Affaira strange, bittersweet quality which takes it out of "soft-hearted comic novel" territory and moves it to a more interesting place altogether. If it takes Tumdrum to a wider audience in the process, so much the better.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Timesjournalist
