THE CASE OF THE MISSING BOOKS
by Ian Sansom
Fourth Estate, £6.99; 336pp
LIKE CHURCHES AND car-parks, libraries are capable of stirring strong emotions, be they of fear, joy or frustration. Israel Armstrong, a chubby, North London Jew, is more attached to them than most. He is the Mowgli of the library, raised in the hallowed hush of public learning, suckled on sports-bags full of “Orwells and specialist non-fiction”, guided by the omniscient spirit of Mr Dewey. But his brain has been curdled by books: Israel is sensitive, passionate, full of words and, to be blunt, “just about no earthly good to anyone”.
He has the chance to change that when he is offered the post of district librarian in Tumdrum, a small town in Northern Ireland. But there’s a problem: because of a “a little bit of a resource allocation”, the library has been closed, and is to be replaced by a brave new “mobile learning centre”, with Israel the Outreach Support Officer at its helm. There’s another problem; 15,000 of them, actually — all the books have been stolen. And it’s up to Israel to get them back. By Christmas.
Ian Sansom is as expertly comic as his hero is comically inept, and he plots an ingenious course of mishaps and misunderstandings around a cast of grade-A eccentrics (the teetotal, evangelical barman whose only words seem to be “You’re barred!” is a favourite). There are parts reminiscent of Roddy Doyle, Kingsley Amis and Mark Twain, but the whole is built upon the foundations of Sansom’s equally funny first novel Ring Road, a poignant portrait of the conflict between the old and the new in a Northern Irish town on the brink of the 21st century.
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The digressive energies of that book have been concentrated in a single, tightly-wound story (though not wound too tightly: at the end is a “teaser” chapter from the sequel, Mr Dixon Disappears) without sacrificing Sansom’s gift for the absurd. This is especially evident in the language gulf: Israel’s increasingly desperate questions are, when acknowledged at all, met with opaque sayings such as “Where there’s a Jack there’ s a Jinny”. His own foreignness and “vegetanarian” inclinations arouse suspicion: when he mentions Channukah, the only response that Ted, his sullen, ex-boxer, cabbie ally, deems appropriate is “Bless you”.
It’s light entertainment, in the best sense but, as Sansom has written elsewhere: “All good whimsy has teeth — it’s a protest.” The message? Communities are worth preserving. And library books, eventually, need returning.