Ian Sansom has a good ear

I noted in an early post about Ian Sansom that engaging author's tendency to have the characters of his novels set in Northern Ireland use the word just at the end of a sentence. I contrasted this to the usual North American English practice of placing just before the word or phrase it governs. This feature of Sansom's dialogue, I wrote, "punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity."

Today I am pleased to be able to report that people in Northern Ireland really do adhere to that pattern, as in the following, from the taxi driver who took me from Cookstown this afternoon to view the stone circles of Beaghmore:

"I'm from an island a mile that way just. Originally."

And why shouldn't a visitor enjoy a country's speech as well as its sights? My favorite of many examples on my current trip has been this exchange between a man and a woman on the bus to Cookstown:

"It's the wet season in my country."

"End of the summer." (Understanding nod)

"A lot of tropical storms there."

"Oh, aye."

 Why did I like this so much? Because the woman who uttered that ubiquitous Northern Irish interjection/affirmation "Oh, aye" was from the Philippines.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Who says Ian Sansom writes cozies?

Ian Sansom's Mobile Library mysteries sound as if they should be cozies: Nerdy London librarian moves to rural Northern Ireland, hates it, has zany adventures with colorful characters, and gradually succumbs to some of the charms of local life.

But Sansom's humor can have a hard edge. In Mr. Dixon Disappears, the librarian/protagonist, Israel Armstrong, undergoes a police interrogation that includes the following:

"You're called Israel and you have no connections with the state of Israel or with the Middle East?"

"No I don't."

"So why are you called Israel?"

"I thought I'd just explained! My mother's Jewish, and she thought it was a good idea at the time. It was the 1970s. We had family there. It was all the rage."

"So you claim you have no contact with the Middle East and yet you have family there?"

and

"Can you name three Glens of Antrim?"

"What?"

"It's funny: you claim you're not an immigrant here, Mr. Armstrong, and yet you don't seem to know very much about the country in which you're living."

The bumbling police officer is a staple of English village mysteries. Sansom keeps the humor but infuses the scene with a touch not just sinister but thoroughly contemporary.

Elsewhere, Sansom has an amateur magician describe the splintering of the area's magicians' groups into a succession of rival factions, most of whose names have three initials. Even at this late date, the jape at Northern Ireland's grim history of paramilitary factionalism has a whiff of daring about it.

And I was pleased to find that the novel contains a nod to a contemporary Irish classic that I will begin reading soon: Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

How to be literary, self-conscious and readable

Two passages early in Ian Sansom's second Mobile Library mystery, Mr. Dixon Disappears, show that it's possible for an author to exhibit literary self-consciousness and remain readable, even amusing, at the same time.

In one, the seemingly hapless protagonist, the librarian Israel Armstrong, in desperate need of something to read, contemplates the walls of a jail cell in which he has found himself, through no fault of his own:

"He tried reading the graffiti on the walls and on the back of the door. But there wasn't enough, and it was too small, and anyway it was all acronyms defying one another and performing sexual acts on one another, the IRA doing this or that to the UVF, who were doing this or that to the UDA, and PUP versus the SF, and up the INLA, and down the UFF, and RUC this and PSNI that: where were the great wits and aphorists of County Antrim, for goodness sake? Where were the imprisoned scribes? Where was the Chester Himes and the Malcolm X of the jail cells of Northern Ireland? Where were the Gramscis of Tumdrum and District?"

That's clever and amusing, proclaiming the joys of reading while at the same time poking fun at inflated claims that critics sometimes make for it. These reflections also precipitate a crisis of confidence on Armstrong's part (though, to be fair, he has such crises frequently).

The other reference is just plain amusing:

"This was way beyond anything Israel has ever experienced before: being in the back of a car, early in the morning, listening to someone reading out an account of what had happened to you over the past half an hour, but from an entirely different perspective to your own; it was like being on some kind of extreme creative writing course."

So here are two ways to make the delicate tactic of self-reference work: Make it amusing, and make it important to the story.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

How do characters talk?

A distinctive feature of Ian Sansom's The Case of the Missing Books for this North American reader was its characters' use of the word just. They often place the word at the end of a sentence, as against North American English's tendency to place it before the word or phrase it governs. Thus, in Sansom:

"So what is it you'll have?

"A mineral water just?"

where we in Canada or the U.S. would reply "Just a mineral water."

I don't know if this quirk of speech is Irish, Northern Irish, English, characteristic of one or another social class, or just a favorite of Ian Sansom's. (On second thought, I may have seen it in other Irish writing.) I do know it punctuates the novel and lends it a suggestion of authenticity or, God help me, texture.

Certain varieties of Indian speech use the word only in similar fashion. I first noticed this tendency in H.R.F. Keating's stories, where characters say things like "I am a simple policeman only." It was easy for me to condescend to Keating, to feel just slightly uneasy with this white Englishman's imitation of Indian speech.

Then I found that Vikram Chandra has several of his characters use the same speech pattern in Sacred Games. More recently, as I have read blogs from India, I find that the tendency to end sentences with only appears to be a living feature of Indian English, at least around Kolkata (Calcutta) and Mumbai (Bombay). This was a rich education for me, not least because it made me repent my own ignorance in having felt morally superior to H.R.F. Keating.

But this is a crime-fiction blog and not a confessional. I'll close with some questions: What role does speech play in creating setting? How far is too far when it comes to trying to capture the flavor of "ethnic" speech? How do authors strike a balance between maintaining an illusion of everyday speech on the one hand and creating memorable dialogue on the other? What happens when authors give up the effort at maintaining a balance? Who are your favorite writers of dialogue, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The Case of the Missing Books, a different sort of mystery by Ian Sansom

I don't know what sorts of movies Ian Sansom watched in the early 1980s, but I'd bet Local Hero was one of them.

In that 1983 Bill Forsyth film, an oil billionaire sends a hotshot young executive to buy up a Scottish village where the oil company wants to build a refinery. Young hotshot is smitten with the village, billionaire with the sky above it, and all ends happily except, perhaps, for the young hotshot, who returns to America and longingly recalls his time in the village as a highlight of his life.

The Case of the Missing Books follows a similar course, except its version of the hotshot — a bedraggled young librarian named Israel Armstrong — stays on, and he and the village grow to embrace one another, if somewhat awkwardly. Armstrong has arrived in Tumdrum, County Antrim, Northern Ireland to take over as librarian for Tumdrum and District. Only the person who is supposed to meet Armstrong fails to show up, the library has closed, and his new job is to staff a mobile library van. Oh yes, and all the books have disappeared.

In short order, Israel loses his clothes, his money and his credit cards. A vegetarian, he struggles to find nourishing food he can eat, not to mention a good cup of coffee. He has trouble understanding the villagers' thick accents and odd expressions, and he gets punched in the eye when he inadvertently spies on a pair of lovers. Beset on all sides, he agrees to stay just long enough to flesh out his résumé and earn enough money to return to London.

His supervisor, as shameless a liar and as fatuous a sugar-coater as my — that is, as any corporate shill, assures Israel that "it is important for the borough to continue to provide information resources with a high service proposition combined with increased competitive flexibility." She also assigns him the unwanted job of finding the missing books and, oddly enough, Israel finds he enjoys the role of sleuth. Only most of his guesses are wrong, and just a few of the 15,000 missing books turn up.

The books do materialize eventually and, like any good mystery, this one has its villain. But the solution comes about not through any discoveries on Israel's part, but only once the villagers have come to trust him. I'll reveal no more except that not only does Israel eventually agree to stay on, he even gets a vegetarian feast. In short, this is less a mystery than an engaging fish-out-of-water story. Lurking within is a ruefully humorous and compassionate message:

"Stripped of his money, his clothes, his dignity, unable to understand what people were talking about half the time, unwilling to eat the food, forced to be doing a job he didn't want to do, and threatened, beaten, and in a state of some uncertainty, confusion and tension, he was now really enjoying the full immigrant experience: this was what it must have been like for his ancestors and relatives who'd made it to Bethnal Green and to America. No wonder they all looked so bloody miserable in the photographs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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