Review: Anytown, Ireland (Newsweek) -- Irish Media Watch Message Board

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Date Posted: 14:26:21 07/13/04 Tue GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: Review: Anytown, Ireland (Newsweek)

BOOK REVIEW
Anytown, Ireland
BY CLAIRE MESSUD

July 11, 2004

THE IMPARTIAL RECORDER, by Ian Sansom. Fourth Estate, 354 pp., $24.95.

Ian Sansom's debut novel is a work of tender and bonhomous refraction. Narrated by the eponymous invisible townsman of an unnamed Irish town, "The Impartial Recorder" follows the fortunes of a broad swathe of the local citizenry over the course of a mildly tumultuous year. The Impartial Recorder is also, and crucially, the name of the local newspaper, "which insisted on the simple goodness and simple rightness of life, insisting upon it in the face of all the local evidence of wrong, all the graffiti, dog dirt, car crime and head-on crashes to the contrary. In The Impartial Recorder there were no big ideas, no ideologies and no purely evil days. There were only personal triumphs and tragedies, inconveniences rather than scandals, with a nice cup of tea always on the horizon and a boiled sweet in your pocket to keep you going."

This, indeed, is the voice of the novel, and it represents a brave choice on the part of its author: Sansom is emphatically unpretentious in his portrayal of the ordinary lives of ordinary folk, and his gentle humor buoys their humdrum lives.

But all is not quite as unfashioned as it seems: He goes so far as to issue a prefatory apologia, which, while assuring the reader that "I do hope you enjoy the book -- it's meant for you to enjoy," serves largely as an apologia for its own existence: "It seems necessary, finally, to apologize to the busy reader for this, a preface ... but I have always found it a hardship not to be helpful, which is a failing, I know."

This quixotic gesture encapsulates some of the novel's idiosyncrasy: The preface is manifestly unnecessary, mildly amusing, potentially irritating but supposedly kept from being so by its plain-spoken self-awareness.

Whether an unpretentious tone -- frank amiability, even, with an occasional slide into cuteness -- can redeem a certain residual (albeit comic) pretension will be for each reader to decide. The novel also allows itself a thick peppering of rambling footnotes, a spoof index and a Monty Python-esque acknowledgment list.

The book as a whole is endlessly digressive, rather like a prolonged conversation with someone's slightly dotty granny on the bus. Or, rather, with a slightly dotty granny who has absorbed a dose of David Foster Wallace. Sansom revels not simply in the quotidian, but in the frankly banal ("At the moment he has a pretty basic Web site put together by Carl and Calvin Mathers, who are the sons of Johnny 'the Boxer' Mathers, our one and only remaining greengrocer there on Main Street. Carl and Calvin run a little graphic and Web-design company from the front room of their shared terraced house on Scotch Street ... " etc.). The result is alternately winning and faintly tiresome.

Sansom's unnamed Anytown, in the tradition of Our Town or of Winesburg, Ohio, is constructed from a mass of explicit detail, of men and women carefully rendered (we learn of their Web sites, their musical preferences, their consumption of Branston pickle), from which the place itself emerges in all its sociological complexity, with all the complications of the recent past laid bare.

Not only do we get to know the tradespeople Quinns, boasting two generations of seven sons; the more scattered Donelly family; the ambitious sandwich emperor, Bob Savory, and his partner and mentor, the triumphant, slightly crooked Frank Gilbey; along with numerous others. We also see their surroundings in palimpsest, the vanished shops and businesses that lurk, in memory, behind the ring road and the fancy new housing developments, replaced now by the shopping mall on the outskirts of town.

At the heart of the novel, and at the heart of the old downtown, is the old Quality Hotel, now standing derelict, a repository of memories for all the characters, no matter their age: Its fate remains the novel's abiding question and the hinge of a fairly desultory plot. In his insistence upon the minutiae of his characters' lives, Sansom has created a faithful vision of their world.

Curiously, then, it would seem that Sansom himself, rather like the town and the townspeople he describes, has set a limit upon his ambition. He has spoken of the novel as "a book of profound inconsequence, as beautiful and moving as, say, the sight of an elderly couple standing outside a greengrocer's, trying to choose a cauliflower." It is a lovely image, and one in which, again, the author's humility resonates.

But from that image, any peculiarity might emerge; whereas the novel, in cleaving wholly to a comic tradition, downplays or eschews elements of strangeness and of pain that abide in any town, anywhere. In this place, death, oddly, has no sting. So it is that in insisting upon "the simple goodness and simple rightness of life," the novel cannot ultimately fully move us. But it can -- and does -- afford a pleasing, amusing and honest portrait, for which no apology is necessary.

Claire Messud is the author, most recently, of "The Hunters: Two Short Novels."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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