Fiction: The Delegates' Choice By Ian Sansom Harper Perennial, 286pp. £7.99An odd couple of curmudgeonly mobile librarians driving around "the windswept north coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland", bickering about their van, their boss, the quality of the coffee - there's got to be a novel in there somewhere, or three novels if you're Ian Sansom, gleeful chronicler of municipal mundanity, puncturer of cultural pretension and navigator of the heart's B-roads.
This latest in Sansom's Mobile Library series sees the less than dynamic duo of Israel Armstrong (young, vegetarian, lovelorn, literary, Jewish) and Ted Carson (middle-aged, practical, dog-loving, loyalist, solitary) make the trip Israel has longed for, back across the Irish Sea to his London home and girlfriend, on the pretext of attending a mobile librarians' convention.
It takes a quarter of the book (the funniest quarter) for the pedantic but excitable Israel to persuade truculent Ted (and his incontinent mutt, Muhammad) away from the familiar pleasures of his beloved Antrim (rain-ravaged coastline, scones at Zelda's café, cranky but amusing visitors to the mobile library) and on to the ferry. On arrival in Liverpool, Ted's reluctance about the trip is immediately justified as he is interviewed at length by police on certain (political/paramilitary?) matters, the details of which he refuses to share with either Israel or the reader. Indeed, Ted is a bit of a "dark horse" (as Israel's mother later describes him) who is about to have his no-nonsense demeanour tested, first by his long-lost cousin (owner of "London's premier Irish gay bar" who assumes "librarian" is a euphemism for homosexual) and later by the nettle-tea-drinking, Earth Goddess-worshipping New Age travellers who become prime suspects when the mobile library van disappears from its parking place in Finchley.
As the hunt for the missing van gathers pace, Israel also finds himself disorientated and disappointed: his girlfriend, Gloria, is avoiding him, his old friends are "transmitting on a channel he no longer received", and his own mother seems more interested in getting to know Ted than she does in reconnecting with her son. And when it comes to detective work, it seems Ted's direct, confrontational approach is more effective than Israel's halting diplomacy.
There is lightness and there is slightness, and this tale is saved by the one while suffering from the other. Though there are one or two tedious stretches on the road with Israel and Ted, they make a kind of sense because the lurking threat of tedium is itself one of the book's themes. While it is a less subtle and substantial work than Sansom's fine earlier novel, Ring Road, and while its characterisation is more stereotyped, The Delegates' Choicesimilarly conveys the bleakness as well as the comedy in the protagonists' efforts to maintain their notions of themselves as they are undermined both by their own impulses and by the dispiriting demands of the outside world.
Sansom has always liked his prefaces, disingenuously alerting the reader to the simplicity of his intentions, but this time he has saved his strategic self-deprecation for an extended afterword and a list of "Ten Good Reasons to Visit Northern Ireland", including Tayto crisps, traybakes, the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum - and peace and quiet. What seems likely is that Israel Armstrong, after his final realisations about Gloria and London, will get further opportunity to sample these delights back in Antrim, with a bit of detective work on the side, as the Mobile Library series rolls on.
Giles Newington is an Irish Times journalist