All human life is there

This book kept reminding me of Robin Williams in One Hour Photo. Just as his character spied on customers’ private lives while developing their pictures, so Chris Paling gets to know the readers at the library where he works. Unlike Williams he doesn’t follow them home at the end of the day (in fact some of the female librarians have the opposite problem), but Paling’s anonymous, functional role lets him observe without being observed. He sees the woman with two small children who takes out Is Daddy Coming Back in a Minute?, explaining sudden death to children in words they can understand. The ‘effete, shaven-headed man in a well-cut suit’ who angrily discusses his new shrink on his mobile phone. The woman who snaps at her husband to hide the tube of Anusol he’s just bought, then orders: ‘Now choose your books.’

What makes Paling so suited for the role is his career as a novelist. Transferring the ‘show don’t tell’ rule to this work of non-fiction, he simply reports on events and lets his material do the work. We meet the regulars, from the table-seeking students who surge in as the doors open ‘like a crowd at a Harrods sale’, to Mrs Stone, who ‘resembles both in sight and odour a compost heap over which a tarpaulin has been thrown’. She’s returning French Women Don’t Get Facelifts: Aging with Attitude. There are several wonderful appearances by Trish, one of a group of adults who attend the library every week with their carers. On one visit she points at a Kiss CD, its cover showing the band in their usual make-up, and asks Paling: ‘Is he a cat?’

Much of the dialogue is worthy of Alan Bennett. A woman states she’s been a library member ‘for donkey’s horses’.