Home town blues

A preliminary riffle through this novel is not all that encouraging. Three pages of spoof Acknow- ledgments (‘some of them are dead; most of them are strangers; the famous are not friends’) range from Graham Swift to Jonathan Swift and from Stevie Wonder to Ralph Vaughan Williams. There is a spoof Preface and a spoof 19-page index of ‘Key Words, Phrases and Concepts’ of absolutely no use even to a reviewer in a hurry. The jacket quotations from reviews of the author’s previous The Truth About Babies are also clearly spoofs (‘A kind of phenomenology of fatherhood’, TLS, ‘It’s cute and it comes with sharp little teeth’, RTE Guide, ‘Just naff’, the Times). Facetiousness is fine at a dinner party, in a pub or in Private Eye. But on this scale in a novel it not merely ceases to amuse but becomes exasperating.

Fortunately, all forebodings of worse to come prove to be baseless once one has dug into the actual text. Here, in its quirky, perky and intermittently moving way, is an admirable novel on the theme of mutability. Famous for being the seventh son of a seventh son, Davey Quinn returns to his home town after 20 years of drifting, to find that it has changed out of all recognition. The ring road of the title has now become an imprisoning circle, isolating and diminishing the Quinn family bungalow. It has also led to the destruction of a host of much loved landmarks.

With elegiac vividness Sansom contrasts the ramshackle, run-down, cosy world of the past with the neon-lit, concrete, brash one that has taken its place. He then proceeds to show the effect of time not merely on the town but also on its inhabitants.