Ring Road
Ian Sansom Fourth Estate, 388pp, £12.99
ISBN 0007156537
You don't hear much about small towns in the UK. When we say "town" we generally mean London, and when we don't say town, we mean countryside. There is nothing much in popular culture between these extremes save the occasional visit to Aidensfield, which is really just a glorified village, or Weatherfield, which is really just a back-lot in Salford, or Ballykissangel, which is in Ireland. One of the few great small towns in literature is Llareggub, the setting for Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, which, like Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, was created for radio, an old-fashioned medium that still has some dealings with small towns.
The nameless town in Ian Sansom's first novel, Ring Road, barely has a radio station, but it does have its own newspaper, the Impartial Recorder, edited by Colin Rimmer, whose attempts to keep pace with small-town events are necessarily doomed. "There's a surfeit out there," he complains, "more stories than we can ever know what to do with, and even a paper is only just scratching the surface." Like Sansom, Rimmer sets out to write a novel, but this, too, is problematic:
Colin was having problems with the plot. Having spent years peering behind the scenes of everyday life, he found that he had an excess of story: he had become overcome by story, in fact, and was unable to make any sense of it.
Rimmer's labours are motivated by the pathetic hope of a Watergate-style scoop, but Sansom's own reasons for chronicling a decade in the life of an imaginary Northern Irish town remain obscure. In an improbably mawkish preface, he writes that he did it to remind himself of "the many different ways in which people live their lives" - a reason that could be used to justify Five Go Off In a Caravan or War and Peace, but which does not explain why he has produced a novel in 21 more or less self-contained chapters, featuring a cast of thousands and little in the way of plot.
Scattered references to Dante suggest a grander ambition: the town is an allegory for modern Britain, a void circled by a ring road "which has stretched and uncoiled itself" around the old centre. Everything is rewritten by the road: the rubble of the secondary school is used as infill; the town unfurls towards Bloom's shopping mall and the "high-spec" housing developments on the periphery - all put up by Frank Gilbey, the local developer. According to Billy Nibbs, binman turned author, Gilbey ranks "just above the panderers and seducers, and just below those who had given in to unnatural lust". Accompanied by our nameless first-person narrator, we move through the first circle of this small-town Inferno and meet the countless lost souls within.
As hells go, it's pretty cosy. Our guide smooths over anything traumatic with routine blandishments: "You might ask what is death to an eight-year-old - what can he possibly understand about it? Well, death is presumably exactly the same for an eight-year-old as it is for the rest of us, nothing more and nothing less: it's a complete shock." Well, yes, if we were all as easily shocked as eight-year-olds, and if eight-year-olds really experience such bland emotions. Does Sansom intend this bizarre claim to be ironic, satirical, or just comforting? The tone throughout - preface, footnotes, index and acknowledgements - suggests reassurance, as though Nigel Slater had built a novel out of comfort food. And Ring Road is rather like a Slater recipe - as nostalgic as sucking your thumb, and about as significant.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
