Ian Sansom, The Case of the Missing Books

Israel Armstrong, the protagonist of Ian Sansom's fish-out-of-water story, is the sort of character Hugh Grant might play, all bumbling and hapless, if Hugh Grant were Jewish and had a paunch. Israel has left his home and girlfriend behind in London to take up a job as a librarian in Tumdrum, County Antrim, in Northern Ireland. Once arrived, however, he finds the library shuttered and his job description much altered: rather than manning a civilized circulation desk, Israel is to run a mobile library out of the back of a broken-down bus. Provided, that is, that he can find the town's 15,000 missing books.

During his quest, Israel is thrown into bizarre circumstances, innumerable bad things happen to him, and he is forced to interact with an endless stream of quirky locals. Think Hugh Grant in Northern Exposure.

The book is meant to be charming, and on paper it sounds as though it should be. Yet it never quite worked for me. The locals are odd but not particularly interesting, and the dialogue often strains too hard for quirky misunderstanding:

"'Are yous the new librarian?'

'Who?'

'Yous?'

'Me?' Israel looked over his shoulder: were there more of him?"

There's an awful lot of dialogue like that, filled with halting speech and almost willful misapprehension. It might work on screen, but not on the page.

I wanted quirky and charming and Alexander McCall Smith-iness. Mostly I was just bored.