The Bad Book Affair. Ian Sansom

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      Israel peered at the girl Goth over his book—Infinite Jest. She did look familiar, the Goth, but then all Goths looked the same to him: pale faces, dark clothes, like priests, or Pierrots, or members of Parisian mime troupes. The only discernible difference between all of Tumdrum’s Goths seemed to be in size: there were fat ones, and thin ones, but nothing in between. There didn’t seem to be any such thing as a medium-sized Goth: Gothicism seemed to be a minimal and a maximal kind of a teenage subculture.

      ‘There are no medium Goths,’ he remarked idly to Ted one day.

      ‘A medium Goth is called an emo,’ said Ted. ‘Keep up, ye eejit.’

      Ted, of course, had no problem with Tumdrum’s Goths. Or the emos. Because, of course, Ted had no problem with anyone: Goths, emos, drunks, loonies, children, Mrs Onions, OAPs. As part-time driver of the mobile library, and proprietor-driver of Ted’s Cabs (‘If You Want To Get There, Call The Bear’), Ted knew everyone in town by name, and mostly from birth. He certainly knew all of Tumdrum’s Goths from when they were mewling and puking in the children’s book trough, and so was able to handle them with his usual aplomb, which mostly meant slagging, mocking and teasing them, but also allowing them to smoke on board the library when it was raining. Ted called the Goths the Whigmaleeries, or the Wee Yins.

      ‘And what are Whigmaleeries when they’re at home?’ asked Israel.

      ‘They’re Wee Yins,’ said Ted.

      So that had cleared that up.

      The young female Goth hovered nervously around the fiction shelves for a few moments, glancing over her black-jumpered shoulder.

      ‘Good morning, madam,’ said Israel, breaking the Gothic silence. ‘How can I possibly help you?’ He found sometimes that if he pretended to be positive and helpful it made him feel positive and helpful, for a brief moment at least. Were all positive and helpful people just pretending? ‘Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps?’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Edgar Allan Poe?’ he said. ‘Master of the macabre.’

      The girl looked blankly at him.

      ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just…You know. I like to guess sometimes which books people are going to borrow, just from the way they…You know…big…fat person, probably going to borrow a…diet book. Child, probably going to borrow…a children’s book…And a weird-looking person is probably going to…Anyway.’

      Israel looked at the young woman’s unsmiling face. Either that was very heavy make-up and eyeliner she was wearing, or she had a very pale complexion and hadn’t slept for weeks.

      ‘I’m looking for something…’ said the young woman. She looked around again, over her shoulder and lowered her voice. ‘From the Unshelved.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Israel, lowering his voice conspiratorially also. ‘Of course. The Unshelved.’

      ‘Yes.’

      Israel winked at her and reached down under the issue desk.

      The Unshelved was an unofficial category of books that the library service—under considerable pressure from representatives from churches, and so-called ‘community’ groups and local political parties—had agreed not to display on open shelves in the mobile library. The arrangement had been made long before Israel’s time in Tumdrum, but apparently, unbelievably, it had been agreed that because of the unique status of the mobile library—its stock being so small, and its serving such diverse communities—certain books would be kept under the issue desk, duly catalogued and available for loan but unseen by the young, the impressionable and the mentally infirm who thronged the van’s potentially virulent, morally infecting eight-foot-by-three-foot browsing area. Books in the Unshelved category included perennial favourites such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and American Psycho, and one or two racier titles such as Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden and The Hite Report. During quieter moments in isolated laybys Israel had been known to have an occasional glance at the latter titles. There was, it seemed, no limit to human ingenuity and imagination. He’d also spent one entire uneventful afternoon on the van counting the various offensive words in Lady Chatterley. Thirty fucks or fuckings; 14 cunts; 13 balls; 6 each of shit and arse; 4 cocks; and 3 pisses. Which was quite a lot, really, when you thought about it.

      Not that he agreed with censorship. Not at all. On the contrary. He did not agree with the Unshelved, on principle. As a north London Jewish vegetarian liberal freethinker—someone who would most certainly be reading the Guardian on a daily basis, if the Guardian were available on a daily basis in Tumdrum—Israel saw no problem with open access to all available books and to all of the rich and peculiar outpourings of the human mind. Once you were about eleven, frankly, in Israel’s opinion, you could and should be reading whatever was out there. You might not be able to drink alcohol, or marry, or drive a car, but surely you should be allowed to read Under the Volcano, and Madame Bovary, and Crash? How else were you going to learn? Personally, Israel had gone through all of William Burroughs, and D. H. Lawrence, and Norman Mailer, and Lolita in his local library back home in north London in his early teens, looking for the dirty bits, which usually someone else had already found and had marked on your behalf, and it hadn’t done him any harm at all. Or not much.

      The only books in the library that Israel had any real doubts about were in fact the young adult readers, which were proudly and openly displayed on the mobile on the ‘Teen Fiction’ shelves, in their garish jackets with their sub-literate jacket blurbs. Israel avoided uplifting, joyous, life-affirming reads as much as the next man—who cares about the Five People You Meet in Heaven with Morrie?—but even he found some of the young adult material depressing and creepy. In Israel’s experience as a librarian most young teenagers these days seemed to be reading deeply disturbing, adult-sanctioned psycho-sexual fantasies about zombies and vampires. This probably tells you something very profound about where we are as a society, but Israel would have needed the Guardian, or perhaps the Daily Telegraph, to remind him exactly what.

      The Goth waited patiently while Israel scooped up the dozen or so books from the shelf under the desk, and placed them on the table. It was always a slightly awkward moment, the displaying of the great Unshelved—you never knew if the borrower really was looking for George Orwell, or was really angling for Madonna’s Sex. Israel suspected that Nineteen Eighty-Four was borrowed more times out of embarrassment than out of choice. He always preferred to absent himself while the borrower…browsed.

      ‘I’ll, er…just tidy a few books here,’ he said.

      When the young woman’s nervous shuffling made it clear that she had made her decision, Israel swiftly and discreetly issued the books with half-closed eyes.

      ‘Thank you, then. Enjoy your reading!’

      Philip Roth. American Pastoral: the young woman would not be disappointed.

      Israel glanced at his watch.

      Eleven o’clock.

      Which in a town like Tumdrum, wherever you were, meant only one thing.

      Zelda’s.

      He called Gloria, again, quickly.

      

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