Let me pick up from the previous post which fumbled around in the dark for a general sense of Englishness. Living abroad puts you in an advantageous position within which to ruminate about such matters - you are continuely confronted by who it is that you are or, more particulally, who people assume you are. Never happy with a sense of Englishness which reduces me to reciting a literny of people and events - Churchill, Paul Mccartney, Gracie Fields or 1966, 1939-45 etc it is the 'everyday' sense of how you are that roots you. Michael Billig identified this as 'banal nationalism' a universal phenomenon which does not involve flag-waving but is a means through which the nation is constantly flagged in the most mundane of circumstances.
All this came to mind when reading a review, available here, of the recently published novel 'Ring Road' by Ian Sansom. The unspoken subject appears to be Britishness, rather than Englishness, made that much more intriguing since the novel appears to be set in Northern Ireland where Britishness is frequently contested. Yet what seems to find a place here is not the assertive, bowler hatted Britishness of Ulster Unionism but a Britishness that anyone familiar with the UK from St Ives to Gallashields or Southend to Larne would instantly recognise.
It is the Britishness of the everyday which the reviewer, Geraldine Bedell, highlights in the novel:
Ordinariness is not much in demand any more. Even reality TV shows claiming to explore the lives of the unfamous turn their subjects into stars, into Jade Goody-style spectacle, fodder for Heat magazine. The genuinely ordinary - the sort of people who might wear skirts with elasticated waists, eat fish fingers for tea and worry vaguely about fungal infections on their feet (people, in other words, who are like us in ways we might prefer not to mention but know to be true) - are beneath general notice. Except in novels.
Layering detail on wry detail, Ian Sansom has built up a complex, vivid and convincing panorama of life in an unnamed town (presumably in Northern Ireland, where the author lives) that remains obstinately ordinary. In this place, Bob Savory, the owner of the Speedy Bap! sandwich business (and author of a cookery book of the same name) is as close to a celebrity as they've got or as anyone wants. This is a town where a car park going pay and display is a big controversy; where, despite the recent preference for avocados over turnips, fresh herbs remain a rumour.
She goes on:
The tone is part elegy, part satire, part howl, and very, very funny. I laughed more times than I can remember over a novel for years. Sansom is a master of the dying fall and the punchline that jumps out of nowhere; his real subject is language, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world, and those we use in self-deceit. He revels in marketing speak, in starter homes and u-PVC windows in the new upmarket housing development, Woodsides: 'Which is something of a misnomer because they had to cut down the wood to build the houses.'
He loves names of hairdressers (Upper Cutz, located near Inspirationz, the cards and novelties shop, and Sew Biz, where the Romanian lady alters garments), bakers (the brown-and-yellow cake shop) and supermarkets (Supa Valu) and the way that the promises implied by the names, the invitations to sample wares, are invariably not quite fulfilled...
This sounds like home to me...