A Year in the ProvinceDoes literary humour exist as a genre these days? The modern comic novel seems rather lost. True, there are those insipid, gender-based affairs, in which women shop and worry about their weight, while men have trouble expressing their emotions until the last chapter. And there are all those pre-assembled parodies that follow successful novels like seagulls after a trawler, and are traditionally presented as unwanted Christmas gifts to unwanted relatives. Add the Dilbert collections and those little novelty boxes full of tat (”Zen garden in a matchbox!”) that appear every Christmas, and that’s the store humour buyer’s budget all used up. Humour as a literary—rather than cynically commercial—genre seems non-existent.

So I was interested to read A Year in the Province by Christopher Marsh. It’s a send-up of the expatriate memoir genre, a bit like those old Bill Forsyth role-reversal comedies, in which Andalucian Jesús Sánchez Ventura moves his family to Belfast in an attempt to engage with miserable, foul-weathered consumerism.

Here’s the beginning, with narrator Jesús in full flow:

My name is Jesús Sánchez Ventura, and this is the story of my quest for a better life. I will speak to you in English for the very simple reason that I am more than competent so to do. Perhaps you will from time to time find my language almost diabolically fluent. You must understand that it is learned from the classics of your literature rather than from the old man in your dingy northern pub or, worse still, from your televisual celebrities (I spit out the words with scorn). Every night, I go to bed with better men than they, with Shakespeare or Dickens or Wilde, and I know what I am doing.

From here, the narrative clambers enthusiastically from puns to conceptual gags, gradually thinning out the linguistic tangles in order to focus on a story of culture clash, academic bureaucracy, and marital paranoia, set superbly in a bewildering and contradictory post-Troubles Belfast. It’s drawn—perhaps inevitably—comparisons to Flann O’Brien.

Just as Jesús’ narrative is a caricature of a non-native speaker, the Belfast of the novel is also exaggerated to wonderful comic effect. And so we find multi-million pound tunnels being built under Belfast to accommodate the Orange marches, and a “Fun gun run” in which the members of various paramilitary organisations compete to turn in the most armaments:

Teams of one hundred individuals on each side spent a six-hour period jogging to and fro between a designated starting point in the city centre and the Lisburn Road police station, with the object of the competition being to establish which organisation could hand in to authorities illegal weaponry of the higher value. In view of the fact that all paramilitary groups had previously decommissioned ‘the totality of their weaponry’ in several occasions, there was an impressive array of hardware on display. The honours were shared fairly evenly until the republicans produced two ancient “Skud” missiles that nobody had even suspected them of possessing.

Elsewhere, jokes about Tim Henman might date quickly (and somebody should really tell the author that gravity still exists in a vacuum), but that’s okay—future generations can annotate these. A Year in the Province is a great modern comic novel. It makes me wonder, where are all the others?

A Year in the Province is published by Beautiful Books, an interesting new publisher that collects together three imprints—the other two being contemporary (urban?) list Burning House and horror list Bloody Books. For the moment, my eye’s on their principal list, which includes Marsh’s book and a fictional autobiography of Shakespeare (out soon in paperback—watch this space for a review).