The Good Mayor
BY Andrew Nicoll
Black & White, 360pp, £10 FEW DEBUT NOVELISTS MANAGE to get themselves noticed over the tide of well-known authors whose works fill our bookshops, but Andrew Nicoll's The Good Mayor almost c
ertainly will.
Tibo Krovic is the hero of Nicoll's enchanting novel. He is the Mayor of Dot, a town on the Baltic sitting on the River Ampersand and not far from the port of Dash. Nicoll's love of punctuation is as good a device as any to capture a slightly fantastical world, somewhere rooted in a kind of 1950s realm of trams, coal barges and paper memos – certainly not e-mails – but divorced enough from the rest of the world to keep the action completely contained.
Tibo has been in love with his secretary, Agathe Stopak, for years but has never plucked up the courage to tell her. An incident with a lunch box and a fountain changes all that. There is also an old, good-natured witch, a fat, snobbish lawyer, a reprobate painter and a mysterious troupe of circus performers, seen by some but not by others.
While The Good Mayor is a love story, it is more about love than about a love affair. It deals, in its own, self-contained way, with love, loss, life, friendship and loyalty. It is also a book about contrasts – unrequited love and passionate lust, a grossly obese man whose hobby is writing on tiny grains of rice, friends who are real and friends who are imaginary – and there is also quite a lot about dogs, or at least people with canine attributes.
But where The Good Mayor really succeeds is in the quality of the writing. As Nicoll states in the book: "This story is much more about the telling than the things that happen in it," and it is the telling of the story that really works. Nicoll is not wordy; rather, his writing is sparse but beautifully poised. His imagery is sometimes good enough to make you gasp and, over everything, there is a sense of freshness. This is not a book by a new writer finding his voice: Nicoll's really appears to be a voice that has been polished for some time but which is only now finding its audience.
The flip side is that The Good Mayor is not plot-heavy. Some readers may grumble that not enough happens through the middle section, when Tibo's love affair starts to blossom. There is also a sense in which the first chapter does not sit comfortably with the rest of the book. It reads as if it were written in isolation, in an attempt to set the scene – but without the subtle style of the rest.
The humour in the first few pages is more reminiscent of Tom Sharpe than anything else, but as soon as the story really starts, the writing is lighter and more assured and the humour stronger, because it is written with a more confident touch and not pushed to the limit as it is in the first chapter. There are still absurdist elements throughout the novel, but they tend to add to, rather than detract, from the plot.
The Good Mayor isn't a quick, pacy read. Developments in the story are slow and subtle. It is also occasionally bleak and there is a darkly surreal streak which can take the plot in odd, if interesting, directions. But, as Nicoll points out near the end of novel: nothing is as it seems – which is a pretty good summation of life in Dot.
It is also a fairly good description of the author himself. Nicoll is a former lumberjack and veteran Sun journalist – yet, here he is, breaking down any preconceptions about what career choices might say about character, writing a gentle love story with well-rounded characters and refreshingly original descriptive passages.
The full article contains 651 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
