Something of the Night - review

Something of the Night
by Ian Marchant
(Simon & Schuster, £14.99)

There's a footnote on Page 8 of this book which reads: "It isn't necessary for you to have read my other books in order to understand this one, but it is necessary that you buy them." It's a good joke, but it also tells us something about Marchant's career: he seems to write books about any old thing.

The first one I read was Parallel Lines, which was about Britain's rail network. It was geekily fascinated by the detail, yet somehow Marchant pulled off the trick of also being funny and interesting at the same time. Then three years later I read The Longest Crawl, in which he and a friend go on a pub crawl starting in the Scilly Isles and ending up in Shetland, taking in and passing on a lot of pub-related lore, both personal and national, en route. It was delightful, and I strongly recommend it.

Something of the Night is perhaps harder to classify. It is loosely themed on what we do during the hours of darkness - by all means think of the obvious things - but is also packed with personal stories. It is a kind of autobiography. An assistant in a proper bookshop would undergo some hesitation as to which section of the place the book should go in. Memoir? Anthropology? Sociology?

The form of the book goes like this: Marchant arrives at his friend Neil's place in West Cork after a 300-odd-mile drive from Belfast to buy some weed. They stay up and talk. Well, mostly Ian talks. From time to time Neil says something along the lines of how it sometimes helps him to concentrate on what Ian's saying by shutting his eyes and snoring a bit.

Marchant digresses: the subjects he covers include straw mattresses, fireworks, Bonfire Night in Lewes, pop music, floodlit football matches ("Last night I dreamt I went to Wembley again," begins one chapter, which of course works best if you pronounce it "Wemberley"), service stations, the sad fortunes of the Northern Irish linen industry, an ex-girlfriend who "asked me at what stage in a duck's life-cycle it turned into a swan" (there's quite a lot about ex-girlfriends of his in this book), the risk of us being hit by an enormous meteorite, how wonderful Trinity College, Cambridge is ("even your wackos out-wacko everyone else"), how profoundly hateful Christianity's hatred of sex is (he is, though, for the record, a Christian), the ethics of prostitution, hippies, modern druids, curfews, the origin of the word "lantern", nightingales, death...

Do you get the idea? It's reminiscent of Nick Hornby or Bill Bryson - if you like those writers you'll love Marchant - but somehow less needy than Hornby and less reliant on the joke than Bryson. It looks as though it risks being a self-indulgent mess but it isn't. Marchant somehow carries us through all this, with patience, good humour, self-lacerating honesty and an immense amount of charm. I don't see how anyone could fail to like it.