The Roofer

Our reviewer finds Ansible’s Libresse Prize-winning tale of a hard-drinking, hard-smoking itinerant roofer charming, subtle, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The Roofer, by A.A.N. Ansible
Polar Books, 1750 pp, £45.00, July 2018

“Ah jus’ farkin’ lay rooves.” Or does she? The Roofer — the real name of Ansible’s protagonist is never revealed to us — travels through Europe laying ‘rooves’. It is a damning indictment of the author that we are never quite certain whether this mis-spelling of the plural is an evocative evocation of the narrator’s native Kiwi or simply a pudding-worthy proof of poor proof-reading. No matter: along the way, our Roofer meets other lost souls who drink almost (but never quite) as much as she does. Ultimately, her journey has no discernible destination: she ends the novel back in rural Germany, penniless and condemned to wander in search of menial employment, competing against the rest of her rootless generation.

The central metaphor of the book — the roof over our heads as protection from the elements, but a form of protection that needs to be continuously tended and renewed lest it wither away and leave us exposed to the “endless storm of living” (as Ansible writes, channeling Yeats) — is ultimately too blunt to be compelling. Yes, life is a terrible storm, and yes, we all need protection from it. But is a roof really the protection we seek? No: the correct response to life’s traumas is to learn to dance in the rain. This book never learns to do that, and is all the poorer for it.

Although the chapter-long digressions on roofing technique, drawing on Ansible’s own experience as an itinerant labourer and recalling Melville’s miscellany of digressive essays in Moby-Dick, make for compelling reading, any lasting impression The Roofer aims to create is washed away on a tide of Jägerbombs and sundry cheap drinks. Ansible succeeds in compelling the reader to share The Roofer’s ennui, but the unending rounds of alcohol leave a sour taste in the mouth.

“Ah,” as Browning once observed, “but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp/ Or what’s a heaven for.” Ansible clearly shares Browning’s sentiments, but one questions whether the novel really had to reach quite as far as 1750 pages. In a very literal sense, this reviewer found the tome exceeding their grasp. The Great American novel is, of course, as good a hill to die on as any small mound, and Ansible has clearly decided that she wants to make her own foolish stand there. The fact that her novel centres on an Antipodean travelling through Europe is, frankly, no obstacle. The meandering plot and loose prose is.