Darkmans

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmansis an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all... If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?

Darkmansis a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It's also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark - quite unspeakable - into its ear.

The third of Nicola Barker's narratives of the Thames Gateway, Darkmans is an epic novel of startling originality.

"There isn't much plot to Barker's Man Booker-shortlisted novel (after Clear and Behindlings), but a cast of eccentric characters, a torrent of inventive prose and an irresistible synthesis of wickedly humorous and unsettlingly supernatural elements more than compensate for the loose itinerary. The novel is set in a contemporaneous British district bisected by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel's international passenger station, a sore point for one of the central characters, cranky 61-year-old Daniel Beede, distraught at the loss of local landmarks. Beede is estranged from his prescription drug-dealing son Kane, though they share a flat, where Gaffar, a muscular Kurdish refugee with a rabid fear of salad greens, takes up residence. Beede is friends with Elen, a podiatrist, and with Isidore, Elen's paranoid and narcoleptic husband; their young son Fleet is a spooky prodigy who, in one of this intricate tale's several instances of mind-bending nuttiness, may actually be Isidore's ancestor from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by the boy's propensity for quoting bits of the biography of King Edward IV's court jester, one John Scogin, the dark man who haunts the book. Despite the story's plotless sprawl, any reader open to the appeal of an ambitious author's kaleidoscopic imagination will relish this bravura accomplishment." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'Tis the season of huge literary novels. Those of us for whom size matters welcome with holiday cheer Denis Johnson's 'Tree of Smoke,' James McCourt's 'Now Voyagers,' two new translations of Tolstoy's 'War and Peace,' Paul Verhaeghen's 'Omega Minor,' Alexander Theroux's 'Laura Warholic' and the 992-page 'Adventures of Amir Hamza,' an old Urdu saga (by way of Arabia and Persia) newly translated for... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the Modern Library. Crashing this boys' club from England comes Nicola Barker's 838-page 'Darkmans,' her seventh and longest novel and a finalist for this year's prestigious Man Booker Prize (which went to a much much shorter novel).

'Darkmans' records with manic energy a week in the chaotic lives of a dozen characters living in contemporary Ashford, near the British entrance to the Chunnel. The cast includes a prescription-drug dealer named Kane, his no-nonsense father, Beede, a foulmouthed teenager named Kelly (my fave), a displaced Kurd, a troubled married couple with a precocious son (he built a replica of the Cathedral of Sainte-Cecile from matchsticks), an antiques restorer/forger and the shadowy title character, who seems to be responsible for the occasional supernatural irruptions in the novel.

For something strange is happening to some of these characters: mental blackouts, hallucinations, hauntings, confrontations with malevolent birds and various signs and tokens of the late Middle Ages. Many of the latter concern John Scogin, court jester to Edward IV (who ruled 1461-83), and the famous book about him, 'Scogin's Jests,' which supplies some of the plot elements in 'Darkmans.' Britain no longer employs court jesters; novelists now may fill that function, a job open to members of either sex.

Despite the supernatural elements, 'Darkmans' isn't really an occult novel but a social comedy suggesting the modern world has reverted to the premodern culture of the 15th century, an era of spectacle and overindulgence, of superstition and conspicuous consumption. Beede owns a copy of Johan Huizinga's classic 'The Waning of the Middle Ages' and has underlined the sentence, 'So violent and motley was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.'

Life in Barker's England is likewise 'violent and motley,' bedeviled by many of the same problems we have here in 'Yank-land' (as one character calls it): drug abuse, overdevelopment, declining standards, racism and cultural illiteracy. And with a jester's license to speak truth to power, Barker conveys this in a motley style of great wit and daring. She relies heavily on idiomatic dialogue, deploys unconventional spacing and paragraphing, and exults in startling imagery and extended metaphors (with parenthetical asides), like this riff from Kane on his father's uncharacteristic refusal to meet his gaze:

'Unheard of! Beede was the original architect of the unflinching stare. Beede's stare was so steady he could make an owl crave Optrex. Beede could happily unrapt a raptor. And he'd done some pretty nifty groundwork over the years in the Guilt Trip arena (trip? How about a gruelling two-month sabbatical in the parched, ancient Persian city of Firuzabad? And he'd do your packing. And he'd book your hotel. And it'd be miles from the airport. And there'd be no (expletive) air conditioning). Beede was the hair shirt in human form.'

Barker also has invented an effective typographic device to indicate what a foreigner means to say while speaking broken English, but she doesn't coddle the reader with traditional transitions. You're often as much in the dark as the characters as to what exactly is happening, and you're propelled to read on to see not just what happens next but what Barker will do next with language. The novel's pages fly by, and it's a bloody larf, mate, due to the profane slang used by all classes of society. (On laundry challenges, the hostess of a dinner party observes, 'Bright whites can be such bastards to maintain, can't they?') Surprisingly for such a raucous novel, there's no sex in it.

Barker's extensive use of dialogue and her balancing act of serious theme/comic style remind me of the late William Gaddis, who likewise used 'The Waning of the Middle Ages' in his first novel, 'The Recognitions,' to show that in many quarters today it's as if the Enlightenment never happened. The ingenuity with which Barker weaves historical material into the fabric of modern life rivals that of Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon, though 'Darkmans' is somewhat easier to read than their novels. Indeed, Barker has more in common with male writers like these — add the late Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, David Foster Wallace and the aforementioned Alexander Theroux — than with her writing sisters. Barker once acknowledged this: 'A girl writer is something I never wanted to be. Girl writers don't get taken seriously. I am a boyish writer.'

Hilarious and erudite, spooky and unconventional, 'Darkmans' is a dazzling achievement. I haven't read this year's winner of the Man Booker Prize, but I suspect Nicola Barker was robbed."

Reviewed by Steven Moore, author of many books and essays on modern literature and currently writing a history of the novel, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"In this epic, delirium-inducing Mad Tea Party ride, we're parachuted into the lives of some eccentric English everymen.... it's a novel like no other — hilarious, bizarre, and possibly mind-altering. A-." Entertainment Weekly

"The hip, the square and the crazy trip over their pasts and each other in this boisterous latest from Barker... you'll find plenty to enjoy." Kirkus Reviews

"The book of the year for me — and I suspect it'll be a book of the many years to come — was Nicola Barker's Darkmans (Fourth Estate). It's a novel of prestigious craft, energy, risk, sleight of hand and linguistic generosity and acuity, and a funny, faster-than-virtual take on what's contemporary and what's history and how the twain meet and never will meet." Ali Smith, The Observer

"The Man Booker Prize is often criticised for being too serious and elitist. My gift to the naysayers is Nicola Barker's Darkmans, a tour-de-force of contemporary life set in Ashford, Kent. When it was long-listed, the writer and journalist D J Taylor described Darkmans as a 'left-field 838-page weird out'; and I celebrated. Barker is a comic genius. Her imagination is incendiary. Her subject matter is Tesco, daytime TV, builders, chiropody, the family outing from hell when Dad's kagool has not been packed. She is also fascinated by history and language. Darkmans is the novel of the decade." Ruth Scurr, The Daily Telegraph

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, "Darkmans" is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on the unsuspecting. The third of Barkers narratives of the Thames Gateway, this work is an epic novel of startling originality.

Nicola Barker is one of Britain's most original and exciting literary talents. She is the author of two short-story collections: Love Your Enemies [winner of the David Higham Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award] and Heading Inland [winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize]. Her previous novels are Reversed Forecast, Small Holdings, Wide Open Behindlings and Clear, the last of which was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. Her work is translated into twenty languages, and in 2000, she won the IMPAC Award for Wide Open. In 2003, Nicola Barker was named a Granta Best of British Novelist. She lives in London.