Perhaps...hard to say for sure, but it's certainly my favorite book of last year. And the winner is......
Darkmans by Nicola BarkerHere's a review from The Guardian (U.K.)A jester haunts this book. Not the story (though he does that, too), but the book itself, possessing the characters at inconvenient moments, forcing broken language out of their mouths and scattering it across the page, "ducking and diving between the words ... deceiving and then disappearing". For jesters, like clowns, are not actually about comedy, are they? They're about mischief, and malevolent mischief at that.
And so, in a way, is Nicola Barker. Through six novels and two short-story collections, she has made a virtue of dangerous play. She is a serious writer, certainly, maybe even a "serious" one, but it is difficult to think of another contemporary novelist who will so relentlessly pursue the truth and then punctuate it with a honking red nose, who will expose real pain and human complexity while at the same time squirting water in your eye. Each of her works brims with electricity, energy and invention, with rude humour, originality and contrariness. She is not to everyone's taste, but isn't that good reason to cherish her all the more?
Who else but Barker would produce an 838-page epic with little describable plot, taking place over just a few days and set in - wait for it - Ashford? For that's what Darkmans is, and it is phenomenally good.
The novel opens simply, with a meeting in a café between father and son. Beede is the father, a lifelong Ashford resident whose victory against the Channel Tunnel's destruction of a local landmark took a Pyrrhic turn and left him a small, embittered old man working in a hospital laundry. According to his son Kane, Beede celebrates a kind "immaculate dullness - he was the Virgin Mary of the long hour". And yet no one is ever that simple, especially in a Barker novel. For Beede's life has been ruined (for complicated reasons) by the theft of some antique tiles, and he has embarked on a mysterious project with the forger Peta Borough (an electric hand buzzer of a name) that seems to involve strange duplications and research into John Scogin, jester in the court of Edward IV.
Kane, meanwhile, "easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral)", deals prescription drugs, supplied by a hospital work colleague of Beede's. Kane's mother divorced Beede when he was young and then died after a long illness. After her death, Kane decided to style himself as the anti-Beede, and communication between the two has broken down so badly that not only is the meeting in the café accidental and surprising to both men, but neither will relent and tell the other what he's doing there.
Beede, it seems, is awaiting the arrival of Elen, a pretty chiropodist with mysterious bruises. Contrary to his dull persona, Beede has stolen some of Kane's drug stash, but are they for Elen or for her German husband Dory? Dory seems to suffer from a mental illness somewhere between narcolepsy and schizophrenia. In a daze and on horseback, he arrives at the same café as everyone else. Beede, ever steadfast, calms Dory down and leads him home, though Dory, who remembers nothing about stealing the horse, is growing more suspicious of both Beede's and Elen's motives.
Kane, meanwhile, returns home to find his ex-girlfriend, the endlessly profane teenager Kelly, waiting on his doorstep with a freshly broken leg, having fallen off a wall. Kelly is a member of the Broad family, a long line of thieves, chavs and drugheads who have spent most of their time making life miserable for the other residents of Ashford. She is being aided by Gaffar, a Kurdish repairman who, after a fight with Kane over the seriousness of Kelly's injuries, comes to work for him as a courier and also befriends Beede who, of course, shares a house with the son he barely talks to.
Then there is the matter of Fleet, son of Elen and Dory, an eerily gifted and strangely prescient boy who has building a painstaking model of the Cathedral of Saint-Cecile with matchsticks. To the growing alarm of Elen and Dory (and Kane, who involves himself with Elen simply because Beede has told him not to), Fleet knows impossible amounts of information about the same John Scogin that Beede is researching. And during Dory's hazy episodes, Fleet calls his father "John".
Which brings us back to the jester who haunts the book. The word "darkmans" is old thief cant for nighttime. But Barker, as ever, is far more interested in the flexibility of language than in simple, straightforward definitions. Darkmans in this novel is the night, yes, but it's also the weight of history pressing down on the present, sometimes suffocating it. Darkmans is also the dark man, Scogin himself, inhabiting the characters, driving them to acts of cruelty and comic destruction. Beede finds his back hunching and his feet literally curling. Dory unwittingly recreates some of Scogin's most notorious and disastrous pranks. And Kane sees visions of fire and speaks in words he's never heard before. History here is a joker, a malicious one happy to see you suffer. "John always comes back," Fleet says. "That's the whole point."
Because what is history but the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, the language that connects us to each other and to our pasts? But Barker's argument is more interesting than even that, for every time she suggests a larger scheme, she punctures the idea with a cutting remark until finally, in the last few pages, Peta seems to sum up this entire wonderful contrary sprawl of a novel by talking about the "absurd idea that language has these gaps in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through". When Kane points out that this "absurd idea" was Peta's own, she replies: "Nah. I probably just said what I needed to, so we'd both end up here."
So is ending up "here" worth all this length? Absolutely. Over all these hundreds of pages, Barker's linguistic energy never lets up. Not everything works equally well - a section on Kelly's cowboy builder uncle feels too familiar - but there are no doldrums, no loitering anywhere. Importantly, too, this is not a messy novel, despite its ostensibly freewheeling nature. It has been constructed very carefully, with artful clues and playful games, and though you may have to dig to unravel the full implications of the ending, the effort is worth it.
It is also very, very funny. Kelly's monstrous mother is "Jabba the Hut with a womb, chronic asthma and a council flat". Kelly herself protests to Gaffar that she's never done drugs, "apart from the odd bit of puff an' speed an' E, obviously". And Kane informs us, quite casually, "one irreducible fact is that people who climb mountains are invariably cunts".
Barker comes up with a particularly good device for Gaffar, who speaks broken English in the same font as the rest of the characters but switches to a baroque typeface when speaking highly eloquent Turkish, often in the course of a single sentence. Aside from almost backhandedly making a sharp point about the perception of immigrants and language, Gaffar is allowed hugely important monologues in which the only word the other characters can understand is "Thermos".
Most of all, Darkmans is a novel about language. Whatever its ability to connect human beings, whatever its false or true suggestions of real communication, language is un-containable. "Like a fast-running river. It bubbles up and splashes and spills." It is "sometimes more of a ... a roar, and sometimes just a titter. Sometimes a yuk-yuk-yuk or a hoarse guffaw or a tee-hee-hee, or a single, sharp Ha! (It [is] nothing if not variable)."
Darkmans is just the sort of bravura performance that will probably inspire vitriol in a certain breed of reviewer as too ostentatious, too brazen. Pity them, reader, for being unable to embrace such a loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. Barker is a great, restless novelist, and Darkmans is a great, restless novel. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren't 838 more.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Horwitz first led readers on an unexpected adventure in One for the Road (1988), a journey to the Australian Outback. Since then he’s ventured to the Middle East (Baghdad Without a Map), joined re-enactors at Civil War battle sites (
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