Nicola Barker: Darkmans

[Stewart]

“If history is a sick joke”, the inside cover of Nicola Barker’s Darkmans says, “then who exactly might be telling it, and why?” It goes on to ask if it’s John Scogin, a 15th Century court jester. Given that the book is set in contemporary Ashford, Kent, then you’d be hard pressed to accept such nonsense. Yet, substitute history for Darkmans in that question and you know who is responsible. But after 838 pages, why?

You’d think, by looking at its cover, that Nicola Barker’s Booker shortlisted novel was some sort of gothic tale: the skeletal figure, the bold text, the door hinges. What it is, however, is a light romp jumping between a cast of quirky characters as they go about their business and slowly become obsessed with history - and history is something sorely lacking in sterile Ashford. Unfortunately, while I don’t mind a quirky text, I don’t like quirky characters all that much. Ergo I didn’t find much joy in Darkmans.

Of the cast, there’s Daniel Beede and his drug-dealing son, Kane. Kane employs Gaffar, a Kurd with an irrational fear of salad. Then there’s Kelly Broad, a girl with a broken leg who is Kane’s ex-girlfriend for whom Gaffar has the hots. Back to Beede, and there’s Elen, his chiropodist and her husband, Isidore (or Dory, for short) who is German - or isn’t. Together they have a son, Fleet, a child prodigy and a spooky little brat. And in the background, haunting the text, is the notion that John Scogin may just be the architect of all the strange happenings intruding upon their lives.

People come and go, the narrative leads off in one direction before fizzing out and being (sometimes) resumed at a later point. There are ambiguous interjections in paragraphs - mostly just monosyllabic grunts and the whole prose is weighed down by a knowing overuse of cliché, adverbs, and speech tags :

“Did you get rid of it?” he asked.
She smiled, her eyes shining.
Kane rubbed at his own eyes. He felt a little stupid. He steadied himself.
“Beede’s had that verruca since I was a kid,” he said slowly. “It was pretty bad.”
“I believe it was very painful,” she said, still smiling (as if the memory of Beede’s pain was somehow delightful to her).
He coldly observed the smile -
Is she mocking him?
Is she mocking me?
- then he gradually collected his thoughts together. “Yes,” he said stiffly, “I have one in almost exactly the same place, but it’s never really…”
His words petered out.

The text is certainly playful and Barker seems to be having a lot of fun here, whether it be puns or pop culture references that will date the book (very much the point, to maintain its history thread); or in the more textual experiments, such as Gaffar’s spoken Turkish presented in a different font. It’s all highly readable but I couldn’t find myself breaking the shell of Darkmans to engage with what was going on - I never took an interest in the characters, never felt part of the action. While I allowed myself to be carried along to the end, I was bored by the greater percentage of the book which showcased Barker’s fondness for whimsy. There were occasions when the dialogue would head off in a direction that may give clues to the text itself, but as to what those clues reveal, I’m lost for ideas. My suspicion was that Barker had taken historical events and rewritten them as mundane everyday happenings. But I’ll never truly know.

Being shortlisted for the Booker means that Darkmans will see more readers than may have been expected. I don’t think it’s a winner - it doesn’t make sense to award a book that doesn’t make sense. (Or perhaps, by that logic, it does.) Darkmans is a cryptic text where the meat behind it has been removed leaving over eight hundred pages of not much. With repeated readings perhaps it may give up its secrets but with frequently talk about history repeating itself and the weight of history pushing down on the modern day, I’m happy to relieve the pressure by not reading Darkmans again.

[fausto]

I think Funhouse loved this book. For me, it was a huge surprise. Tremendously enjoyable. Both the characters and the story kept coming back weeks after.

Bar the hyperbole, Steven Moore does a better job than me in explaining what's good about it:

The Past Looms Large

However, if you read French, I made my own attempt a while back:

http://table-rase.blogspot.com/2008/...verything.html

[Stewart]

Originally Posted by fausto

Bar the hyperbole, Steven Moore does a better job than me in explaining what's good about it:

He certainly does. Since I read it, I've had a number of comments on my blog telling me why it was so good and, having read much of the comments on the Booker forum last year, I know I was in a minority.

But I'm not alone as a common search term that finds my blog is explanation of darkmans. Rarely is it darkmans review.

I sort of see it now, and can remember the characters clearly, but just could never warm to the book.

[Eric]

As I was forcibly reminded tonight on Grumpy Old Women, albeit hardly the pinnacle of philosophical comment, that once you are more than what can be estimated as halfway through life, time is no longer endless.

So the thought of an 800-page novel is daunting. And I am also allergic to the endless generation of weird characters, such as Rushdie, Márquez and others produce, seemingly to show off about the fact that they have lived in the same world as the rest of us, or have read a few books, on which they can endless draw intertextual anecdotes.

So unless this book grabs me when I flick through it, next time I'm in a bookshop that stocks it, I'm going to concentrate on a tiny fraction of the thousands of other things I would like to read.

The parameters sound interesting: enlivening a killingly boring provincial town, as Fausto writes in his review. But yet another 800-page novel? Hubris or genius? It pulls out all the right stops, on the organ of contemporary British life. But before I get hold of a copy to judge, I will be rather negatively inclined towards it. The problem areas it takes up, according to Fausto, are highly relevant. But it's how she deals with them that I want to see, before committing myself to so many pages.

Fausto:

Et puis le style. Barker n’écrit ni mal, ni bien.

Curate's egg? Manic outpourings? I want to read good books, not ones that are stylistically in between.

[Mirabell]

yet another 800-page novel?

I am irresistibly drawn to thick novels. Always a good reason for buying a book.

[matt.todd]

Again, my thoughts are here.

This book is brilliant! Completely bonkers, but amazing. I was expecting something really heavy and dull - and long - but it is neither of those things. I'm still not totally sure what was going on half the time, but I would read it again to find out in an instant.

[miercuri]

I spotted two copies of Darkmans at the library of the local British Council. I was thinking of borrowing one for the winter break when I have more time on my hands. Judging by the size, I expect it to be pretty engaging.

[Funhouse]

Fausto was right (I belatedly reply). I did love this. Here's what I wrote at the time in the context of reading through last year's Booker shortlist:

I was intrigued by this 836 behemoth as soon as I heard about it, but put off reading it because of its sheer size. I could get wider coverage of the shortlist much more quickly by reading the other slim volumes in contention.

Well, it was certainly worth the wait (weight?) in the end, as I hefted the mammoth thing onto the tram and off for a couple of weeks, initially utterly perplexed, and gradually slightly less perplexed as I made my way through this very strange book.

Initial superficial impressions were not favourable. The book is printed in a sans serif font which may be fine for reading on screen, but does not look good on paper. Later in the novel it morphs into a germanic style font whenever someone speaks in a foreign language, a stylistic tic I actually quite like. The other thing that irritated me, though, was the bizarre paragraphing. Many of my students are under the impression that there are two sorts of paragraph breaks. One that requires an indent and one that necessitates merely a line break. Barker and/or her publishers are evidently suffering from the same misapprehension.

Quibbles aside, I was soon utterly entranced by the novel, which follows a group of interconnected characters around Ashford and its environs in south west England. Ashford is a very modern town, the gateway to the Channel Tunnel, but history is intruding in a very macabre and sometimes violent way. I guess you could call it a ghost story, but that doesn’t quite get to the nub of what this novel is about.
In fact, I’m still not really sure what the novel is about, despite having finished it and liking it immensely. If I had to pin it down is some way I would say that it’s a cross between a Haruki Murakami novel and the excellent Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. Barker has all of the weirdness and unexplained supernatural phenomena that Murakami employs, and as with his novels I was prepared to just accept the world on the author’s terms and go along for the rich and wonderful ride. In terms of subject matter and ‘feel’, it felt very close to Mantel’s novel, which also deals with ghosts and like Barker’s deals with very grim subject matter that is leavened by the blackest of humour. And it should be made clear that Darkmans is very funny.

The best thing that the novel does, however, is create characters with real emotional depth. Most of the characters are quite closed off particularly the father and son, Daniel and Kane Beede, who might be termed the main protagonists. But there’s enough space to slowly draw out their inner quirks and foibles and the pain that keeps them apart despite their physical proximity. They’re also given a wonderful supporting cast of oddballs and freaks, most endearingly (and amusingly) Gaffar, a Kurdish boxing champion who has a morbid fear of salad.

On the sentence level, Barker is perhaps not as impressive a writer as the likes of Anne Enright, but unlike Enright she’s got a hell of a story to tell, and it’s not like anything that you’ve ever read before. I still think that Lloyd Jones will take out the prize, but it would be real nice to see a book as odd as this one get all the publicity.

[Sevigne]

Me too. I love maximalist literature. I love a book that has everything in it but the kitchen sink.

Originally Posted by Mirabell

I am irresistibly drawn to thick novels. Always a good reason for buying a book.

[Colette Jones]

I didn't care for Darkmans. Had it been shorter I would have finished it though. It's the only one of the Booker shortlist I didn't finish that year, and also the only one I didn't like! I wasn't completely put off by the number of pages, but the quirkiness and (especially) "unexplainedness" going on for that long didn't appeal to me.