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Thames Gateway #3
Darkmans
If history is just a sick joke, then who exactly is telling it and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive? Or is it Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote Scogin's biography? This is a modern tale about two familiar subjects - love and jealousy.
838 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
157 people are currently reading
3956 people want to read
About the author
Nicola Barker
35 books305 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Nicola Barker is an English writer.
Nicola Barker’s eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in East London.
Nicola Barker is an English writer.
Nicola Barker’s eight previous novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden Prize), Wide Open (winner of the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and Clear (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2004). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in East London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 324 reviews
April 18, 2012
I was stunned. I was bored. I laughed. I sighed. I was disturbed. I was elated. I couldn't put it down. I dreaded having to pick it up. I chortled. I grunted. I embraced this tome's rogue's gallery. I was exasperated by them. I was moved. I was impatient. I was apprehensive. I was excited. I felt stirrings. I lengthened and shortened. I smiled. I frowned. I snorted. I rolled my eyes. I dug for nuggets. I backslid. I was propelled by its ebullience. I held my breath. I farted. I zoned right in. I was fist-punched by history. I was rabbit-punched by melancholy. I consumed it by the light of day. I devoured it beneath the cold night glowering. It accompanied me to the bathroom. I marveled at the book's thickness. I inhaled its fragrant pages. I was bracketed by its sans-serif typography. I cradled it. I thumbed backwards and re-read at leisure. I was inspired. I book-dreamed. I was exhausted. I was entertained. I was impressed. Deeply impressed. All of this is to say that I loved Darkmans and I think Barker's one mightily talented glimmer gal.
This phone directory of effervescent fiction is a bit of a stumper, no question about it. Eight hundred and thirty-eight entertaining and mostly brilliant pages under the belt and several days to chew the whole shebang over, and I still cannot ascertain, with any degree of certainty, what exactly transpired to a select crew of the denizens of Ashford, a coastal town in Kent that is linked to, and given new life by, the Channel Tunnel. Ashford is a curious and, at times, alienating mix of the thoroughly modern surrounding a medieval core, the transient and ephemeral laid to drape over a foundation much more rooted within the pregnant past of England's well-watered history.
These denizens who comprise Barker's narrative core—the estranged father and son pairing of Beede and Kane; Beede's demi-German friend Isidore and his bewitching chiropodist wife Elen (whom said father and son simultaneously pine for) together with their borderline autistic five-year old son, Fleet; Kane's newly acquired personal assistant Gaffar, a transplanted Turkish Kurd with claims to a most sanctified lineage; and Kane's teenage ex-girlfriend Kelly Broad, a chav's chav, along with various relations from her locally notorious family—all appear to be afflicted by the baleful and mischievous spirit of one John Scogin, a rather errant and, at times, nasty individual who served as jester to the court of Edward IV back in the days of the War of the Roses. Scogin, the Darkman of the title, appears as a haunting presence with a proclivity for the invasion and possession of these intertwined individuals, who are all caught-up in their own intricately structured travails; but he also serves as a nominal representation of history, and the many ways that history, utterly permeated as it is within the physical world that surrounds us, has of overtaking us as we wend our way throughout daily life and springing all manner of unexpected, unwanted, and unpredictable traps.
Several people have described Darkmans as being plotless, but that's inaccurate and unwarranted; the plot consists of the interlinked pathways that each of the characters wanders during the course of the story's unfolding, beginning with a chance meeting between the prescription drug-dealing Kane and his austerely efficient and modernity-antipathetic father, Beede (in personality not unlike the Venerable forebear whose name, less one e, he shares). The impish spirit of Scogin appears to be inhabiting the body of Isidore, who has become prone to memory lapses and odd behaviors; but, as the story progresses, secondary characters are introduced and/or whisked away, and these Ashfordites become more involved in the affairs of each other, their linkages with the past—old guilts, grudges, betrayals, affairs, conquests, mistakes, and erroneous decisions—show themselves to share a commonality that none, alone, would have ever anticipated. And each of them in their turn—Elen, Fleet, Beede, Kane—come to exhibit the signs of being possessed by this Scogin for reasons that are beyond their ken.
So here's the skinny: I truly enjoyed Darkmans and all of the wonderful touches Barker provides throughout: effectively natural dialogue that parks the reader right within the conversational flow; absurd and comic antics abutting creepy and tense situations; splendid set-pieces that perfectly compliment each other, even when seeming superfluous to the story's progression; dips across time to flesh out personal histories; and the references to Scogin and his bounty of clever, but cruel, tricks and his connexions across the tenebrous strands of time with these twenty-first century inhabitants—indeed, a microcosm of modern England offering a window into a corner of Kent that wonderfully captures the present with all of its quirks and contradictions.
Barker cleverly allows room for differing interpretations of what each afflicted character is undergoing: is it possession by a mischievous, potentially malevolent ghost? Or is it perhaps a chemical reaction to widely spread prescription drugs? A shared hallucination? Eerie and intangible psychic linkages? Personal mental illness that flowers within a common genetic bed? Delusions given form and function by the suggestive powers of an artist's hand? Or is it History, in all of its juggernaut glory, crumbling individual lives like miniaturized bowling pins on its unending and unendable quest to resolve itself. I found it highly impressive how Barker tailored each possession to suit the invaded character's personality and past, and to display itself in a way that accommodated the future result each was (knowingly or not) setting themselves up, in both past and present actions, to realize. A book that undoubtedly will reward a second reading, Darkmans has left me hungry for more fiction from Nicola Barker.
This phone directory of effervescent fiction is a bit of a stumper, no question about it. Eight hundred and thirty-eight entertaining and mostly brilliant pages under the belt and several days to chew the whole shebang over, and I still cannot ascertain, with any degree of certainty, what exactly transpired to a select crew of the denizens of Ashford, a coastal town in Kent that is linked to, and given new life by, the Channel Tunnel. Ashford is a curious and, at times, alienating mix of the thoroughly modern surrounding a medieval core, the transient and ephemeral laid to drape over a foundation much more rooted within the pregnant past of England's well-watered history.
These denizens who comprise Barker's narrative core—the estranged father and son pairing of Beede and Kane; Beede's demi-German friend Isidore and his bewitching chiropodist wife Elen (whom said father and son simultaneously pine for) together with their borderline autistic five-year old son, Fleet; Kane's newly acquired personal assistant Gaffar, a transplanted Turkish Kurd with claims to a most sanctified lineage; and Kane's teenage ex-girlfriend Kelly Broad, a chav's chav, along with various relations from her locally notorious family—all appear to be afflicted by the baleful and mischievous spirit of one John Scogin, a rather errant and, at times, nasty individual who served as jester to the court of Edward IV back in the days of the War of the Roses. Scogin, the Darkman of the title, appears as a haunting presence with a proclivity for the invasion and possession of these intertwined individuals, who are all caught-up in their own intricately structured travails; but he also serves as a nominal representation of history, and the many ways that history, utterly permeated as it is within the physical world that surrounds us, has of overtaking us as we wend our way throughout daily life and springing all manner of unexpected, unwanted, and unpredictable traps.
Several people have described Darkmans as being plotless, but that's inaccurate and unwarranted; the plot consists of the interlinked pathways that each of the characters wanders during the course of the story's unfolding, beginning with a chance meeting between the prescription drug-dealing Kane and his austerely efficient and modernity-antipathetic father, Beede (in personality not unlike the Venerable forebear whose name, less one e, he shares). The impish spirit of Scogin appears to be inhabiting the body of Isidore, who has become prone to memory lapses and odd behaviors; but, as the story progresses, secondary characters are introduced and/or whisked away, and these Ashfordites become more involved in the affairs of each other, their linkages with the past—old guilts, grudges, betrayals, affairs, conquests, mistakes, and erroneous decisions—show themselves to share a commonality that none, alone, would have ever anticipated. And each of them in their turn—Elen, Fleet, Beede, Kane—come to exhibit the signs of being possessed by this Scogin for reasons that are beyond their ken.
So here's the skinny: I truly enjoyed Darkmans and all of the wonderful touches Barker provides throughout: effectively natural dialogue that parks the reader right within the conversational flow; absurd and comic antics abutting creepy and tense situations; splendid set-pieces that perfectly compliment each other, even when seeming superfluous to the story's progression; dips across time to flesh out personal histories; and the references to Scogin and his bounty of clever, but cruel, tricks and his connexions across the tenebrous strands of time with these twenty-first century inhabitants—indeed, a microcosm of modern England offering a window into a corner of Kent that wonderfully captures the present with all of its quirks and contradictions.
Barker cleverly allows room for differing interpretations of what each afflicted character is undergoing: is it possession by a mischievous, potentially malevolent ghost? Or is it perhaps a chemical reaction to widely spread prescription drugs? A shared hallucination? Eerie and intangible psychic linkages? Personal mental illness that flowers within a common genetic bed? Delusions given form and function by the suggestive powers of an artist's hand? Or is it History, in all of its juggernaut glory, crumbling individual lives like miniaturized bowling pins on its unending and unendable quest to resolve itself. I found it highly impressive how Barker tailored each possession to suit the invaded character's personality and past, and to display itself in a way that accommodated the future result each was (knowingly or not) setting themselves up, in both past and present actions, to realize. A book that undoubtedly will reward a second reading, Darkmans has left me hungry for more fiction from Nicola Barker.
November 24, 2012
Such a great cover, too.
This is what Nicola Barker does. Here she's talking about what her character Elen does. She's a chiropodist.:
On a good day she was a Superman or a Wonderwoman,
doggedly fighting foot-crime and the causes of foot-crime (usually - when all was finally said and done - the ill-fitting shoe . . . Okay, so it was hardly The Riddler, or The Penguin, but in a serious head-to-head between a violent encounter with either one of these two comic-book baddies and an eight-hour, minimum-wage shift behind the bar of a 'happening' Ashford night-spot with a corn the size of a quail's egg throbbing away under the strappy section of your brand-new, knock-off Manolo Blahniks . . . Well . . . it'd be a pretty close call).Elen firmly believed that she was making a difference. She was nothing less than an evangelist for the foot. She was a passionate devotee. She worshipped at the altar of the arch and the heel. Sometimes it wasn't easy. The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages ('yer dogs', 'yer plates', 'yer hoofs'). No one really gave a damn about it (although - fair's fair - the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen's view, the short-fall still fell . . . well, pretty damn short). The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly ... the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet. But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Cote du Tawdry). The foot lived in purdah - in cold climes particularly. It was hidden away, crammed inside, squeezed.
Nicola Barker's middle name is ebullient. She hammers things into the ground, bulldozes, steamrollers, she overwhelms with a rich rash rush of verbiage, throws the kitchen sink in and the neighbour's - oh, now I'M doing it too! It's not that hard, evidently. The tone, as you see, is mildly humorous, almost mildly mocking, certainly not serious. Very occasionally she is funny, as opposed to mildly humorous. This book is so mild and desperate for a cuddle. So by page 200 she's invented a small cast of mildly caricatured oddballs set in the present day (they buy books over the internet and everything) and bathed them all in an unstoppable torrential gush of slightly, occasionally humorous commentary. Also, I have been peering through a powerful book-telescope but I have yet to distinguish anything which appears to be a plot, a story, a narrative, although a couple of Last Mimzy kids have now hoved into view so maybe it will turn into some kind of tepidly funny science fiction which is the very kind of science fiction I can't say I'm much of a fan of. Still, I'll give it another 200 pages.
One week later
No, I won't, and my week-ago self can't make me by jumping into a time machine and appearing in front of me with a haughty sneer. Nicola Barker finally made me give up by writing a 10 page skit about a dodgy builder which was as deeply unfunny as British comedy unfortunately frequently can be. It was dire, it was obvious, it was as lame as a three legged dog. So, in the words of many Samuel Beckett characters, I can't go on.
This is what Nicola Barker does. Here she's talking about what her character Elen does. She's a chiropodist.:
On a good day she was a Superman or a Wonderwoman,
doggedly fighting foot-crime and the causes of foot-crime (usually - when all was finally said and done - the ill-fitting shoe . . . Okay, so it was hardly The Riddler, or The Penguin, but in a serious head-to-head between a violent encounter with either one of these two comic-book baddies and an eight-hour, minimum-wage shift behind the bar of a 'happening' Ashford night-spot with a corn the size of a quail's egg throbbing away under the strappy section of your brand-new, knock-off Manolo Blahniks . . . Well . . . it'd be a pretty close call).Elen firmly believed that she was making a difference. She was nothing less than an evangelist for the foot. She was a passionate devotee. She worshipped at the altar of the arch and the heel. Sometimes it wasn't easy. The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages ('yer dogs', 'yer plates', 'yer hoofs'). No one really gave a damn about it (although - fair's fair - the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen's view, the short-fall still fell . . . well, pretty damn short). The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly ... the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet. But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Cote du Tawdry). The foot lived in purdah - in cold climes particularly. It was hidden away, crammed inside, squeezed.
Nicola Barker's middle name is ebullient. She hammers things into the ground, bulldozes, steamrollers, she overwhelms with a rich rash rush of verbiage, throws the kitchen sink in and the neighbour's - oh, now I'M doing it too! It's not that hard, evidently. The tone, as you see, is mildly humorous, almost mildly mocking, certainly not serious. Very occasionally she is funny, as opposed to mildly humorous. This book is so mild and desperate for a cuddle. So by page 200 she's invented a small cast of mildly caricatured oddballs set in the present day (they buy books over the internet and everything) and bathed them all in an unstoppable torrential gush of slightly, occasionally humorous commentary. Also, I have been peering through a powerful book-telescope but I have yet to distinguish anything which appears to be a plot, a story, a narrative, although a couple of Last Mimzy kids have now hoved into view so maybe it will turn into some kind of tepidly funny science fiction which is the very kind of science fiction I can't say I'm much of a fan of. Still, I'll give it another 200 pages.
One week later
No, I won't, and my week-ago self can't make me by jumping into a time machine and appearing in front of me with a haughty sneer. Nicola Barker finally made me give up by writing a 10 page skit about a dodgy builder which was as deeply unfunny as British comedy unfortunately frequently can be. It was dire, it was obvious, it was as lame as a three legged dog. So, in the words of many Samuel Beckett characters, I can't go on.
January 26, 2015
A strange book, which can be funny, moving, thought-provoking – as well as frustrating. But then it is set in Ashford, which is all of those things and less. The plot is hard to summarise, although as a reader you'll probably be more preoccupied with unpicking the Byzantine web of connections which links the cast. The nearest thing to a central character is Kane, a layabout and amiable drug-dealer; he has a strained relationship with his father Beede, who works at the local hospital. Both of them are infatuated with a chiropodist called Elen, whose half-German husband Dory suffers from schizophrenic episodes during which he appears to be possessed by the spirit of a medieval jester. Their son, Fleet, has preternatural awareness and is building a fourteenth-century French cathedral out of matchsticks. A Kurdish immigrant, Gaffar, observes them all with sardonic weariness, and chats up Kelly, a sympathetic chavette who breaks her leg and finds God. I could go on, but my eyes are watering as it is.
As an ensemble piece, it starts off something like a prose version of Magnolia. But there is more going on here, and considerably more weirdness than a froggy April shower. ‘Darkmans’ is archaic thieves' slang for ‘night’; but Barker (who never explains this) takes it as a name for the medieval jester mentioned above, whose shadowy presence lurks behind all the other characters, occasionally breaking through with sinister results. Something is being said, it seems, about how close to us our history is, lying unrecognised beneath the surface of the present. Ashford, in this context, makes the ideal setting.
A lot has been said about Barker's use of language. Here too, the past is forever barging its way into the present, albeit in a way which I found somewhat trivial. Characters with trouble keeping their grip on reality are likely to slip accidentally into German, Latin or Middle French. The reminder that our language is a collection of fossils is crucial, but the tricks Barker uses to make the point have been pulled off more effectively by other writers.
In other ways, too, I found the language disappointing, even slapdash. It's exhilarating to see such a crazy jumble of characters and plot points; but when the same principles are applied to sentences it too often comes over as just a poorly-controlled prose style. Her love of parenthetical asides can make her appealingly conversational, but after too many you end up with sentences that seem to be made of elbows.
A few sentences like this are quite fun; but a dozen per page is sometimes an effort. There are brackets here by the hundred. I also became a little frustrated by the way no one ever ‘says’ anything in this book. On one double page opened at random, I find:
(Feel free to read the preceding as a modernist poem.) You get the idea – though in fairness, there are a couple of ‘said’s in there too. Also needlessly erratic is the paragraph spacing, which appears to be entirely random – sometimes we get a whole new section halfway through a conversation.
None of this disguises the fact that when the writing is held under control, Barker is impressive. Her treatment of characters' internal dialogue, for one thing, can achieve strange new effects. She often skips to a new line to give us the unedited thoughts of whoever she is describing, which form a colloquial counterpoint to the action.
At times like this the text reminded me of a comic strip, in the way such ‘thought bubbles’ are pulled out of the narrative. It takes some getting used to, but she convinces you it's an effective tool. Part of the reason it seems so effective is that her characters are the book's greatest draw and its biggest reward. This becomes clear once you realise the plot's inexplicable but that you still loved the novel. Some of the throwaway jokes are excellent (Beede has ‘a stare which could make an owl crave Optrex’), and one scene detailing a horrendous middle-class dinner party is a comic tour-de-force.
Like the mysterious Darkmans, Barker believes that humour can ‘often be a direct route to power’, and there is something serious at work behind the jokes – even if the ending leaves you unsure how it all technically came about. What you are likely to be more sure about is what an unusual and enjoyable way she has of asking the central question: if we can't understand our history, then how can we understand each other? Because despite the one-liners, the image that stayed with me was that of Kane and his father walking away from each other after another halting argument:
As an ensemble piece, it starts off something like a prose version of Magnolia. But there is more going on here, and considerably more weirdness than a froggy April shower. ‘Darkmans’ is archaic thieves' slang for ‘night’; but Barker (who never explains this) takes it as a name for the medieval jester mentioned above, whose shadowy presence lurks behind all the other characters, occasionally breaking through with sinister results. Something is being said, it seems, about how close to us our history is, lying unrecognised beneath the surface of the present. Ashford, in this context, makes the ideal setting.
A lot has been said about Barker's use of language. Here too, the past is forever barging its way into the present, albeit in a way which I found somewhat trivial. Characters with trouble keeping their grip on reality are likely to slip accidentally into German, Latin or Middle French. The reminder that our language is a collection of fossils is crucial, but the tricks Barker uses to make the point have been pulled off more effectively by other writers.
In other ways, too, I found the language disappointing, even slapdash. It's exhilarating to see such a crazy jumble of characters and plot points; but when the same principles are applied to sentences it too often comes over as just a poorly-controlled prose style. Her love of parenthetical asides can make her appealingly conversational, but after too many you end up with sentences that seem to be made of elbows.
And Beede (who hadn't, quite frankly, really considered all of these lesser implications – Mid-Kent Water plc didn't run itself, after all) found himself involved (didn't he owe the condemned properties that much, at least?) in a crazy miasma of high-level negotiations, conservation plans, archaeological investigations and restoration schemes, in a last-ditch attempt to rectify the environmental devastation which (let's face it) he himself had partially engendered.
A few sentences like this are quite fun; but a dozen per page is sometimes an effort. There are brackets here by the hundred. I also became a little frustrated by the way no one ever ‘says’ anything in this book. On one double page opened at random, I find:
‘So you think I could do better?’ he smiled…
‘Why not?’ she demanded…
‘And it ain't only me as thinks so, neither,’ she continued…
‘Your poor old mum?!’ he grinned.
‘He's been schmoozing my mum, Kane,’ Kelly exclaimed…
‘Well he can't fancy her that much,’ she sniffed…
‘The ignorant fuck,’ she scowled.
‘He didn't shag her,’ Kane repeated.
‘God, no,’ Kane muttered…
‘Anyway,’ Kane maintained…
‘Her tits are amazing,’ Kane added…
(Feel free to read the preceding as a modernist poem.) You get the idea – though in fairness, there are a couple of ‘said’s in there too. Also needlessly erratic is the paragraph spacing, which appears to be entirely random – sometimes we get a whole new section halfway through a conversation.
None of this disguises the fact that when the writing is held under control, Barker is impressive. Her treatment of characters' internal dialogue, for one thing, can achieve strange new effects. She often skips to a new line to give us the unedited thoughts of whoever she is describing, which form a colloquial counterpoint to the action.
He glanced down –
Damn
The tip of his spliff had dropped off into his lap. And there was still a small –
Fuck!
– ember…
He cuffed it from his jeans and down on to the floor. He checked the fabric – no hole, but a tiny, brown…
Bugger
He took a final, deep drag –
Nope…
Dead
– then tried to push the damp dog-end into the ashtray, but the ashtray, it seemed, was already full to capacity.
At times like this the text reminded me of a comic strip, in the way such ‘thought bubbles’ are pulled out of the narrative. It takes some getting used to, but she convinces you it's an effective tool. Part of the reason it seems so effective is that her characters are the book's greatest draw and its biggest reward. This becomes clear once you realise the plot's inexplicable but that you still loved the novel. Some of the throwaway jokes are excellent (Beede has ‘a stare which could make an owl crave Optrex’), and one scene detailing a horrendous middle-class dinner party is a comic tour-de-force.
Like the mysterious Darkmans, Barker believes that humour can ‘often be a direct route to power’, and there is something serious at work behind the jokes – even if the ending leaves you unsure how it all technically came about. What you are likely to be more sure about is what an unusual and enjoyable way she has of asking the central question: if we can't understand our history, then how can we understand each other? Because despite the one-liners, the image that stayed with me was that of Kane and his father walking away from each other after another halting argument:
They both turned. They both paused. They both took one measured step forward, then another; like a pair of old adversaries engaging in a duel, but without weapons, or seconds, or anybody to call.
April 15, 2012
I want to review Darkmans but I should be researching UK agents so I can submit my own novel to snotty Islington ministers’ daughters—the sort who fall down drooling at The Kite Runner or some such oxplop—in the hope that one day I can write a tongue-in-cheek five-star review of my own novel on Goodreads then re-post a series of self-promoting updates every four minutes for everyone to ignore, then fight off a caustically withering slapdown from Mr. Bryant with four pages of unpunctuated vitriol, made worse by a pompous author shot of me, unshaven, in my James Joyce glasses, oozing hard-won wisdom.
I wonder if Nicola Barker ever spends the afternoon writing a three-hundred word review for Goodreads under a pseudonym rather than delivering the next twelve pages of her latest opus to her publisher. I doubt it. See, this is my problem. I adore writing but I love reading more more more. Then I love sharing my passions on this worldwide book orgy. I flinch—no, I wince, an appropriate word for this novel—at writers who prefer writing to reading. These people are usually lawyers who decide to take up writing on the side, transcribing the minutiae of their cases for their mass market drivel, while earning £26K getting a rapist off on a technicality. Where is this going? Nowhere.
I have stuff to do. Needless to say, this book is her second masterpiece, next to Wide Open, which I still think (sorry deleted member Iain) is her best book. This one is compelling and witty, bursting with energy, comedy, heartbreak and mystery, but shows its flaws all too easily. The least nagging of these is an unhealthy use of the verb to wince—the characters are wincing all over the place, why not blench, cringe, flinch, quail, recoil, or squinch, Nicola? Anyway, fabulous book. Chris’s review and Drew’s review are better. I’m off to work, by which I mean linger on Goodreads for another hour. Curse this place!
I wonder if Nicola Barker ever spends the afternoon writing a three-hundred word review for Goodreads under a pseudonym rather than delivering the next twelve pages of her latest opus to her publisher. I doubt it. See, this is my problem. I adore writing but I love reading more more more. Then I love sharing my passions on this worldwide book orgy. I flinch—no, I wince, an appropriate word for this novel—at writers who prefer writing to reading. These people are usually lawyers who decide to take up writing on the side, transcribing the minutiae of their cases for their mass market drivel, while earning £26K getting a rapist off on a technicality. Where is this going? Nowhere.
I have stuff to do. Needless to say, this book is her second masterpiece, next to Wide Open, which I still think (sorry deleted member Iain) is her best book. This one is compelling and witty, bursting with energy, comedy, heartbreak and mystery, but shows its flaws all too easily. The least nagging of these is an unhealthy use of the verb to wince—the characters are wincing all over the place, why not blench, cringe, flinch, quail, recoil, or squinch, Nicola? Anyway, fabulous book. Chris’s review and Drew’s review are better. I’m off to work, by which I mean linger on Goodreads for another hour. Curse this place!
January 10, 2012
Anytime I see a book this size I think: "What was that you had to say that you needed more than 800 pages to do it?". And I am intrigued, because, surely, it must be something magnificent to justify the magnificent size. On the other hand I know that I suffer from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and if I started this book I would just have to finish it no matter what. There is a possibility it could be 800 pages of blabbering, or worse yet, 800 pages of impenetrable ontological debates.
Luckily, you can just skate through 'Darkmans' and it is not all total blabbering, Paul!
I suppose I should tell you what it is actually about, although explaining it will not be easy.
'Darkmans' is about a group of characters living in Ashford, including some chavs, hospital employees, construction workers, drug dealers... basically, the sort of group that many British writers who set their books in small drab English towns write about. Now, the twist here is that all these characters (with the special mention of Isidore, German security guard) seem to be invaded by a ghost of Middle Ages in the form of John Scogin, wicked medieval jester. He muddles their minds, gets them confused, and makes them speak pre-Shakespeare English.
The scope of this book is impressive; the research, the linguistic finesse is quite something. Of course, you will be tempted to hope that everything will neatly come together in the end but it is a foolish hope. As one of the character says (and I can't give you the exact quote, because stupidly I have returned the book to the library - it was about 5 years overdue) we fool ourselves to believe that things happen for a reason, that there is some sort of grand design behind it all. No, only in art, apparently. Now, whether this book calls itself art or whether it tries to imitate real life is for you to decide.
That is not to say, that it leaves nothing but loose ends. It is indeed very clever. In the end, it's Barker's book and you have to play by her rules. If you are ok with that, you are rewarded with a brilliant, epic read. Someone said 'unhinged'. Yes but in the best possible sense.
And as promised: Paul knows nada about real literature. He is a philistine. This book kicks ass.
Luckily, you can just skate through 'Darkmans' and it is not all total blabbering, Paul!
I suppose I should tell you what it is actually about, although explaining it will not be easy.
'Darkmans' is about a group of characters living in Ashford, including some chavs, hospital employees, construction workers, drug dealers... basically, the sort of group that many British writers who set their books in small drab English towns write about. Now, the twist here is that all these characters (with the special mention of Isidore, German security guard) seem to be invaded by a ghost of Middle Ages in the form of John Scogin, wicked medieval jester. He muddles their minds, gets them confused, and makes them speak pre-Shakespeare English.
The scope of this book is impressive; the research, the linguistic finesse is quite something. Of course, you will be tempted to hope that everything will neatly come together in the end but it is a foolish hope. As one of the character says (and I can't give you the exact quote, because stupidly I have returned the book to the library - it was about 5 years overdue) we fool ourselves to believe that things happen for a reason, that there is some sort of grand design behind it all. No, only in art, apparently. Now, whether this book calls itself art or whether it tries to imitate real life is for you to decide.
That is not to say, that it leaves nothing but loose ends. It is indeed very clever. In the end, it's Barker's book and you have to play by her rules. If you are ok with that, you are rewarded with a brilliant, epic read. Someone said 'unhinged'. Yes but in the best possible sense.
And as promised: Paul knows nada about real literature. He is a philistine. This book kicks ass.
June 19, 2021
I am very late to this book, and having finished it five days ago this review is now very late too, so I'll keep it short and impressionistic. To some extent this reflects my very mixed feelings - it is undoubtedly bold and full of ideas, but much of it reads like a sitcom script and the characters all have an element of caricature. There is also a supernatural element that is never entirely explained, and quite a lot of loose ends remain after reading it. So given its length I can't wholeheartedly recommend it, even though for the most part it is an enjoyable read and at times it is very funny.
February 14, 2012
This is going to sound strange, because I imagine most people would think the opposite, but I think if Darkmans were 500 pages shorter (aka the length of a normal book), I would very likely have hated it. The style is maddening in several ways:
1) Barker has a tendency to over-italicize. I know this because I worry that I italicize too much, and if someone else's italics are bothering me, it must be a serious problem. I'm not kidding; Darkmans is like that old newspaper comic Brenda Starr*, where every emphasis gets bolded ("Rex, I'm surprised you're home so early!"). It's as if Barker thinks the reader doesn't understand where people place their emphases when they're talking out loud, and needs to be taught.
2) Also, she's crazy about parentheses. And again, I probably use parentheses too much (this review's probably not a great example since, aside from this one, I'm making a conscious effort to avoid them), so it's not a good sign that I'm saying she uses too many. Every other sentence has some snide little parenthetical aside; I think they're supposed to be funny, but they're usually not, so they seem pretty pointless. And she's never tempted to get fancy with them, e.g. triple nested parentheses that all end at the same time, so you get one of these ))). Which could be either good or bad, depending on who you are.
3) There's also this thing she does that I read described as sort of an alter ego for the narrator, or an alternate narrator - she leaves a couple lines blank and then there's just a word or phrase in italics. It's hard to explain, so here's an example:
She glanced over towards the play area in the corner of the classroom where Fleet** was currently sitting and boredly constructing a small, neat structure -
A fort, was it?
- out of plastic bricks.
The way it reads, though, it's less a groundbreaking narrative technique and more stream-of-consciousness narration broken up by carriage returns for...what reason, exactly? I like to picture Barker's editor saying, "You know, we could probably take all these blank lines out and knock this sucker down to the next, more affordable, price bracket without losing any actual substance." To which Barker apparently says, "No. It's essential that the blank lines stay where they are."
Other minor gripes include the fact that Barker's changed the rules of attraction for no reason; Kane, the charming, good-looking narrator who's at or near the center of the story, ignores the only girl who's actually described as pretty, in favor of being "strangely attracted" to two women who seem to be well into middle age. Wishful thinking? Maybe. Also the fact that the book's incomprehensibility is in direct proportion to the presence of anything interesting. It's compulsively readable when nothing's happening, but as soon as the plot starts to advance, it contrives Ulyssean levels of confusion. Maybe this is because the main plot hook is a spirit from the past, whose motives are uncertain but probably malicious, coming to possess some of the main characters and cause what basically amounts to minor mayhem. So what is the point, then? I have no idea. That's my last minor gripe.
But here's why the book's length works. When you run into an annoying stranger in a bar, every moment of the encounter is painful, and when you finally extricate yourself, your main memory of the incident is how bad it was. But when you have an annoying roommate, things always work out differently. Yeah, maybe it sucks most of the time, but you appreciate the good bits more; if Annoying Roommate makes a surprisingly good joke, it's that much funnier just for coming from him. And when he finally moves out, you sort of start to miss him. Or at least I do. And this is how it went with Barker's characters. For the first 200 or so pages, I was not psyched about finishing the book, although I rarely give up on one. But then they started to grow on me, much like the chronic verruca on Kane's foot. I started to care about what ended up happening to them, although This managed to make the rest of the book enjoyable. Not great, but enjoyable.
Ultimately, four stars for ambition, three for execution. And I round up because I'm a nice guy.
*Why is it that American newspaper comic strips are so relentlessly unfunny? Maybe this is just because I grew up with the Democrat & Chronicle, but the only remotely amusing comic we had was Dilbert. I was probably 14 or 15 before I figured out that there were good comics besides Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side.
**[sic]
1) Barker has a tendency to over-italicize. I know this because I worry that I italicize too much, and if someone else's italics are bothering me, it must be a serious problem. I'm not kidding; Darkmans is like that old newspaper comic Brenda Starr*, where every emphasis gets bolded ("Rex, I'm surprised you're home so early!"). It's as if Barker thinks the reader doesn't understand where people place their emphases when they're talking out loud, and needs to be taught.
2) Also, she's crazy about parentheses. And again, I probably use parentheses too much (this review's probably not a great example since, aside from this one, I'm making a conscious effort to avoid them), so it's not a good sign that I'm saying she uses too many. Every other sentence has some snide little parenthetical aside; I think they're supposed to be funny, but they're usually not, so they seem pretty pointless. And she's never tempted to get fancy with them, e.g. triple nested parentheses that all end at the same time, so you get one of these ))). Which could be either good or bad, depending on who you are.
3) There's also this thing she does that I read described as sort of an alter ego for the narrator, or an alternate narrator - she leaves a couple lines blank and then there's just a word or phrase in italics. It's hard to explain, so here's an example:
She glanced over towards the play area in the corner of the classroom where Fleet** was currently sitting and boredly constructing a small, neat structure -
A fort, was it?
- out of plastic bricks.
The way it reads, though, it's less a groundbreaking narrative technique and more stream-of-consciousness narration broken up by carriage returns for...what reason, exactly? I like to picture Barker's editor saying, "You know, we could probably take all these blank lines out and knock this sucker down to the next, more affordable, price bracket without losing any actual substance." To which Barker apparently says, "No. It's essential that the blank lines stay where they are."
Other minor gripes include the fact that Barker's changed the rules of attraction for no reason; Kane, the charming, good-looking narrator who's at or near the center of the story, ignores the only girl who's actually described as pretty, in favor of being "strangely attracted" to two women who seem to be well into middle age. Wishful thinking? Maybe. Also the fact that the book's incomprehensibility is in direct proportion to the presence of anything interesting. It's compulsively readable when nothing's happening, but as soon as the plot starts to advance, it contrives Ulyssean levels of confusion. Maybe this is because the main plot hook is a spirit from the past, whose motives are uncertain but probably malicious, coming to possess some of the main characters and cause what basically amounts to minor mayhem. So what is the point, then? I have no idea. That's my last minor gripe.
But here's why the book's length works. When you run into an annoying stranger in a bar, every moment of the encounter is painful, and when you finally extricate yourself, your main memory of the incident is how bad it was. But when you have an annoying roommate, things always work out differently. Yeah, maybe it sucks most of the time, but you appreciate the good bits more; if Annoying Roommate makes a surprisingly good joke, it's that much funnier just for coming from him. And when he finally moves out, you sort of start to miss him. Or at least I do. And this is how it went with Barker's characters. For the first 200 or so pages, I was not psyched about finishing the book, although I rarely give up on one. But then they started to grow on me, much like the chronic verruca on Kane's foot. I started to care about what ended up happening to them, although This managed to make the rest of the book enjoyable. Not great, but enjoyable.
Ultimately, four stars for ambition, three for execution. And I round up because I'm a nice guy.
*Why is it that American newspaper comic strips are so relentlessly unfunny? Maybe this is just because I grew up with the Democrat & Chronicle, but the only remotely amusing comic we had was Dilbert. I was probably 14 or 15 before I figured out that there were good comics besides Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side.
**[sic]
August 18, 2012
Darkmans is funny and interesting, though it doesn't become either until almost 300 pages into the 800+ page story. Barker's style of writing (which gives the grammar lover in me nightmares), is tough to follow until she tones it down a little and really lets the narrative take over. At that point, I was able to stop lamenting all the commas that could have been and start really paying attention to the story.
When I finished the book, though, I sat back and thought, "Hmm. Didn't know how to tie that all up neatly, huh?" I'm all for having to think and work for it, but in this case, I just thought that Barker didn't fully develop the idea of the "Darkmans." The characters' stories are all interwoven nicely, though I really feel like Barker just got tired at the end, said, "Well, that's 800 pages. I'm done," and sort of slapped together an ending.
I did enjoy "Darkmans," but it was an effort.
When I finished the book, though, I sat back and thought, "Hmm. Didn't know how to tie that all up neatly, huh?" I'm all for having to think and work for it, but in this case, I just thought that Barker didn't fully develop the idea of the "Darkmans." The characters' stories are all interwoven nicely, though I really feel like Barker just got tired at the end, said, "Well, that's 800 pages. I'm done," and sort of slapped together an ending.
I did enjoy "Darkmans," but it was an effort.
March 14, 2009
Is there a first time for everything? This is the first time I've ever given up on a book halfway through. At first I thought she was being quirky and setting the scene, but I read up to page 405 and nothing had happened yet, the characters were neither interesting nor likeable, and her style of writing is unbelievably irritating - with sentences half-written, full of utterly meaningless interjections like "huh?", "eh?" "what?", "what?", "but...", "right...", "No!", "NO!!", and repeating everything that is said in the form of a question.
A Joker? The joke is on us. Nicola Barker is probably laughing her ass off at home looking at good reviews from people who read her brain vomit.
A Joker? The joke is on us. Nicola Barker is probably laughing her ass off at home looking at good reviews from people who read her brain vomit.
January 6, 2013
What a wonderful book with which to begin the new year. "Darkmans" has been on my radar ever since the book's cover caught my eye four years ago (that tongue-wagging devil is creepy). The book's heft and weirdness intimidated me at first, and I filed it away in my mind as a "get to when it's time" book.
This year, it was time--and what a time I had with this book! The story, though small in actual scale, is peppered with so many warrens and boltholes and caches that captured me without warning and pulled me into musings and conversations about history, language, love, memory, identity, lies, and the subjective nature of consciousness. I love fiction that peddles huge ideas amidst juggling the demands of the story, and Barker's novel fits this bill to a "T".
A standout in this novel is the way Barker highlights the subjectivity of the human experience through conflicting character perspectives. Many times throughout this novel, two characters discussing a similar event end up confusing one another in their differing accounts; sometimes they fess up to this muddle and share the subsequent frustration, leading to another intriguing conversation; and other times one or both characters cover up this confusions with obfuscation and tangential talk, which in turn adds yet another yet another issue to a growing pile of them. These frequent disconnects were at times funny (Gaffar and Beede in the supermarket--choice!) and at times quite sad (Elen's family outing is a terribly-apt example of a family trying to stick together while things go to shit).
Another gem in this novel is Gaffar, a Kurdish man who speaks limited English. When conversing with people in English, his dialog is written in normal text; when he speaks in Turkish, his dialog is written in bold type. Through this device, Barker demonstrates how difficult it is for an otherwise eloquent person to express themselves in a secondary language. The result is both comedic and insightful: Gaffar has cutting observations about the things that go on around him, yet most people view him as a simple-minded being, leading them to underestimate his understanding of what's going on. Again, the supermarket scene comes to mind for its brilliant comedy and word play.
This is a big book, and Barker tells her story well. I do wish that some of the characters had not stepped out of the story in the last third, such as Fleet (what about his crazy building projects?) and Gaffar (will he always suffer from salad-phobia?). I was also surprised by the increasing distance between the narrative and Elen's perspective; though she starts out as a viewpoint character who's thoughts contribute to the story, she later becomes more of a symbol of attraction for Beede and his son, Kane. Given how much she suffers in the middle of the story, I figured that she, too, might find some kind of resolution at the end.
This is one of those books that wrapped me up in its story and deposited a few ideas that will stick with me for a long time. I am so glad that I finally picked this up and gave Barker's work a go, and I have no doubt that I will read some of her other novels (in fact, Goodreads just informed me that this book is third in a "Thames Gateway" sequence of thematically-related books; methinks I need to go to the beginning!).
This year, it was time--and what a time I had with this book! The story, though small in actual scale, is peppered with so many warrens and boltholes and caches that captured me without warning and pulled me into musings and conversations about history, language, love, memory, identity, lies, and the subjective nature of consciousness. I love fiction that peddles huge ideas amidst juggling the demands of the story, and Barker's novel fits this bill to a "T".
A standout in this novel is the way Barker highlights the subjectivity of the human experience through conflicting character perspectives. Many times throughout this novel, two characters discussing a similar event end up confusing one another in their differing accounts; sometimes they fess up to this muddle and share the subsequent frustration, leading to another intriguing conversation; and other times one or both characters cover up this confusions with obfuscation and tangential talk, which in turn adds yet another yet another issue to a growing pile of them. These frequent disconnects were at times funny (Gaffar and Beede in the supermarket--choice!) and at times quite sad (Elen's family outing is a terribly-apt example of a family trying to stick together while things go to shit).
Another gem in this novel is Gaffar, a Kurdish man who speaks limited English. When conversing with people in English, his dialog is written in normal text; when he speaks in Turkish, his dialog is written in bold type. Through this device, Barker demonstrates how difficult it is for an otherwise eloquent person to express themselves in a secondary language. The result is both comedic and insightful: Gaffar has cutting observations about the things that go on around him, yet most people view him as a simple-minded being, leading them to underestimate his understanding of what's going on. Again, the supermarket scene comes to mind for its brilliant comedy and word play.
This is a big book, and Barker tells her story well. I do wish that some of the characters had not stepped out of the story in the last third, such as Fleet (what about his crazy building projects?) and Gaffar (will he always suffer from salad-phobia?). I was also surprised by the increasing distance between the narrative and Elen's perspective; though she starts out as a viewpoint character who's thoughts contribute to the story, she later becomes more of a symbol of attraction for Beede and his son, Kane. Given how much she suffers in the middle of the story, I figured that she, too, might find some kind of resolution at the end.
This is one of those books that wrapped me up in its story and deposited a few ideas that will stick with me for a long time. I am so glad that I finally picked this up and gave Barker's work a go, and I have no doubt that I will read some of her other novels (in fact, Goodreads just informed me that this book is third in a "Thames Gateway" sequence of thematically-related books; methinks I need to go to the beginning!).
November 20, 2011
It's about as challenging to describe Nicola Barker's writing style as it is to read it but picture Thomas Pynchon's twisty and chaotic words with an unreliable narrator in terms of depicting the true reality of every moment crossed with a bit of Flannery O'Connor and you'll have something close. Her vocabulary in and of itself is like a dense road to travel on but it's filled with some glorious wit and cultural references too, for those of us who enjoy sightseeing.
I don't use this term lightly but Ms. Nicola Barker is brilliant and that's something you pick up from the first thrusts of this ambition novel. This is a work of postmodern fiction that brings this genre to a pinnacle and simultaneously to it's knees. It's unfaltering and awe inspiring and perhaps the most inventive novel I've read all year. This one will leave you gasping to keep up and gaping at each new chapter. And truly, I haven't seen characters this vivid since Trainspotting..this is very different in terms of subject matter but the sense of these people really and truly alive is unmistakable.
This novel is a little bit about the relationship of a father and son as well as between a wife and a husband and their son who seems to definitely be on the Autism spectrum but seems centered mainly on delusions and how they affect everyone and everything. Of course, the reader must suffer to decipher through these delusions too and figure out what really is happening. Barker doesn't always spell things out. That would be way too easy on her readers and she clearly expects much more from us.
This is set in postmodern England but it draws from many different time periods in terms of the breadth of it's references. Decipher Barker's true meaning in all it's ways and you might hold the key to the entire universe. Either way, take a glorious stab at it. Even if you don't succeed, you'll be stronger for your journey.
Some quotes:
pg. 174 "He already had a well-documented genius for circumnavigation."
pg. 356 "'A man needs a maid."Kane automatically quoted Neil Young.
'Just someone to keep his house clean, fix his meals and go away." she quoted back
'Marry me!' Kane exclaimed.
pg. 773 "'Is it because of my line of work? Kane demanded, paranoid. 'Is it because I'm a dealer?'...'Does that just make you automatically assume,'Kane continued, furious, 'that I'm the kind of person who thinks pretty much anything can be bought and sold?'"
pg. 824 "The *truth*," Peta informed him, baldly, 'is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again...The truth is that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge for our own, sick reasons-into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ-in very small doses-to render life bearable. It's just a convenient mechanism."
pg. 825 "You were telling yourself a story. You were weaving a spell. You were making all the parts fit. You were feeding into a general energy, a universal energy. You were probably adhering to a basic archetype a 'first model' as the Ancient Greeks would have it-something like he's threatened by his father, he loved his mother, he's terrified of death...or maybe something more intellectual, more esoteric like...I don't know..like the idea of this disparity between fire and water. She pulled a moronic face, 'Or the absurd idea that language has these *gaps* in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through."
I don't use this term lightly but Ms. Nicola Barker is brilliant and that's something you pick up from the first thrusts of this ambition novel. This is a work of postmodern fiction that brings this genre to a pinnacle and simultaneously to it's knees. It's unfaltering and awe inspiring and perhaps the most inventive novel I've read all year. This one will leave you gasping to keep up and gaping at each new chapter. And truly, I haven't seen characters this vivid since Trainspotting..this is very different in terms of subject matter but the sense of these people really and truly alive is unmistakable.
This novel is a little bit about the relationship of a father and son as well as between a wife and a husband and their son who seems to definitely be on the Autism spectrum but seems centered mainly on delusions and how they affect everyone and everything. Of course, the reader must suffer to decipher through these delusions too and figure out what really is happening. Barker doesn't always spell things out. That would be way too easy on her readers and she clearly expects much more from us.
This is set in postmodern England but it draws from many different time periods in terms of the breadth of it's references. Decipher Barker's true meaning in all it's ways and you might hold the key to the entire universe. Either way, take a glorious stab at it. Even if you don't succeed, you'll be stronger for your journey.
Some quotes:
pg. 174 "He already had a well-documented genius for circumnavigation."
pg. 356 "'A man needs a maid."Kane automatically quoted Neil Young.
'Just someone to keep his house clean, fix his meals and go away." she quoted back
'Marry me!' Kane exclaimed.
pg. 773 "'Is it because of my line of work? Kane demanded, paranoid. 'Is it because I'm a dealer?'...'Does that just make you automatically assume,'Kane continued, furious, 'that I'm the kind of person who thinks pretty much anything can be bought and sold?'"
pg. 824 "The *truth*," Peta informed him, baldly, 'is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again...The truth is that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge for our own, sick reasons-into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ-in very small doses-to render life bearable. It's just a convenient mechanism."
pg. 825 "You were telling yourself a story. You were weaving a spell. You were making all the parts fit. You were feeding into a general energy, a universal energy. You were probably adhering to a basic archetype a 'first model' as the Ancient Greeks would have it-something like he's threatened by his father, he loved his mother, he's terrified of death...or maybe something more intellectual, more esoteric like...I don't know..like the idea of this disparity between fire and water. She pulled a moronic face, 'Or the absurd idea that language has these *gaps* in it and that lives can somehow just tumble through."
Read
September 19, 2015Unbelievably bad. Unreadably bad. At first I thought it had the same problem as Stephen King's IT, that the story was in there somewhere but I couldn't find it, but worse, there's seriously no story. So irritatingly written. Each page peppered with italics and -ings and -lys and parentheses of spurious details and weird Germanic bold text (not used for any apparently different reason from all those italics) and telling-over-showing and crazy speech tags followed by lengthy adverbial phrases and digressive never-to-revisit-or-use backstories.
About one thing happens per 2 pages, and most of the time it already happened, and it's as exciting as learning the name of a dog (will this 2 pager dog return even?) in the case of a whole 160 or so pages, learning the name of the guy who got off the horse outside the cafe of the main characters (right?) in chapter 1, which was so great a reveal that we went on to book the second!
The language is trying so hard to entertain, but I've heard these jokes before and so have you, and one non-extended unmixed metaphor per character motion or thought etc would, well, probably still be too much for me to follow.
Barker, having written so many novels (none I feel like trying) must must must know how bad these errors are, right? She's doing it on purpose? Why? Is that the point?
I seriously, amicably, don't understand, don't get, don't comprehend, how anyone finished joyfully, ended happily, completed endearingfully, this! It's not like it's too very dense or intellectual or, or... Or like, or... or anything, it's just like per se totally empty spurious spurious!
So bad.
So bad that I actually have nothing on me to read and I still don't wanna read it! It hurts, Nicola! NICOLAAAAAAAAAAA!!
About one thing happens per 2 pages, and most of the time it already happened, and it's as exciting as learning the name of a dog (will this 2 pager dog return even?) in the case of a whole 160 or so pages, learning the name of the guy who got off the horse outside the cafe of the main characters (right?) in chapter 1, which was so great a reveal that we went on to book the second!
The language is trying so hard to entertain, but I've heard these jokes before and so have you, and one non-extended unmixed metaphor per character motion or thought etc would, well, probably still be too much for me to follow.
Barker, having written so many novels (none I feel like trying) must must must know how bad these errors are, right? She's doing it on purpose? Why? Is that the point?
I seriously, amicably, don't understand, don't get, don't comprehend, how anyone finished joyfully, ended happily, completed endearingfully, this! It's not like it's too very dense or intellectual or, or... Or like, or... or anything, it's just like per se totally empty spurious spurious!
So bad.
So bad that I actually have nothing on me to read and I still don't wanna read it! It hurts, Nicola! NICOLAAAAAAAAAAA!!
November 21, 2019
Characters you won't forget, especially Kelly. Contemporary English language and life that's crazy but very real. Shades of John Irving and nonviolent Stephen King. Off kilter but genuine. It's funny and wild and fun. The strangeness increases toward the end and the title leads you to think there'll be some kind of otherworldly or ancient answer to it all. But Nicola Barkman wrapped it all up for me the way I wanted her to with Peta's speech: "The truth is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again.... The truth is that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory of God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ in very small doses - to render life bearable. It's just a convenient mechanism, that's all." Take the journey and enjoy the ride - it's great.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 25, 2024
Darkmans is not the easiest book to describe, at a whopping 838 pages this is Nicola barker at her most creative, inventive and playful. At the same time it can be a frustrating read, not due to the writing style – it flows beautifully. In a way it really depends on what type of reader you are. I’ll get into this in a bit.
The book consists of the daily interactions of a group of people: they are all interconnected: Beede , his drug dealing son Kane, the eccentric Dory, his wife the chiropractor, their son, Fleet, who has connections with Tudor England and wants to train fleas, Gaffer the Kurd, Harvey and Lester the lazy builders and their niece Kelly who breaks her leg and undergoes a religious experience. That’s just a small sample, there’s much more to this cast of weirdos.
As this is Nicola Barker there’s some funny moments, strange ones and some trivia – ranging from the origin of certain words to information about a certain breed of geese. It is fun and, as always, Nicola Barker is glad that you have joined this cast.
As I mentioned before the enjoyment of the book derives on whether you like closure or not. Barely any of the actions are explained. Do we know why Fleet speaks in medieval English and has visions, does it explain why Beede has this crazy encounter with a cat, does it explain whether Dory acts in a destructive manner? the answer is no but then again this is more a book where the reader has to seek out the themes and there are quite a few.
First of all Darkmans is a homage to the town of Ashford and works as a commentary of it’s rapid industrialisation, it’s link to Europe through the chunnel railway; the adage of hating a place in order to love it is in full force here.
Through Kane and Beede’s relationship a lot is of space is given to father/son dynamics also this reoccurs with Dory and Fleet and to a certain extent Harvey and Lester. Barker manages to display the complexities between two generations of men and sometimes it’s a source of laughter and sometimes tragic. There’s also nudges towards immigration, organised religion and our ties with the past,
In a weird way, if one bypasses the more offbeat scenes, one can see Darkmans reflecting life, after all Nicola barker talks about love, loss and failure which do occur in our lives so despite the stuff about Jesters and mystical birds, there are reflections of reality.
Darkmans is a brilliant novel but I will admit that it has to be approached with caution – if you like your novels largely plotless but with humor then go ahead. If you’ve never read Nicola Barker, Darkmans is not the ideal place to start. I’d ease yourself into her world by reading her shorter works first.
The book consists of the daily interactions of a group of people: they are all interconnected: Beede , his drug dealing son Kane, the eccentric Dory, his wife the chiropractor, their son, Fleet, who has connections with Tudor England and wants to train fleas, Gaffer the Kurd, Harvey and Lester the lazy builders and their niece Kelly who breaks her leg and undergoes a religious experience. That’s just a small sample, there’s much more to this cast of weirdos.
As this is Nicola Barker there’s some funny moments, strange ones and some trivia – ranging from the origin of certain words to information about a certain breed of geese. It is fun and, as always, Nicola Barker is glad that you have joined this cast.
As I mentioned before the enjoyment of the book derives on whether you like closure or not. Barely any of the actions are explained. Do we know why Fleet speaks in medieval English and has visions, does it explain why Beede has this crazy encounter with a cat, does it explain whether Dory acts in a destructive manner? the answer is no but then again this is more a book where the reader has to seek out the themes and there are quite a few.
First of all Darkmans is a homage to the town of Ashford and works as a commentary of it’s rapid industrialisation, it’s link to Europe through the chunnel railway; the adage of hating a place in order to love it is in full force here.
Through Kane and Beede’s relationship a lot is of space is given to father/son dynamics also this reoccurs with Dory and Fleet and to a certain extent Harvey and Lester. Barker manages to display the complexities between two generations of men and sometimes it’s a source of laughter and sometimes tragic. There’s also nudges towards immigration, organised religion and our ties with the past,
In a weird way, if one bypasses the more offbeat scenes, one can see Darkmans reflecting life, after all Nicola barker talks about love, loss and failure which do occur in our lives so despite the stuff about Jesters and mystical birds, there are reflections of reality.
Darkmans is a brilliant novel but I will admit that it has to be approached with caution – if you like your novels largely plotless but with humor then go ahead. If you’ve never read Nicola Barker, Darkmans is not the ideal place to start. I’d ease yourself into her world by reading her shorter works first.
June 24, 2016
What really surprised me when I finished this book is the lack of emotion I felt. I've read books where I've been elated at the ending, or in tears as the last page turns, or even angry for whatever reason, but with this, the best I could muster was an overwhelming sense of time wasted on something that could have been so much better, with so much potential, but just didn't really pull together in the end. As a fiction writer myself, I appreciate hard work when I see it and there is no question Nicola Barker has talent and good ideas. Her characters work well and the opening section of the book is excellent, as are many of the central passages, like the section in the hospital, which I enjoyed, but somewhere, someone let this book go to print with half the editing undone. I'm reluctant to blame the author for everything that's wrong with a traditionally published work, because so many of the choices made with those books are by people other than the original writer, but someone has made an error of judgement here.
I'm usually very tolerant of any art. If an artist or writer wants to write something, who am I to judge? But purely from a reader's perspective, the ending of this book, and in reality, most of the plot, was confused, overly complex and deeply dissatisfying. The quotes on the back cover make the length of the book sound like an advantage; it's not. It's far too long and, worst of all, the ending is an anticlimax. When a reader invests their time and money in a book this size, no matter how hard it is, the author or editor or someone in the publishing process needs to think of that reader, step in and say enough is enough. It's time to press, horror of horrors, the delete button.
It's rare for me to accuse any writer of style over substance, but here I do feel justified. I've read some weird books, with lots of quirks and I like writers who push the boundaries, as long as there's a method or motive to their madness. I've seen a hundred reviewers criticising the style of Darkmans; overuse of italics, bold, stray fragments of text and I can only agree that it's artistic license gone too far. A writer who's different doesn't need to try this hard to prove they're different. It ends up distracting from the story, it alienates the reader, and above all, it just seems pointless. Ahhh, oooh, urgh, ugh, blah, blurgh, are not creative and clever when you've used them page after page in an endless stream of nothingness.
Even after this review, I would try another book by the same author, because I think she can write, but let's hope the next one I open isn't as pretentious in style and marred by the same development mistakes.
I'm usually very tolerant of any art. If an artist or writer wants to write something, who am I to judge? But purely from a reader's perspective, the ending of this book, and in reality, most of the plot, was confused, overly complex and deeply dissatisfying. The quotes on the back cover make the length of the book sound like an advantage; it's not. It's far too long and, worst of all, the ending is an anticlimax. When a reader invests their time and money in a book this size, no matter how hard it is, the author or editor or someone in the publishing process needs to think of that reader, step in and say enough is enough. It's time to press, horror of horrors, the delete button.
It's rare for me to accuse any writer of style over substance, but here I do feel justified. I've read some weird books, with lots of quirks and I like writers who push the boundaries, as long as there's a method or motive to their madness. I've seen a hundred reviewers criticising the style of Darkmans; overuse of italics, bold, stray fragments of text and I can only agree that it's artistic license gone too far. A writer who's different doesn't need to try this hard to prove they're different. It ends up distracting from the story, it alienates the reader, and above all, it just seems pointless. Ahhh, oooh, urgh, ugh, blah, blurgh, are not creative and clever when you've used them page after page in an endless stream of nothingness.
Even after this review, I would try another book by the same author, because I think she can write, but let's hope the next one I open isn't as pretentious in style and marred by the same development mistakes.
October 26, 2010
Reading a Nicola Barker book is the closest thing I can imagine to being Alice, and falling down the rabbit hole. Her stories are unlike anything I've ever read before and I've collected everything she has ever written.
Currently I'm reading Wide Open and it does not disappoint. Take a neat little story, add a ton of strange and interesting characters and the occasional "out of the blue" creepy critter. Throw all the bits in the air and then read them where they land.
In the hands and mind of anyone else, chances are we'd simply chuck the book in the trash and say, "what on earth was THAT all about!" but Nicola is magic, she's a wizard, she casts a spell on many of her readers, her fans. The woman has incredible bloody talent! I find myself reading along and thinking, "where the hell is this taking me! God I LOVE this book! I just LOVE it! This is so strange! But it's so Good!"
I have very little patience for strange just for the sake of trying to be strange or for effect. Or strange just to be different or as a marketing tool. That kind of oddity usually does end up in my trash bin. But, whatever Nicola does in her writing, however she manages it, I believe in the insane world she creates, the characters she invents. I believe, and I love, and I care about them. Sometimes as I read, I laugh my head off! She can be so very funny! Sometimes my heart twists with sadness or sympathy, so deep.
What I wouldn't give to sit down and chat with Ms. Barker! She is a genius but my God she is odd...she has to be to think this all up! I should really say her imagination is odd. :-) She and her books fascinate me. I will read absolutely anything this woman writes. She is like no other.
Words of advise; read slowly, read over bits you don't quite manage to make fit. Enjoy the emotions the book evokes and try not to spend a great deal of time thinking WTF! Instead, let go, pretend you are on safari in Barker world and just let her take you where she will. It's actually a supreme act of control to actually let go of control and your expectations on what a story should be and exactly how it should all work and fit together. Barker's books are about the journey...I'm not entirely sure they have a destination! Enjoy the ride!
Btw, If you enjoy Nicola Barker's work, I highly recommend another wonderful author by the name of Leon Rooke. Especially a book he wrote called A Good Baby!
Darkman is one of my all time favourite books and the more Nicola writes, the happier a reader I will be. Enjoy!
Currently I'm reading Wide Open and it does not disappoint. Take a neat little story, add a ton of strange and interesting characters and the occasional "out of the blue" creepy critter. Throw all the bits in the air and then read them where they land.
In the hands and mind of anyone else, chances are we'd simply chuck the book in the trash and say, "what on earth was THAT all about!" but Nicola is magic, she's a wizard, she casts a spell on many of her readers, her fans. The woman has incredible bloody talent! I find myself reading along and thinking, "where the hell is this taking me! God I LOVE this book! I just LOVE it! This is so strange! But it's so Good!"
I have very little patience for strange just for the sake of trying to be strange or for effect. Or strange just to be different or as a marketing tool. That kind of oddity usually does end up in my trash bin. But, whatever Nicola does in her writing, however she manages it, I believe in the insane world she creates, the characters she invents. I believe, and I love, and I care about them. Sometimes as I read, I laugh my head off! She can be so very funny! Sometimes my heart twists with sadness or sympathy, so deep.
What I wouldn't give to sit down and chat with Ms. Barker! She is a genius but my God she is odd...she has to be to think this all up! I should really say her imagination is odd. :-) She and her books fascinate me. I will read absolutely anything this woman writes. She is like no other.
Words of advise; read slowly, read over bits you don't quite manage to make fit. Enjoy the emotions the book evokes and try not to spend a great deal of time thinking WTF! Instead, let go, pretend you are on safari in Barker world and just let her take you where she will. It's actually a supreme act of control to actually let go of control and your expectations on what a story should be and exactly how it should all work and fit together. Barker's books are about the journey...I'm not entirely sure they have a destination! Enjoy the ride!
Btw, If you enjoy Nicola Barker's work, I highly recommend another wonderful author by the name of Leon Rooke. Especially a book he wrote called A Good Baby!
Darkman is one of my all time favourite books and the more Nicola writes, the happier a reader I will be. Enjoy!
November 23, 2013
Now, to make it clear I couldn't finish this nonsense. I usually force myself to finish a book but this one just pushed my limits. I can't tell the amount of boredom it gave me. What's it talking about? A ghost? Obsessed people? Medieval past? To be honest, it talks about nothing. I really couldn't keep the track of its safari into meaningless. The writer tries to make interesting descriptions, create her own narrative style but ends up with irrelevant plot construction and rather colourless and dry characters. I'm listening to Bach's "ich freue mich auf meinen Tod" while writing this comment, the lyrics of which are:
"I delight in my death,
ah, if it were only present already!
Then I will emerge from all the suffering
that still binds me to the world".
This is the feeling the book gives me. No matter what others say.
"I delight in my death,
ah, if it were only present already!
Then I will emerge from all the suffering
that still binds me to the world".
This is the feeling the book gives me. No matter what others say.
December 30, 2011
I finished Darkmans by Nicola Barker. I loved it. It's wonderfully written, extremely modern, yet steeped in medieval ties & references. The story wanders amongst a diverse & unique group of characters, who surprise in quite a few ways. This is a book I could read more than once & get more out of it w/ each reading. There are many layers & I'm quite sure I missed many things. I'm still pondering the final pages.... I think it deserves more attention (I had never heard of it, just stumbled across it on a library shelf, even though it was nominated for the Man Booker prize), but I do know it's not a novel to everyone's taste. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy modern fiction, experimental literature, & literary wordplay.
January 25, 2008
I read this through once, then immediately started over. It's the sort of book that takes a couple of readings to see its shape--like that low-budget sci-fi film Primer. I think Nicola Barker is one of the best contemporary writers--not least because she challenges herself with each book. This is nothing like her previous novels, but it is equally brilliant.
Read
December 5, 2025So here’s an odd thing. Darkmans is very bloody long – 838 pages in the paperback edition I read – which is, by any quantitative standard, a doorstopper. And yet by a particular qualitative standard, it didn’t entirely feel like one. This is not quite either a good or a bad thing. What I mean is that a book can be long and yet can avoid allowing you to settle, with a metaphorical ruffle of your feathers, into its world. The experience of reading Darkmans is not reminiscent of curling up in front of a fire and getting cosy, which is what we tend to associate with doorstoppers. Instead, it feels like riding a willful and cunning horse. You can run along for extended periods of time in reasonable comfort, but it’ll always buck and try to throw you before too long. The way you respond to the horse bucking, as it were, is going to be what determines the overall tenor of your experience.
Me, I decided to hang on tight through the bucks and keep applying the spurs (this metaphor is absolutely out of control), so what happened was I read 838 pages of exuberant formal and narrative chaos in two days. It was an experience, if not exactly the relaxing one that Doorstoppers In December is designed to promote.
First of all, we’re in Ashford, Kent, where the Channel Tunnel starts. History is a weird proposition in Ashford; it looks like one of those no-places composed entirely of new-build estates and ring roads, but all no-places are built on top of what used to be someplace. Barker’s concern throughout Darkmans is history as a concept, as constant revision and constant presence, something that pops out and hits you on the nose the more you try to keep it down. Her cast of characters is wide and interconnected, but we start with Beede and Kane, a father-son duo whose strained relationship is attributed by both of them to their differences in personality. Beede is a campaigner by calling, a man possessed by the idea of a better, slower, more authentic life, who does things like chair a committee to get a pedestrian light installed at a dangerous road crossing point or attempt to save a batch of antique tiles from a building knocked down for Channel Tunnel construction. Kane is a cynical drug dealer who couldn’t care less about most things and who resents his old man for existing. Both are romantically obsessed with Elen, a podiatrist whose husband Dory experiences periodic fugue states in which he behaves with erratic violence. Their small son Fleet is similarly troubled: he’s building a French cathedral he’s never actually seen, in lifelike detail, using matchsticks, and refers to his father as “John” when the fugues overtake him.
What’s going on with Dory? What’s going on with Fleet? Why do Beede and Kane seem to hate each other so much? What does Kane’s ex-girlfriend Kelly, a foul-mouthed chav stuck in hospital with a broken leg, have to contribute? What about Gaffar, a Kurdish delivery driver hired by Kane? All of these characters add their pieces to the mosaic, and all are demonstrations of the hazards and temptations of historical revisionism. As far as Dory and Fleet go, the strong implication is that both are being possessed by the ghost of John Scogin, a real historical figure who served as Edward IV’s court jester. Scogin’s violently psychopathic tendencies were enabled by the protected status of jesters, men who were permitted to speak truth to power – and thus to acquire their own power – in an era when that was a reserved privilege. Scogin’s ghost represents the Whackamole nature of history. He can’t be contained by theory, sentiment, or wishful thinking; he sows confusion, chaos, pain, distress. He’s the anarchy of what actually happened, the uncontainability of people and events. Beede and Kane’s relationship, it’s eventually revealed, is bad because of past actions: Beede allowed Kane’s mother to foster codependency with him, as she became ill with cancer and Kane was forced into caring responsibilities that a child should never have to shoulder. The narrative they’ve spun for each other since – Beede as a saintly do-gooder, Kane as a deadbeat – is uprooted by the Scogin-esque revelation of a very different story.
Kelly and Gaffar have similar trajectories. Kelly is the scion of an infamous local family, the Broads (her uncle, a dodgy building contractor, features in a subplot where he cons Elen and Dory over repairs to their roof). Nothing good comes from the Broads. Her brother has been in an overdose-induced coma for years, and dies in the course of the novel; her mother is portrayed as an overbearing, benefit-snatching harridan. Kelly’s story involves the discovery that she might be related to Dr. Andrew Boarde, an eighteenth-century bishop and biographer of Scogin. As it turns out, this is probably not true, but it matters deeply to Kelly; the idea that her family has experienced a tragic slide over generations is far more compelling than the reality that they have probably been petty criminals for centuries. At the same time, Barker doesn’t punish her for wanting more meaning in her life. She has a religious conversion experience in hospital, and while she retains her miniskirt-wearing, inventively-cursing personality, she also seems to find more purpose after being “saved”. Maybe historical revisionism has its place, Barker seems to be suggesting; maybe deluding ourselves isn’t an entirely bad idea. Gaffar, meanwhile, is one of the oddest characters in the book. He too has an understanding of his family’s history which appears not to be the whole truth, and he functions interestingly as a non-English counterpoint to the very English histories that otherwise populate Darkmans. The novel ends with him: he comes face to face with whatever the Scogin entity actually is, and sits down to gamble with it, in a closing image reminiscent of that famous chess scene from The Seventh Seal.
There’s so much going on that you might think it’d be easy to just surrender to the novel, but then there’s the style. One of Barker’s primary techniques is to show a character’s internal thoughts, often just a single-word reaction, on an intervening separate line between the more polished articulations of the narrating voice. Take this, for example:
This, basically, is why the book is so long. The action is just “Kane finishes a cigarette”, but it takes up a lot of physical space on the page, and it yanks the reader’s attention back and forth between official narrating voice and irrupting character reactions. In that sense it’s a brilliantly effective way of formalising Darkmans's main preoccupation: embedded in the text itself is the experience of having an authoritative story disrupted and scattered, again and again, by something that represents the banal formlessness of reality. The constant use of parenthetical phrases achieves roughly the same end. Here, we’re with podiatrist Elen, musing on her work:
It’s distinctive, successful, and not particularly conducive to readerly relaxation. But then, Darkmans doesn’t want us to relax. I’m not entirely sure that its reiteration of its theme couldn’t have done with some variation, and I’m equally not sure that the past needed to be so relentlessly painted as aggressive; there are other mental frameworks for considering history, including as a means of positive emotional connection across otherwise unbridgeable gaps of time. What Barker does, though, she does with skill and guts. I’ve read three novels by her now, and this is far and away my favourite.
Me, I decided to hang on tight through the bucks and keep applying the spurs (this metaphor is absolutely out of control), so what happened was I read 838 pages of exuberant formal and narrative chaos in two days. It was an experience, if not exactly the relaxing one that Doorstoppers In December is designed to promote.
First of all, we’re in Ashford, Kent, where the Channel Tunnel starts. History is a weird proposition in Ashford; it looks like one of those no-places composed entirely of new-build estates and ring roads, but all no-places are built on top of what used to be someplace. Barker’s concern throughout Darkmans is history as a concept, as constant revision and constant presence, something that pops out and hits you on the nose the more you try to keep it down. Her cast of characters is wide and interconnected, but we start with Beede and Kane, a father-son duo whose strained relationship is attributed by both of them to their differences in personality. Beede is a campaigner by calling, a man possessed by the idea of a better, slower, more authentic life, who does things like chair a committee to get a pedestrian light installed at a dangerous road crossing point or attempt to save a batch of antique tiles from a building knocked down for Channel Tunnel construction. Kane is a cynical drug dealer who couldn’t care less about most things and who resents his old man for existing. Both are romantically obsessed with Elen, a podiatrist whose husband Dory experiences periodic fugue states in which he behaves with erratic violence. Their small son Fleet is similarly troubled: he’s building a French cathedral he’s never actually seen, in lifelike detail, using matchsticks, and refers to his father as “John” when the fugues overtake him.
What’s going on with Dory? What’s going on with Fleet? Why do Beede and Kane seem to hate each other so much? What does Kane’s ex-girlfriend Kelly, a foul-mouthed chav stuck in hospital with a broken leg, have to contribute? What about Gaffar, a Kurdish delivery driver hired by Kane? All of these characters add their pieces to the mosaic, and all are demonstrations of the hazards and temptations of historical revisionism. As far as Dory and Fleet go, the strong implication is that both are being possessed by the ghost of John Scogin, a real historical figure who served as Edward IV’s court jester. Scogin’s violently psychopathic tendencies were enabled by the protected status of jesters, men who were permitted to speak truth to power – and thus to acquire their own power – in an era when that was a reserved privilege. Scogin’s ghost represents the Whackamole nature of history. He can’t be contained by theory, sentiment, or wishful thinking; he sows confusion, chaos, pain, distress. He’s the anarchy of what actually happened, the uncontainability of people and events. Beede and Kane’s relationship, it’s eventually revealed, is bad because of past actions: Beede allowed Kane’s mother to foster codependency with him, as she became ill with cancer and Kane was forced into caring responsibilities that a child should never have to shoulder. The narrative they’ve spun for each other since – Beede as a saintly do-gooder, Kane as a deadbeat – is uprooted by the Scogin-esque revelation of a very different story.
Kelly and Gaffar have similar trajectories. Kelly is the scion of an infamous local family, the Broads (her uncle, a dodgy building contractor, features in a subplot where he cons Elen and Dory over repairs to their roof). Nothing good comes from the Broads. Her brother has been in an overdose-induced coma for years, and dies in the course of the novel; her mother is portrayed as an overbearing, benefit-snatching harridan. Kelly’s story involves the discovery that she might be related to Dr. Andrew Boarde, an eighteenth-century bishop and biographer of Scogin. As it turns out, this is probably not true, but it matters deeply to Kelly; the idea that her family has experienced a tragic slide over generations is far more compelling than the reality that they have probably been petty criminals for centuries. At the same time, Barker doesn’t punish her for wanting more meaning in her life. She has a religious conversion experience in hospital, and while she retains her miniskirt-wearing, inventively-cursing personality, she also seems to find more purpose after being “saved”. Maybe historical revisionism has its place, Barker seems to be suggesting; maybe deluding ourselves isn’t an entirely bad idea. Gaffar, meanwhile, is one of the oddest characters in the book. He too has an understanding of his family’s history which appears not to be the whole truth, and he functions interestingly as a non-English counterpoint to the very English histories that otherwise populate Darkmans. The novel ends with him: he comes face to face with whatever the Scogin entity actually is, and sits down to gamble with it, in a closing image reminiscent of that famous chess scene from The Seventh Seal.
There’s so much going on that you might think it’d be easy to just surrender to the novel, but then there’s the style. One of Barker’s primary techniques is to show a character’s internal thoughts, often just a single-word reaction, on an intervening separate line between the more polished articulations of the narrating voice. Take this, for example:
He glanced down –
Damn
The tip of his spliff had dropped off into his lap. And there was still a small –
Fuck!
– ember…
He cuffed it from his jeans and down on to the floor. He checked the fabric – no hole, but a tiny, brown…
Bugger
He took a final, deep drag –
Nope…
Dead
– then tried to push the damp dog-end into the ashtray, but the ashtray, it seemed, was already full to capacity.
This, basically, is why the book is so long. The action is just “Kane finishes a cigarette”, but it takes up a lot of physical space on the page, and it yanks the reader’s attention back and forth between official narrating voice and irrupting character reactions. In that sense it’s a brilliantly effective way of formalising Darkmans's main preoccupation: embedded in the text itself is the experience of having an authoritative story disrupted and scattered, again and again, by something that represents the banal formlessness of reality. The constant use of parenthetical phrases achieves roughly the same end. Here, we’re with podiatrist Elen, musing on her work:
The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (‘yer dogs’, ‘yer plates’, ‘yer hoofs’). No one really gave a damn about it (although – fair’s fair – the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen’s view, the short-fall still fell . . . well, pretty damn short). The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly … the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet. But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Cote du Tawdry).
It’s distinctive, successful, and not particularly conducive to readerly relaxation. But then, Darkmans doesn’t want us to relax. I’m not entirely sure that its reiteration of its theme couldn’t have done with some variation, and I’m equally not sure that the past needed to be so relentlessly painted as aggressive; there are other mental frameworks for considering history, including as a means of positive emotional connection across otherwise unbridgeable gaps of time. What Barker does, though, she does with skill and guts. I’ve read three novels by her now, and this is far and away my favourite.
February 3, 2012
Oh dear. This is the worst kind of book - long (838 pages), doesnt go anywhere and leaves you wondering what the hell it was all about. And to top it all off, it doesnt even match the blurb on the back that says its to do with 20th century getting possessed by a medieveal spirit. I dont think that happens - but then again, I was so bored, it could have.
So why put up with it.... I dont really know. They was enough humour in the first 300 pages (that admitedly, due to the gaps, were rapidly despatched) to hope that the book would actually progress.
So its set in Ashford and we have Beede - middle aged, consciensous and father of Keene - prescription drug dealer. They are both besotted with Ellen who is a chirpodist and married to Isodor - a germanic nu job. The only really interesting character is Kelly - ex girlfiend of Keene - who is working class slutty scum - but she does has something to say at least.
So on it goes - conversations between the characters are recorded - there is an underlying theme of language - but ultimately - you dont know what the book is trying to get across and more to the point, there is no plot. It is simply not funny enough to carry this off for 838 pages - although there are some memorable lines such as "all mountaineerers are cunts".
A monumental waste of time and probably the fourth book in a row - where the highest rating could be given as very average.
So why put up with it.... I dont really know. They was enough humour in the first 300 pages (that admitedly, due to the gaps, were rapidly despatched) to hope that the book would actually progress.
So its set in Ashford and we have Beede - middle aged, consciensous and father of Keene - prescription drug dealer. They are both besotted with Ellen who is a chirpodist and married to Isodor - a germanic nu job. The only really interesting character is Kelly - ex girlfiend of Keene - who is working class slutty scum - but she does has something to say at least.
So on it goes - conversations between the characters are recorded - there is an underlying theme of language - but ultimately - you dont know what the book is trying to get across and more to the point, there is no plot. It is simply not funny enough to carry this off for 838 pages - although there are some memorable lines such as "all mountaineerers are cunts".
A monumental waste of time and probably the fourth book in a row - where the highest rating could be given as very average.
July 27, 2010
This was a shot in the dark I took, never having heard of the book or the author, and I scored. The writing of this book isn't the kind of thing I usually go for, stream of consciousness, sound effects, etc., and there were way more pop culture references than I normally tolerate, but in the end, this book reminds me of a really simplified Thomas Pynchon, meant as a compliment. I knew by about page 5 or 6 hundred that when the book ended at page 838 I wasn't going to understand everything that was happening. Basically I must assume everyone in the book goes insane from time to time, and one character is insane most of the time (Dory), and people can imagine things and make them form in the real world. This last part was kind of strange because in the horror novel I read just before this book the same thing happened.
This was the first book I've read by Nicola Barker, and I think she's very funny and talented. I think I'll read more books by her if they pop up.
This was the first book I've read by Nicola Barker, and I think she's very funny and talented. I think I'll read more books by her if they pop up.
July 29, 2011
After reading too many disposable novels I was desperate for something to sink my teeth into. Well, for a week, I neglected my children, ignored my e-mails, forgot my husband and literally curled up with this. Even on the rare occasions I wasn't reading it (one must periodically eat, sleep and wash) I was thinking about it. In fact, it felt like it was alive in my head, which wasn't altogether a pleasant sensation - found myself doubting my sanity sometimes. It was a rare beast: bizarre but not for bizarreness' sake, each strange incident simply drew you further in with beguiling fingers, never over-explaining, never giving anything away.
Incidentally, Beede was played (in my head) by Ken Stott. Don't know why.
Incidentally, Beede was played (in my head) by Ken Stott. Don't know why.
July 3, 2013
From the Guardian's review:
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".
Ha... ha?
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".
Ha... ha?
December 30, 2008
I truly hated this book and could not force myself to finish it although I was at the beach with no convenient way to find something else to read. I am perplexed that anyone could have enjoyed this.
October 29, 2025
Looking back over the last 12 months I seem to have read quite a few books over 600 pages, some have seemed more of a marathon over rough terrain rather than an enjoyable stroll: this at 850 pages has been a riot! Nicola Barker’s novels are unique, full of linguistic energy, the prose can also be playful and words are scattered artfully across the page. She is happiest describing the crazy underbelly of society, the misfits and the chancers, and she is willing to confront the weird, the inexplicable and the bad.
Nicola Barker expertly crafts her stories and this one has a historical mystery at its heart. The reader is treated to flashes of perspective from a range of characters whose pasts and presents interweave: the reader has to stay alert to passing references and linkages because nothing is in the text by chance.
The setting is deepest darkest Kent, focussing mainly on the Ashford area, which has been developed to within an inch of its life: with housing, dual carriageways, roundabouts, commercial premises loosening historical and social ties. In amongst the gritty social realism, there is dark humour and wise cracking tradesmen and modern-day misfits; Caffar the random Kurdish refugee pathologically terrified of lettuce; bored housewives in their fluffy slippers; the unlikely sexy podiatrist Elen and Peta Borough the forger of antiques; Kane disillusioned son and sometime soft drug dealer and Beede his estranged father and hospital laundry manger; the psychotic German Dory and the partially paralysed dog in a special cart; several strange children in dysfunctional families including the anorexic Kelly, Kane’s ex girlfriend who dramatically breaks her leg and Fleet who builds cathedrals and towns from matches; a weird trip to the seaside and a nighttime chase in a dark forest with a sword carrying huntsman and his pregnant dog; last but not least John Scogin salaried mischief maker or court jester in the fifteenth century court of Edward lV who haunts the whole book as a malicious spirit.
I don’t want to say too much about the plot suffice to say revenge is a driver: the reader has to work and work hard to see how everything comes together but not neatly or coherently or in a way a rational person could explain. It is one of the most enjoyable and immersive long books I have read for a while: it is a rewarding and enriching experience.
Nicola Barker expertly crafts her stories and this one has a historical mystery at its heart. The reader is treated to flashes of perspective from a range of characters whose pasts and presents interweave: the reader has to stay alert to passing references and linkages because nothing is in the text by chance.
The setting is deepest darkest Kent, focussing mainly on the Ashford area, which has been developed to within an inch of its life: with housing, dual carriageways, roundabouts, commercial premises loosening historical and social ties. In amongst the gritty social realism, there is dark humour and wise cracking tradesmen and modern-day misfits; Caffar the random Kurdish refugee pathologically terrified of lettuce; bored housewives in their fluffy slippers; the unlikely sexy podiatrist Elen and Peta Borough the forger of antiques; Kane disillusioned son and sometime soft drug dealer and Beede his estranged father and hospital laundry manger; the psychotic German Dory and the partially paralysed dog in a special cart; several strange children in dysfunctional families including the anorexic Kelly, Kane’s ex girlfriend who dramatically breaks her leg and Fleet who builds cathedrals and towns from matches; a weird trip to the seaside and a nighttime chase in a dark forest with a sword carrying huntsman and his pregnant dog; last but not least John Scogin salaried mischief maker or court jester in the fifteenth century court of Edward lV who haunts the whole book as a malicious spirit.
I don’t want to say too much about the plot suffice to say revenge is a driver: the reader has to work and work hard to see how everything comes together but not neatly or coherently or in a way a rational person could explain. It is one of the most enjoyable and immersive long books I have read for a while: it is a rewarding and enriching experience.
September 7, 2024
I would struggle to explain the plot of this book, it's surreal and I don't think anything much actually happens even though it's pushing 900 pages, but the detail of the characters and their actions and background is insane and I absolutely loved it. I will definitely be reading more of her stuff
July 30, 2021
What an exhilarating head-spinner. Those 838 pages sped by as if I had taken something stronger than the pills from prescription-drug dealing Kane.
So what happened? The story is set in anonymous Ashford in the present day, a place split by a bypass and on the way to somewhere else, but a historic town now partly buried beneath concrete.
And from the past – although why particularly associated with Ashford I don’t know – rises the mischievous spirit of John Scogin, jester to King Edward IV, who takes over the personality of each of the main characters in greater or lesser degree, forcing them to utter strange words and act in an outrageous manner.
That might seem explanation enough for the weird events that occur from the outset, when the German-ish but not German Dory, who hates horses, finds himself outside a family restaurant having apparently arrived on a pony.
But that aside, one still looks through the glass darkly to perceive what the hell is going on. A reviewer in The Guardian observed that one had to dig more deeply at the end to work out all the clues, but they evaded me. It would have felt good to complete a ‘So he .. then she ..’ test paper, but I didn’t much care. I was just having too much fun.
The central character is Kane’s kindly father Beede (or at least he might be) who has paid a forger to copy documents relating to Scogin. Father and son have in interest in the enigmatic chiropodist Elen, who seems to understand the unnatural possession of her husband Dory and their precocious son Fleet.
The lad is building an intricate model in matchsticks – allusions to fire – of a French cathedral. When it is remarked that it isn’t complete, Fleet, who often calls his father ‘John,’ replies that is because ‘it hasn’t been built yet,’ as would have been the case when Scogin fled there in exile.
The novel roars along, giving a feel of the social codes of the Middle Ages, when spectacle was all, a time when something was right or wrong, with no in-between, no concept of leniency, when punishments and jests could both be cruel. And there are echoes of its superstitions in the frequent intervention of beasts – a stag, a demented crow, a cat that haunts the scene like the one in The Master and Marguerita.
Barker also revels in language, advancing the theory – as interpreted by the indeed venerable Beede – that language is driver of history, and that the Renaissance took place in Britain at least because of the development of English and ‘its unconstrained grass-roots honesty and power.’
The scenes are often farcical, but it’s the comedy in the language above all that rips through the book like a jester’s fart.
There is constant amusement in the character of Gaffar, an immigrant Kurd, who speaks not only in broken English but in his native tongue, printed in the book in distinctive bold type, and which Beede alone can understand.
There’s humour too in the character of the appropriately-named Kelly Broad, who finds God, or believes he has found her because of a series of coincidences that she invests with meaning, but doesn’t give up her foul and hilarious language. As when she issues a blanket forgiveness of everyone, for everything.
One forgiven soul who cannot think for what she is forgiven rejects the gesture:
‘”What if I don’t want your forgiveness?’ Winnie wondered. ‘What if I’m not interested ..’
“Kelly rapidly lifted her hand.
“‘Then you can fuck right off,’ she spat, ‘because you’re forgiven, and there ain’t bugger-all you can do about it.’”
A great book or just a magician's trick of a book? Time will tell, but never mind. I loved it, I loved the characters. Now will someone tell me what was going on?
So what happened? The story is set in anonymous Ashford in the present day, a place split by a bypass and on the way to somewhere else, but a historic town now partly buried beneath concrete.
And from the past – although why particularly associated with Ashford I don’t know – rises the mischievous spirit of John Scogin, jester to King Edward IV, who takes over the personality of each of the main characters in greater or lesser degree, forcing them to utter strange words and act in an outrageous manner.
That might seem explanation enough for the weird events that occur from the outset, when the German-ish but not German Dory, who hates horses, finds himself outside a family restaurant having apparently arrived on a pony.
But that aside, one still looks through the glass darkly to perceive what the hell is going on. A reviewer in The Guardian observed that one had to dig more deeply at the end to work out all the clues, but they evaded me. It would have felt good to complete a ‘So he .. then she ..’ test paper, but I didn’t much care. I was just having too much fun.
The central character is Kane’s kindly father Beede (or at least he might be) who has paid a forger to copy documents relating to Scogin. Father and son have in interest in the enigmatic chiropodist Elen, who seems to understand the unnatural possession of her husband Dory and their precocious son Fleet.
The lad is building an intricate model in matchsticks – allusions to fire – of a French cathedral. When it is remarked that it isn’t complete, Fleet, who often calls his father ‘John,’ replies that is because ‘it hasn’t been built yet,’ as would have been the case when Scogin fled there in exile.
The novel roars along, giving a feel of the social codes of the Middle Ages, when spectacle was all, a time when something was right or wrong, with no in-between, no concept of leniency, when punishments and jests could both be cruel. And there are echoes of its superstitions in the frequent intervention of beasts – a stag, a demented crow, a cat that haunts the scene like the one in The Master and Marguerita.
Barker also revels in language, advancing the theory – as interpreted by the indeed venerable Beede – that language is driver of history, and that the Renaissance took place in Britain at least because of the development of English and ‘its unconstrained grass-roots honesty and power.’
The scenes are often farcical, but it’s the comedy in the language above all that rips through the book like a jester’s fart.
There is constant amusement in the character of Gaffar, an immigrant Kurd, who speaks not only in broken English but in his native tongue, printed in the book in distinctive bold type, and which Beede alone can understand.
There’s humour too in the character of the appropriately-named Kelly Broad, who finds God, or believes he has found her because of a series of coincidences that she invests with meaning, but doesn’t give up her foul and hilarious language. As when she issues a blanket forgiveness of everyone, for everything.
One forgiven soul who cannot think for what she is forgiven rejects the gesture:
‘”What if I don’t want your forgiveness?’ Winnie wondered. ‘What if I’m not interested ..’
“Kelly rapidly lifted her hand.
“‘Then you can fuck right off,’ she spat, ‘because you’re forgiven, and there ain’t bugger-all you can do about it.’”
A great book or just a magician's trick of a book? Time will tell, but never mind. I loved it, I loved the characters. Now will someone tell me what was going on?
August 1, 2021
I never feel clean leaving a review of a book I haven't finished but according to my kindle I have read 234 pages and I have suffered enough. Goddammit.
I read the first two books in this trilogy, and it *is* a trilogy because they are sub-titled as Thames Gateway #1, #2, #3
The first book was like a B&W TV drama, stark, under-explained and brilliant.
The second was more of an early colour tv 80's drama, colours a bit washed out and a few fuzzy lines on the screen but you could still make out what was happening.
Where do I begin on #3? First of all wtf is happening? I can discern no plot, storyline, framework, or anything that holds it all together. The characters are 2 dimensional in spite of the number of words that are thrown on their presence. Their petty thoughts and accommodations are simply fucking boring. Did it have a beginning? a middle? I am sure as hell not wasting any more time to see if it has an end.
I've read enough Japanese plot-less novels to know that you don't need a "plot"as such but you do need a context and characters that are interesting.
It's like it was written by someone who didn't write the first two in this trilogy. The first two were tied together by being placed on the Thames Estuary and in the characterisation, but where is this one placed? I simply have no idea either geographically, spiritually or intentionally.
I'm not afraid of long books! I have read 4 volumes of The Man Without Qualities, Sapiens, Gravity's Rainbow and The Luminaries, and while The Luminaries had good moments and bad moments, at least it had enough sub-plots to help you along. But where is the fucking main plot, let alone any sub-plots in this?
The characters are not being developed just repeated over and over again.
I'm sick of angst that thinks it is substance. Angst is the wallpaper in the room, it is not the room! Flawed characters are not the same as characters that draw empathy or even hatred out of you. I'm sick of the blandness of it all. Like I said 235 pages of what?.
I have read many novels with less pages but more substance than this. And I'd include Thames Gateway #1 in that list any day.
I read the first two books in this trilogy, and it *is* a trilogy because they are sub-titled as Thames Gateway #1, #2, #3
The first book was like a B&W TV drama, stark, under-explained and brilliant.
The second was more of an early colour tv 80's drama, colours a bit washed out and a few fuzzy lines on the screen but you could still make out what was happening.
Where do I begin on #3? First of all wtf is happening? I can discern no plot, storyline, framework, or anything that holds it all together. The characters are 2 dimensional in spite of the number of words that are thrown on their presence. Their petty thoughts and accommodations are simply fucking boring. Did it have a beginning? a middle? I am sure as hell not wasting any more time to see if it has an end.
I've read enough Japanese plot-less novels to know that you don't need a "plot"as such but you do need a context and characters that are interesting.
It's like it was written by someone who didn't write the first two in this trilogy. The first two were tied together by being placed on the Thames Estuary and in the characterisation, but where is this one placed? I simply have no idea either geographically, spiritually or intentionally.
I'm not afraid of long books! I have read 4 volumes of The Man Without Qualities, Sapiens, Gravity's Rainbow and The Luminaries, and while The Luminaries had good moments and bad moments, at least it had enough sub-plots to help you along. But where is the fucking main plot, let alone any sub-plots in this?
The characters are not being developed just repeated over and over again.
I'm sick of angst that thinks it is substance. Angst is the wallpaper in the room, it is not the room! Flawed characters are not the same as characters that draw empathy or even hatred out of you. I'm sick of the blandness of it all. Like I said 235 pages of what?.
I have read many novels with less pages but more substance than this. And I'd include Thames Gateway #1 in that list any day.
December 10, 2010
When the Booker Prize longlist came out I ordered a couple of the 13 books from the library. I didn't really look very deeply into the details of the books, in fact I pretty much ordered them blind hoping that being on the longlist would be enough to give me something interesting to read.
I didn't bargain on the first book that turned up being an over 800 page doorstep. (No, not a doorstop, I do think you could use this as a doorstep!)
My first impressions weren't great and I struggled through part one not really having any clear idea of the characters or the story that was being told. The structure changed in part two and we stayed with a single character for longer and found out more about them and I began to enjoy the book more even after the structure changed again in part three. In the end I found it quite an easy book to read, lots of white space, prose that was easy to take in and I found the pages to turn pretty fast.
I believe that no really good book should ever tell you every little detail - as a reader I want to be left feeling that I saw more than what the author wrote. I don't want every clue and connection between different places in the story to be pointed out to me.
At the end of the book I felt that I had hundreds of jigsaw pieces in my head. A lot of them (not all of them) were well crafted and interesting to read. What I didn't have was quite enough to manage to piece them together into a coherent whole. I was left feeling that I wasn't quite clever enough for the book.
There's obviously a lot of "second reading" life in this book; I suspect I'd find it a better read second time around but there are too many good books waiting to be read first time around and I don't read many books again, and I don't think this will be one of the few.
Although I found most of the book a good read, my first, and last, impressions were that it wasn't a good book to win the Booker Prize and I hope that there are books more worthy of the prize on the longlist.
I didn't bargain on the first book that turned up being an over 800 page doorstep. (No, not a doorstop, I do think you could use this as a doorstep!)
My first impressions weren't great and I struggled through part one not really having any clear idea of the characters or the story that was being told. The structure changed in part two and we stayed with a single character for longer and found out more about them and I began to enjoy the book more even after the structure changed again in part three. In the end I found it quite an easy book to read, lots of white space, prose that was easy to take in and I found the pages to turn pretty fast.
I believe that no really good book should ever tell you every little detail - as a reader I want to be left feeling that I saw more than what the author wrote. I don't want every clue and connection between different places in the story to be pointed out to me.
At the end of the book I felt that I had hundreds of jigsaw pieces in my head. A lot of them (not all of them) were well crafted and interesting to read. What I didn't have was quite enough to manage to piece them together into a coherent whole. I was left feeling that I wasn't quite clever enough for the book.
There's obviously a lot of "second reading" life in this book; I suspect I'd find it a better read second time around but there are too many good books waiting to be read first time around and I don't read many books again, and I don't think this will be one of the few.
Although I found most of the book a good read, my first, and last, impressions were that it wasn't a good book to win the Booker Prize and I hope that there are books more worthy of the prize on the longlist.
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