In the Approaches

Digital Trilogy #3

by Nicola Barker

‘Open yourself up again to all that terrible light and savage bliss and deafening reverberation …’

Nicola Barker’s readers are primed to expect surprises, but her tenth novel delivers mind-meld on a metaphysical scale. From quiet beginnings in the picturesque English seaside enclave of Pett Level, ‘In The Approaches’ ultimately constructs its own anarchic city-state on the previously undiscovered common ground between G.K. Chesterton and Philip K. Dick. On the one hand, this is an old-fashioned romantic comedy of fused buttocks, shrunken heads and Irish-Aboriginal saints; on the other it’s Barker’s wildest and most haunting book since 2007’s Booker Prize-shortlisted ‘Darkmans’.

Following previous celebrations of the enduring allure of the posted letter (’Burley Cross Postbox Theft’) and the pre-lapsarian innocence of pre-Twitter celebrity (Booker-longlisted ‘The Yips’), this concluding instalment of Barker’s subliminally affiliated ‘digital trilogy’ imagines a basis for the internet in Catholic theology. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwell’s was in the future, ‘In the Approaches’ offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, British Literature, 21st Century, Ebooks

497 pages, Hardcover

First published June 5, 2014

About the author

Librarian 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.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barker releases another bouncing bomb of British barminess and wipes out several hundred readers in the process (including this one). In the first decade of Barker’s career, she wrote understated and careful prose and imbued her oddballs with dark all-too-human eccentricities, creating airtight worlds with her own peculiar prose insignias. The arrival of Behindlings marked the beginning of her new expansive phase, perfected to an art in Darkmans. Since that novel, she has been ploughing the same furrow of manic farce and one-voice characterisation (self-inquiring and implausibly wordy), reaching its nadir in this shambolic tale of romance and religion featuring a failed metafictional subplot and an the unfortunate narration of a lexically limited parrot. Those approaching Barker for the first time might not be as fed up of her clumsy repeated verbs and slapdash top-of-the-head feel of the (excessive) dialogue, however patient readers of The Yips will reach their breaking point here. The character who rails against his author is rubbed from the story (intentionally), although the absence of purpose and self-comment suggests Barker is somewhat uneasy, and aware, of the resistance to her unrelenting style . . . perhaps a welcome change of approach for her next novel is a-coming. Please. Please!? PLEASE!?!?

[Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too much of a good (and not characteristically great) thing. Padded with top-heavy zany tautology, slightly too distractingly meta at times...but still unique madcap fun in the main.

[Snakes · Rating 2 out of 5]

At times pretty engaging, subtlety humorous, and borderline masterful, but more often droll, overly long-sighted, and painfully slow. Barker is generally brilliant. This offering not so much.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was headed for a 4-star rating, and then the last 50 pages happened. Barker always creates marvelously eccentric characters, and they kept me going, but the end doesn't contain an ending. And, adding post-modern insult to injury, tells us it doesn't. As one of the themes in the book revolves around faith, perhaps we were meant to take on faith the life-reflecting reality of no real end outside of (and perhaps not then) death.

[Esther Duarte Martí · Rating 4 out of 5]

How to create literary misfits

Anywhere she goes, Nicola Barker leaves a trail of misfits. Disrupted storylines, peculiar characters and British landscapes comprise some of the patterns visible in her novels. Nonetheless, her complex character portrayal has been the main source of headache for her readers. Their main characteristic? Misfits that find themselves connected to one another due to a traumatic past event. As we have seen in prior novels such as Wide Open or Behindlings, all of Barker’s characters are given the complexity to make them likeable as well as exasperating at times. In both novels, Barker showcases extraordinary skills to portray incorrigible and incurable characters that readers at times unwillingly learn to love. They can be rude, completely cynical and they misbehave, yet still, they wield a magnetic pull, even to their own creator. For instance, in an interview with Yuka Igarashi in the online newspaper Granta, Barker playfully claimed “I start a novel and then the characters just keep on popping up. Sometimes they’re quite unwelcome. I’ll sit back and think, ‘Oh! Hello? Who the hell are you?’”.
What makes her characters stand out from the crowd is the sense the reader gets that they constitute the most odd, arbitrary and incidental characteristics put together in a single person. Whether it be feeding your hand to an owl or forcing your hands together in order to pray until the verge of death, most of Barker’s characters seem to draw controversy upon themselves. As Barker explained in an interview with John Cunningham for The Guardian, "I like to write something that people have to struggle to understand; something to get over a prejudice." She does not only portray weird characters with the sole purpose of making the reader laugh. Barker goes beyond and uses her characters in order to shock the reader into accepting the rare as the new normal so that the weird can be faced and understood as part of a common life. Yet still, she prompts such a noble message in a rather entertaining way through the usage of the character’s overly dramatic inner monologues in order to bring comedic relief.
To talk about the misfits portrayed in In the Approaches is, in particular, to talk about hats made out of spider webs, hiccups that last chapters long, sealed buttocks, a character being able to sex birds, a bird imitating ringtones to drive the human crazy, a character aware of his fictional nature that calls the author a cow or another character that, as certain Brits seem to do, believe that WD-40 can be used basically for just about anything - even pain relief after a hornet’s sting.
Whereas Barker’s style has been described by readers as overcomplicated and plotless, in In the Approaches we find a Barker that deceives. The main plot appears to be the story of a family that has been hounded by tragedy. A father that might have been involved in terrorist attacks, his Aboriginal wife, who had been conceived from rape, and their deeply religious thalidomide daughter. The narration begins with Mr D. Huff coming to the Sussex village of Pett Level with the sole purpose of unravelling the circumstances that occurred thirteen years prior surrounding the Cleary family. But suddenly, the plot turns unexpectedly to a game of romantic tug of war between Mr D. Huff and Miss Cara Hahn. The one insults her overly fat dog, the other hides a shark underneath his bed and so on and so forth. It turns thus, into the typical romantic comedy of boy actively ignores the girl just to find himself asking what she must smell like. Barker explores the possible comedic outcomes that can happen when the typical teenager romantic story is catapulted into the adult world. Although, as per usual in her novels, she creates several other sub-pots through the different characters that are bound together by the story. She diverts the plot to focus on little Orla and her phantasmagorical appearances that orchestrate the coming together of the main couple alongside a comical character aware of his fictional status that criticises the author and even chapters reserved for a parrot.
What does Barker have to say for herself? In the aforementioned interview, Barker affirmed that "[e]veryone says my characters are weird, but to me they seem normal.". She seems to have welcomed the odd into her everyday life so that it has lost its meaning and has become mundane.
Barker seems to be fascinated by the improbable when it comes to writing characters. Still, it is not only the character’s qualities that classify them as peculiar or eccentric. The events that precede them, their origins, the misadventures that befall them, how they behave, how they think, they all compose an entirely curious whole that is her novels. Or is deciding to take a fourty-eight hour walk in which one breaks into a church, confesses in Spanish to a priest from Alicante and ends up with a dwarf breed of a rabbit in his vest a normal evening to you?
Barkers’ world of character oddities expands even into the animal realm, in which we could consider Barker one of them if we count her as the “cow of an Author”. Following her modus operandi, we find animals such as Rolfie, a cat that is actually living his nine lives to the fullest at the grand old age of forty-one, and Rogue, a morbidly obese dog that dies only to come back from the dead from what was actually a diabetic coma to simply die again. In her other novels we have found sexually active chinchillas, mysterious never seen gorillas or malformed animals in boxes whereas in In the Approaches the fauna of Pett Level gains more than a secondary position. Teobaldo, Baldo to his friends, is a wrongly gendered parrot who is given the same agency as a human character. She has her own voice in her own chapters where she faces off King, a mynah bird who has been stealing her sun, fruits and even the attention of “bitch”, which is the affectionate appellation she uses to refer to her owner.
Character wise, Barker has outdone herself in this novel by creating, for the first time in her oeuvre, a character that breaks the fourth wall. Mr Clifford Bickerton becomes a character aware of his own fictional nature who constantly diatribes looking towards the sky and is utterly paranoid he will be killed in an embarrassing way. Thus, he becomes the external critical voice of the reader wondering in a witty tone whether she will ever finish telling the story she started to tell before she got distracted with the other ones. It is his whimsical train of thought and unanswered rants against the cow of an Author - his words, not mine - that give the novel a highly amusing undertone.
In another outstanding move by Barker, creating a character aware of the fictional set surrounding them, she writes her own self within the novel. As if she were a modern Margaret Cavendish, she inserts herself inside of the plot in order to add a layer of contrast among other writer’s characters and hers. She does not interact with her creation quite as Cavendish does but her ‘character’ is the source of far more humour. Yet, the impressive part of Clifford’s situation is that somehow his awake state within the novel allows him not only to know about the details concerning his fellow characters, but he is also capable of knowing things about the author’s personal life. From Barker’s award-winning novels to her sadistic tendencies, Clifford can and will use this information to influence the opinion of the reader about the author.
With the usage of such explicit metafiction, the reader is reminded of the work’s fictitious quality. As well as by introducing the author into the plot, the character’s free will can be seen as diminished. According to Clifford, the cow of an Author makes him act out of character and makes him talk in a far too sophisticated way. Thus, the author writing the novel can be perceived as a kind of puppet master, moving her puppets into doing and saying what she wants. Nevertheless, with Clifford we become witnesses of how during the writing process a character can develop a life of their own outside the author’s controlling reach. During the novel the reader is unsure whether the character is at the mercy of the Author or whether the character has obtained an agency of his own. We see Clifford re-write, invent and meddle with the story without her authority. As the plot unwinds, the reader receives glimpses of the singular duel between the author and Clifford. The character that Barker creates of herself as the “almighty Author” that she is does not seems to mind Clifford addressing the reader or his complaints about her word choice for his character. Nevertheless, as we do with misbehaving children, she punishes him if he interferes with the progress of the plot by feeding information to the other characters. The Author, as any other God, is a vengeful one: Clifford tells Mr Huff about Mrs Hahn’s deeds, he gets a dog bite; he tells Mrs Hahn about Mr Huff’s relationship with the photographer, swan poo in the head.
In this instance, we see a Clifford that has had it with being the secondary character used in a romantic story where the woman he is in love with has the main role along with another man. Thus, wanting to put his superpowers to the test, he steps into an active role and decides to narrate the story, coming up with the fact that Mr Huff’s seatbelt of the car is faulty. He knows the belt works, Mr Huff actually double checks it does, yet still he tells the reader it does not. He claims it to be an innocent experiment; however, he wonders whether his words can actually challenge the fictional reality he is aware of. So, he speeds, and the belt snaps and Mr Huff flies out of the car. This scene adds an yet another layer, even for Barker, who is not afraid of having the reader laugh at her expense by writing herself into the novel so that one of her rebellious characters can make fun of her.
As if taken out of an episode from The Truman Show, Clifford complains when he notices staged sets: he realises there is a hedge-cutter when there are no hedges around. Obviously, Barker counterattacks by almost piercing his foot with a fork at the same time the hedge-cutter silently falls. Yet this fork-attack should serve him as warning sign. Big cow of an Author is watching you, Clifford. His demise finally comes since the fatal problem with Clifford Bickerton is that he is Mr Nice. He is not cynical, nor eccentric, nor any of the adjectives applicable to Barker’s character archetype; in contrast, he is normal. He is seen as stable, reliable and reasonable. For that, the Author sentences him to death, if only literarily speaking. She does not give him a fatal and nasty toenail infection, as he feared, or make him commit suicide, since he himself alludes to the difficulty hanging himself would carry due to his height. The cow of an Author shows mercy on him - and I think he would agree with this - by not making him follow through with some of the deaths his character colleagues from other novels suffer. He does not asphyxiate on a frozen butter pad or die due to “something to do with a tooth?!” as Barker inflicts upon Mr Huff’s ex-wife.
Even if one sympathises with Clifford Bickerton and believes Barker to be a “cow of an Author��, her character portrayal renders her one of the most eminent contemporary British authors. Ultimately, In the Approaches is a magnificent story about the connection between love, all kinds of (mis)adventures, hilarious secondary characters duelling the author and a parrot.

[Bodosika Bodosika · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dull but hope to try another of her work before giving a final verdict.

[Iain Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased, as Nicola Barker is one of my favourite writers, but for me this is the novel of 2014. See how firmly I've nailed my colours to the mast. The rest of this review would be pretty one-sided, so I'm not going to discuss the book or explain the story or any of that usual book review schtick. I'm just going to point at this novel, and stare at you, until you are either shamed or enticed into buying and reading it. That is all.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the Approaches by Nicola Barker is one of those books where the author seems to be having so much fun they’ve forgotten about their readers. Amusing in snatches it was also frustratingly confusing. By the end I had no clearer idea of its purpose than I had at the beginning.

I started reading it having heard of Nicola Barker’s name as ‘one to watch’. She’s steadily attracted attention ever since she was named as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2005 and her last novel The Yips was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The announcement that her latest novel, In the Approaches, was nominated for the 2015 Folio Prize motivated me to get to know this writer.

I knew she had a reputation for somewhat off beam plots and characters but I wasn’t prepared for a novel that lurched so wildly from knock about humour (the central male character ends up with a very embarrassing medical condition) to the bizarre (a conversation conducted naked inside a small sauna perched on the edge of a crumbling cliff) and unrequited love, taking in mysticism and links to IRA bomb plots along the way.

Set in a picturesque coastal village of Pett Level “in the approaches of Rye Bay and Hastings” it features Mr Franklin D Huff, an ex journalist who arrives to take up temporary residence in the village. He’s there to uncover the truth about events 14 years ago when his former wife, a world famous photographer, lived in the Levels and had an affair with a mural artist who may or may not have been involved with the IRA. Huff’s arrival in the village stirs up the murky past, particularly for his landlord Miss Carla Hahn. She was once nanny to the artist’s daughter, a half-Aboriginal thalidomide girl who developed a reputation as a visionary until her early death. Carla is desperate to preserve intact the girl’s achievements and her legacy.

The story unfolds slowly with many digressions including two pages of possible solutions to hiccups and a LOT of sections of dialogue which don’t advance the plot much. Most of the dramatic events seem to happen off stage and we discover them only through the somewhat clumsy device of conversations or interior monologues. Huff and Hahn alternate as the main narrators, but we also get a few chapters seen through the perspective of a neurotic parrot (supposedly these were meant to be funny but it was one conceit too many for me). More amusing was the character of Clifford the milkman, frustrated because his love of Carla Hahn goes unacknowledged and because his destiny is to be the minor character in the novel, a little bit of local colour or just “A tragic afterthought dreamed up by the mean cow of an Author to add that tiny bit of extra depth, a light gloss of policy – a nice, reliable pinch of snuff…. to the ‘main’ the important, the real, the actually-grown-up-three-dimensional relationship.”

He talks back to the author, complaining that she’s going to make him act totally out of character before killing him off quickly. He also makes some snide comments about her previous books : “She killed someone in another novel (forget the name of it, offhand) with a frozen, miniature butter pat and then she won a prize. A prize! A big money prize! What were they thinking?!”

Beyond the humour, Barker seems to be striving to make a point about people like Carla Hahn who are stuck, in the metaphorical ‘approaches’, circling around life rather than engaging it it fully. Even her house is on the fringes, each year getting closer to the sea as the cliff beneath it crumbles. By the end a more profound tone emerges as Carla ‘is found’ and realises that the only certainty in life is love. “The way it flew. The way it burns. Almost senselessly. Until everything is devoured. Everything is consumed. And then it dies and is gone. Just the ashes remaining. A pointless little pile of exquisite, feather-light flakes of depleted carbon.”

Why Barker left it so late to give us something worth reflecting upon, I can’t imagine. “Does she ever get around to telling a story?” asks one character. “I can’t seriously imagine her Average Reader would approve… they’ll all say she’s losing the plot.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Having reached the end of this shambling romantic comedy I was no nearer understanding the point of it, than I was at the beginning.

[Matt Hunt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This started of really nicely, then there was a chapter from the point of view of a parrot and it became amazing. I quickly tired of it all after that and by page ~100 I couldn't be arsed reading the rest.
So I've quit.

[Bart Van Overmeire · Rating 4 out of 5]

To quote Mr Clifford Bickerton, the local odd-jobs man and self-conscious pawn in the hands of the author: 'Does she ever get around to telling a story? And aside from that (how can you write a story without actually telling a story?) I just feel like she's really over-egging the pudding this time around. I can’t seriously imagine her Average Reader would approve (is that you? Or are you just flicking through this at your mother’s house during the Christmas holidays - bored out of your tiny mind - because it’s something she’s been forced to read by her book group?) (I don’t have a clue what a book group is. So I don’t even know why I mentioned that). I think they’ll all say she’s losing the plot. The book’ll bomb.' 

No, Nicola Barker does not tell conventional stories. She is very good at not telling conventional stories, though.

The aforementioned Mr Clifford Bickerton is convinced the cow Author (his/her own words) is intent on getting him killed and suffers direly under her spell, being made to use arty-farty pretentious words and what not.

Another character on the sidelines is Teobaldo, a parrot who is not particularly fond of his owner 'Bitch' (the parrot's words, not mine) but hates the backstabbing sneaky new mynah bird, sheer evil genius King, even more.

As to the main plot: let me suffice by saying it's fuzzy. In 1984, Mr Franklin D. Huff attempts to reconstruct and understand the bizarre and tragic events which befell Orla, an Irish-Aboriginal visionary girl thirteen years ago. But who cares, because buttocks are sealed together en route to Douai Abbey and more craziness ensues 😂. Unfortunately, the end is a bit too much and too religious for my tastes and my poor atheist soul, hence the lost star... 

[Pádraic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not without its charming moments -- the blurb gives no real indication that this is essentially a romance and kind of a cute one at that -- but also with more than its fair share of irritations. The metatextual plot mostly induces wincing, the very close first-person narration is cloying, and there are multiple chapters from the perspective of a parrot. A massive step down from my last Barker, Darkmans, but I did end up enjoying it more than some other things I've read lately that are, in many respects, technically 'better'.

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Nicola Barker's books! If you haven't read her you should.

[Just This · Rating 3 out of 5]

lots of kooky characters & weird behaviour, very meta, and completely engaging

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicola Barker has a mind like no other and I am so happy she writes stories. That is all.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bonkers. Finally, a writer as funny as Morrissey. Learnt so many new words. Plot, however, had nothing to grab onto. [Read half]

[Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicola Barker rarely makes public appearances, so it was a rare pleasure to see her in conversation with her fan Ali Smith at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2014. She made the observation that her novels roughly alternate between ‘serious’ works written in the third person and more frivolous ones written in the first person. During the brief chat I had with her while she signed my copy of In the Approaches, I said that I probably wouldn’t like it, because I much prefer her serious, third-person books. I also took along my old paperback of Wide Open for her to sign; she said that that particular book tends to be more popular among male readers.

Anyway, I read In the Approaches and, while I wouldn’t rate it as highly as Darkmans or Wide Open, I found it a surprisingly engrossing tale. What a bizarre, vivid imagination Nicola Barker has, though: I can’t imagine how the background for this weird story could possibly have come to mind.

The crazy premise runs like this. In a town on the South Coast of England in 1971, there lived an enigmatic couple (Irish artist man, Australian half-Aboriginal woman) who had a young daughter called Orla Nor. She had the birth defects characteristic of Thalidomide, including stunted arms, but she became renowned, at least among Catholics, for her apparently holy qualities. Her nurse/nanny was a young German woman called Carla Hahn, who remained living in the town. Some kind of tragic end befell the family. Thirteen years later, in 1984, a weird journalist/explorer man called Franklin D. Huff arrived in the town, rented a cottage from Carla Hahn, and tried to investigate the story, while befriending, after a fasion, Carla.

The story is mostly told in the alternate voices of Carla and Franklin, with their different perspectives on some pretty bizarre events, but there are some very memorable cameos to. The talking parrot, Baldo, has a few chapters of his/her own. The local handyman-type person, Clifford Bickerton, appears, with a weird knowledge of the fact that he is a fictional character in a story written by ‘the cow Author’. Towards the end, the story is not exactly resolved – if you like your books to end cleanly with all loose ends tied up, you don’t read Nicola Barker books – but there is some degree of settlement. Also it may be relevant, symbolically, that the town is gradually falling into the sea due to coastal erosion.

I’m not sure I totally agree with the jacket notes that it ‘offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith’, but there is something strange and otherworldly going on, at least lurking in the shadows of the book. If I could find a few other people who would not be infuriated by reading it, I think it would make for fascinating discussion at a book group.

The hardback has a beautiful cover, featuring a William Holman Hunt painting. The typeface inside is the very neutral, classic Plantin, which lends the story a certain degree of authority and gravity. (I only mention this because Nicola Barker herself mentioned typefaces at her Edinburgh Book Festival talk!)

[Jack Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Nicola Barker's books even though (because) they're quite weird. This one struck me particularly because it's full of characters talking to the author/reader and endless brackets, both things which some people really can't get on with but might explain my own interest in them. :)

It's a big fat thing set on the south coast (a place she writes very well - sort of near Rye-ish this one) where the precarious nature of the coast, slipping into the sea, is reflected by the precariousness of the characters' grasp of their lives. It's also about faith, I think, the story revolving round the events twelve years previously which involved or didn't involve miracles facilitated by Orla, a child affected by Thalidomide. I like the back and forth with two possibly unreliable narrators, Miss Carla Hahn, owner of the house Orla lived in, and Franklin Huff, who has come from Mexico to write about the events. Plus Rusty, Carla's erstwhile lover, and Theobaldo, an angry parrot. There's lots of stuff about people not saying what they think and misunderstandings, which I usually hate, but it works really well here. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone but I really enjoyed it.

[Latkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read a couple of Barker's previous books, Darkmans and The Yips, and I liked them, so I read this one. I liked it too - because it's so odd! I still don't know what it's about really, but I don't think that matters because it's so entertaining. It's mainly 2 people's inner dialogues wrestling with their perceptions of the outside world, added to by a minor character who is aware that he's a minor character and is permanently enraged at the author, and the musings of a transgender parrot. I read some reviews of this complaining that not much happens, which is true, but no bad thing - I like books in which not much happens. It's very funny, in any case. There was a lot of stuff about religion, spirituality and maths that was rather profound - most of that probably went over my head. It's a brilliant read, if you don't take it too seriously!

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don’t like quirky and off-beat, you probably won’t like this decidedly bizarre novel. Only the strange thing is that in spite of the fact that on the whole I myself don’t enjoy quirky and off-beat novels, I actually found myself quite entranced by this one. I’m not going to try and summarise the plot, such as it is. Essentially it’s the tale of Franklin D Huff who arrives in Sussex on an investigation of some sort and rents a cliff-side cottage form Miss Carla Hahn. So far, so straightforward. All sorts of bizarre characters and situations then ensue and all sorts of themes and ideas are incorporated – from the IRA and the Brighton bombing to Nazism, thalidomide, religion and even a bit of romance. It’s all quite chaotic and wildly inventive, but Barker just about manages to keep control of her unruly characters and subject matter and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 but rounded up because it is much better than The Yips... even so something of a disappointment. Great fun to read, mostly, and you have to admire the chutzpah of having several chapters written from the point of view of a parrot (or possibly a macaw) but the plot... disappeared off a cliff fairly early on. if you enjoy the prose, the process dare I say, then the lack of closure may not jar. I'm genuinely not sure if I did but since I made it to the end am prepared to give the benefit of the doubt to this fine writer. I do think she's better when not reaching quite so far, Burley Cross PostBox Theft being the prime example.

[Steve Charters]

Hilarious and innovative narrative techniques. Though some of these tricks (the hiccups; the parrot's squawks) were somewhat overdrawn and wearing to read. The two main protagonists shared the propensity to be uncertain about word-choice and so 3 or 4 alternatives were ALWAYS offered which gave the impression that they weren't differentiated characters but just authorial mouthpieces. But perhaps that was the point - because the same point was addressed directly with the treatment of Clifford. I especially enjoyed the moment when he sneezes violently and narrow strips of typescript stream from his nose and Clara is able to read them before they dissipate.

[Philippa St · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barker is always a challenging read but always too a thoroughly enjoyable one if you don't mind not really knowing what is going on. 'In the Approaches' tackles themes of religious faith as well as love in ways which stimulate thought. It also draws attention to its literariness in a postmodern way in the character of Clifford Bickerton who is cross throughout the book because the author keeps putting words into his mouth which he feels as a local yokel he would never say while knowing that he's going to come out badly in the end. It's hilarious but I was sorry when he faded away like an echo. Why isn't Barker better known?

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicola Barker's In the Approaches is a twisted, perverse yet strangely sweet comedy about keeping faith and finding love. The light-infused counterpart to the brooding, harrowing Darkmans, Barker's latest has at its centre the image of an angelic child obsessed with praying for others, who literally cannot clasp her own hands together to offer up those supplications. The image is both heartrending and inspiring, and stands most vividly for the damaged but endearing souls (Barker's trademark and forte) reaching out for meaning, contact and solace.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I still love you Nicola Barker and there were moments where I laughed out loud and was almost caught up in the old magic but so much of this novel seemed like Nicola Barker retread. The tricks (admittedly brilliant) without any purpose behind them. Case in point: There didn't really seem to be a point to the parrot.

I will fondly think back on Darkmans and Clear, and hope for better from The Cauliflower.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

It breaks my heart to say it, because I love 'Darkmans' like a member of my own family, but this was total guff. Rambling nonsense with little in the way of plot. It's a sad day when the funniest thing in a Nicola Barker novel is a chapter from the perspective of a mis-gendered budgie.

[scarlettraces · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5)

[Pamela Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow! I couldn't put this down - bizarre and beautiful . fast paced - about saints, seaside villages, parrots.

[Clare · Rating 1 out of 5]

I pine for the Nicola Barker of days gone by. Circa Wide Open.

[Marrije · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and playful and rather hard to make sense of - but I think I loved it.

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am totally confused by this one and I can't bear to read any more ... sorry