Heading Inland

by Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker conjures up a fantastical world where an unborn baby escapes an unsuitable mother through a belly-button zip, a disgruntled job applicant steals his interviewer's garden pond and a new father feeds his hand to an owl. Her imagination is truly weird and wonderful, but what makes these stories work so well is that they are based on reality - a woman falls in love with her husband because his buttons are done up wrongly, a bitter old woman tries to trick a tramp, a man frees eels from an East End pie shop, a bride throws a tantrum on her wedding day. This collection brings to life a world which simmers just below the surface of the imagination, proving again that Nicola Barker is one of the most original young writers of her generation

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

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

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do so love Nicola Barker, but this short story collection is pretty variable. (Are there any short story collections which aren't variable?) Some stronger pieces at the end of the book just scrape this into 4-star territory. But, despite the so-so stories it's still more enjoyable than any other single-author collection I can think of, and Barker evokes a range of emotions not too far short of DFW's Oblivion .

Buds of the tour-de-force that was Darkmans are sprouting everywhere: the fucked-up characters in nowhere towns*, scenes of the just-tolerably grotesque, genuine high-volume hilarity, and occasionally that Neil-Gaiman-short-story type of fantasy that's just a genie away from reality.

"The Piazza Barberini", though written ten years before the fact, is like a sicko parallel-universe version of the Italian section of Eat, Pray, Love . And she makes me realise that, for all the romantic tales of circus life we read in childhood, the modern version hardly ever finds its way into adult fiction.

A few here are more 'normal' than I'd expect - especially "Water Marks", about preparations for a standard-issue white-meringue wedding (I like to think that Barker characters would have a big fat gypsy knees-up, or my personal favoured option, the impulsive, secret, parentless dash to the registry office.) But otherwise there are few other writers who make me feel quite as much at home as she does. Or should that really be "at work"?
(In 2007 when I read Darkmans it felt as if someone had finally put everything I would want to into a book, said everything I wanted to say at that point, far better than I could - and most of the characters could have come straight from the advice centres I worked in. Having read that Cambridge graduate and career novelist Barker used to have a job in a betting shop, I can only assume that that's where she had time to become acquainted with these motley crews.)

Heading Inland is pretty good, but more than anything it makes me want to read more of her later, more fully-developed, work.


* Actually... epiphany ... Suede and Nicola Barker inhabit the same territory geographically and to some extent character-wise. But Barker puts flesh on those skinny-shirted bones and adds humour, which has, frankly always been Brett Anderson's weak point.

[Kerri · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty mixed, but excellent at points, particularly when it comes to unzippable bellies and stolen ponds.

[Kirstie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a real peculiar sensibility to these stories. Nicola is effective in creating a substantial glimpse into the lives of these strange beings and, though we cannot see what happens to them ten or twenty years from that point, there's a bit of a defining sense of the moments she brings us. In general, I prefer stories that sort of knock you over the head especially at the ending (like Flannery O'Connor's short stories) These are a great deal more subtle for the most part though it does have a couple of frantic scenes (like when a man is choking) but mainly the stories (some quite short) build like an unfathomable smile on one's face with an intelligent wryness characteristic of Barker.

[Alec]

#1
The foetus snorted in a derisory fashion. 'Revolutionaries,' he said, 'don't wear baby clothes. Steal me a gun, though, and I'll fire it through your spleen.'

#2
'I tell you what,' Jeanie offered, 'all in one lace bodysuit, right? Stretchy stuff. No bra. No knickers. It'll hold you in an' everything.' Jeanie held up the prospective item.

#4
Wesley knew all about the sea, though. Knew all about fishes and currents and stingrays and everything. His mum had bought him a book about it. For his birthday when he was six. And so he knew about eels and how they all travelled from that one special place in the Sargasso Sea. Near the West Indies. That's where they were spawned and that's where they returned to die.

#9
He was fashionable himself, did his hair in a self-concious quiff at the front, at the back, a duck's-arse. Fashionable he could understand, but strange? Had her hair been loose and straight, he would have propositioned her two weeks earlier.

#11
She kept remembering all the things that had happened with the saucepan. How she'd bought it from Argos. A set of three. How she'd liked to boil eggs in it and cook spaghetti hoops. She kept going over the pan's history in her head; it was bought, it was used, it was broken. All in that order. And now he had it. What had he done with it? Her pan.

#12
Parker thanked her for the tea, watched the curve of her hip pushing against the black fabric that contained it as she walked from the room, picked up his pen, smiled to himself and then started writing.

[Jacob biscuits · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very weird, very wonderful. Not the sort of thing I usually go in for but properly clever. Smash.

[Abbi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know. This was very average for me, which it shouldn't have been when you consider the peculiar (and often dark) themes of the stories. I think the problem was the execution rather than the ideas - the writing style was very blah in comparison to the unique plot points. Additionally, the least interesting stories were often the longest, which was very irritating. The endings were anti-climatic - that or I just didn't understand them. I just didn't feel compelled to pick it up at all, really.

[Ian White · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant. I didn't realise that she had written about Wesley before Behindlings and that some of the key past incidents referred to in the novel are covered in these short stories. Makes me want to read Behindlings again.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slices of life among London's various outsiders. The Wesley trio in particular is amazing.