required reading

There has been no post from me about this novel though I've moved on to other novels since, but it's not due to a lack of love on my part. Darkmans is large and unwieldy, and I mean that in the physical sense as well as the figurative, so it's hard to lug around. Hey, it's even hard to pull it off the bookshelf to flick through it again!

Darkmans is a big comic novel, seeming to encompass all of modern life, set in Ashford, Kent. Incidentally, this setting delighted me, as I have a friend who lives in Ashford and have actually been there. That the only location I recognized was the McArthur Glen shopping centre is beside the point. Or perhaps it is exactly the point; this is not life exalted and abstracted into art; instead we delve into the familiar until it becomes strange, in the same way that the word 'teapot' becomes weird and shifty if you say it too many times. So we have characters like the wondeful Kelly Broad, who has been labelled a 'delightfully naive chav' (accurate, though I don't think that Nicola Barker uses the word, and I don't like it at all), with a wicked sense of humour, and a manner of dressing that would have you averting your eyes. Also making an appearance is Kelly's father Harvey, a rogue builder, who has managed to delight many, though he only just skates around the edges of a stereotype. Other characters include the dour Beede (named perhaps for the father of English History or for the Old English verb meaning 'to ask'), a campaigner for the community who seems to be hiding a dark secret; Kane, his prescription drug dealing son; Elen, the desirable, vulnerable chiropodist and beleagured wife of Isidore; Isidore himself, also known as Dory, who may or may not be German, and who might or might not be possessed by the spirit of a 14th century court jester; their precocious son Fleet, aged 4, who has built a replica of a medieval French town that he has never seen from matchsticks; and Gaffar, the Turkish immigrant with a pathological fear of salad leaves.

And what is Darkmans about? That's not an easy question to answer, but Nicola Barker insists that it is about history. It's about how the past haunts the present. This theme is writ large in the form of John Scogin, the medieval jester who holds influence over these characters, warping their words and maninpulating circumstances. The claustrophobic twists and turns all the characters take, and all the journeys and decisions they make bring them to exactly where they should be. All the choices they make are, in fact, making them. Darkmans is also about language, and how it can break open and reveal the links between seemingly unrelated things, and how it can deviate from what we intended and grow beyond our control. I think it might be about the same thing in society: the fissures and fractures, and the associations and connections. Society is of our making but is beyond our control.

And how does Darkmans do all of this? With exhilirating and unconventional prose and twists and turns of plot and character that it is nigh-on impossible to keep track of. It only makes sense to give a taster of the first few lines - any later and the text becomes so dense that would need explanation:

He and Beede were not close. And they were not similar, either. They were different in almost every conceivable way. Beede was lithe, dark, strong-jawed, slate-haired and heavily bespectacled. He seemed like the kind of man who could deal with almost any kind of physical or intellectual challenge.

It's the radiator. If you want to try and limp back home with it, I'll need a tub of margarine, a litre of water, a packet of Stimorol; but I won't make any promises...

Ned Kelly's last ever words? Spoken as he stood on the scaffold: 'Such is life.'

Yes, I do believe the earwig is the only insect which actually suckles its young.

No. Nietzsche didn't hate humanity. That's far too simplistic. What Nietzsche actually said was, 'Man is something which must be overcome.'

To all intents and purposes Daniel Beede was a model citizen. So much so, in fact, that in 1983 he'd been awarded the Freedom of the Borough as a direct consequence of his tireless work in charitable and community projects over the last two decades.

The narrative doesn't return to Kane, though we are expecting that Beede will be compared to him, for another 9 pages, and then we have one paltry paragraph! It is typical that the story interrupts and diverts itself, interjecting into the narrative with illustrations and comments. The reader becomes bewildered, and it is only if we go back and examine the text (as above, where we seem to be promised some information on Kane, but never receive it) that we realize that we are being tricked a little. But it's an absolute joy to read - wild and unnerving- and it goes fast: one reviewer commented that he wished that there were another 838 pages, and I'm with him. Though this would have made the task of reading the Booker shortlist before the announcement a good deal harder.