Darkmans

By Nicola Barker

Shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, an epic novel of startling originality which confirms Nicola Barker as one of Britain's most exciting literary talents.

If history is a sick joke which keeps on repeating, then who keeps on telling it? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's jester, whose favourite skit was to burn people alive? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, physician to Henry VIII, who wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of salad? Or a beautiful bulimic with brittle bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?

Darkmans is a very modern book, set in ridiculously modern Ashford, about two old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. And the main character? The past, creeping up on the present and whispering something quite dark into its ear.

Darkmans is the third of Nicola Barker's visionary Thames Gateway novels. Following Wide Open (winner Dublin IMPAC award 2000) and Behindlings it confirms one of Britain's most original literary talents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9780007372768

Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker is one of Britain's most original and exciting literary talents. She is the author of two short-story collections: Love Your Enemies [winner of the David Higham Prize and the Macmillan Silver Pen Award] and Heading Inland [winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize]. Her previous novels are Reversed Forecast, Small Holdings, Wide Open Behindlings and Clear, the last of which was long-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize. Her work is translated into twenty languages, and in 2000, she won the IMPAC Award for Wide Open. In 2003, Nicola Barker was named a Granta Best of British Novelist. She lives in London.

Reviews for Darkmans

[calvin_xa · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

A really long review but i'm kind of angry that i spent good money on this... I came to this book after reading Raw Shark Texts which is awesome, and wanted something similar. fail.Darkmans reads like "master's thesis on court jesters (yawn) meets Enid Blyton for adults sans plot"Darkmans was horrible, clunky, and after 686 pages, the story never really started, never makes any sense. is there a plot? not sure. and there's barely an attempt to tie anything together at the end... there's a few hours of my life i'll never get back.CRAPTASTIC PHRASES:these were so awful that i marked them in the book as i read.... there were many more.. * "for all intents and purposes.."* "..that the most ferocious curmudgeon would do well to take umbrage at" * every thing was "quite...." or "so very ....." "awfully..." - channelling Enid Blyton* there's stacks more but i forgetPLEASE NO MORE PARENTHESES?? Part1 is 126 pages and is almost unreadable. I felt like i had Attention Deficit Disorder. I could hardly read a sentence before it was split with parentheses containing some lame witticism or pun. i thought maybe the author was "narrating like a 16yr old". it would be a nice trick, but she wasnt.GAFFAR TRANSLATIONS?Gaffar is a kurdish character in the book.. he cant speak english all that well. i "think" that the sections in the book where he's talking in kurdish have been set bold. But somehow the characters in the book seem to understand kurdish perfectly... and reply...???IT'S ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESSabout 2/3 of the way through the book i got a feeling that long, barely interesting, sections of the book were completely pointless, completely unrelated to the tiny thread of plot that was in this book. a few i remember:* the Keeper of the Forest and his dog - quite a few pages spent on this and then...? what was that for?* Beede's crazy moment in the house with the blood in the bathroom - never mentioned again..?* Gaffar, his religious order and the fear of salad? (oh dear how many pages were wasted on this??)* i know there's more but i forgetI'M RANDOMLY SPEAKING WEIRD LATIN STUFFtoward the end of the novel, most of the main characters eventually start mixing up their words with german or latin, or quoting whole sections of some incredibly dull text on court jesters. but they dont seem to think this is weird. they dont turn to other main character and ask "is the same happening to you?" seems a bit unlikely...NO ATTEMPT TO TIE ANYTHING TOGETHERwell ok in the last few pages we get a couple of lame attempts* we find out scooby-doo style who it was that nicked the tiles (it was old man johnson by the way)* Darkmans gets mentioned for a couple of sentences - who? what? where? * we get a few sentences about gaffar's sect but nothing meaningful

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is sort of like if you put Cloud Atlas into a blender. I certainly enjoyed it, though I was about halfway through before I became really engaged. When you're dealing with an 838-page novel, that's a pretty big commitment.

I found the characters very lovable and intriguing. Geez, my favorite thing ever was Beede asking Gaffar in mangled Turkish whether his father gets "leaf afraid." YES, so great.

Ultimately, though, I wanted it to cohere a bit more at the end. I felt like we were building toward something huge that I never got to witness. Did I miss it?

It might just be that I've been so deep in the 19th century lately that I have a preference for endings that add up to something less ambiguous and more definite. It might be that I need to go back and reread more slowly. But my guess is more that it's difficult to take things that have been deliberately scrambled and fragmented and then connect them.

[phil5james · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved every moment of reading this book. While I was away from it I needed to get back to it, which for me, is my definition of a supremely successful novel.

[kbullfrog · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Fantastical in a strangely grounded way--dirty but elegant--forgetful but memorable. This book screams BritLit to me, and often I enjoy it (but not too often--i see a Booker Prize winner and steer clear). But sometimes i just can't stretch my mind across the Pond and into that world. This book just didn't work for me.

[psutto_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good “The truth” Peta informed him, baldly, “is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again….”What can I say about Darkmans? This has been a very hard to review to write. Barker goes on a journey into an unusual haunting with a collection of unusual characters with an unusual approach. It’s, well, unusual. I got to the end of the 800+ pages and thought that it may not have been worth dedicating that many pages to the story she wanted to tell, but also couldn’t for the life of me think of how it could have been made any shorter and kept its essence. There are some wonderful characters and situations in this book which starts and ends mid-story. History repeats itself, historical characters come to life in the modern day, it’s a father son story, it’s a mother son story, it’s a story of chiropody and art forgery, of disappearances and re-appearances, of immigrants and incompetent builders. It is a great many things. It is not a neat book, there are no explanations, you won’t get to the end and have a light bulb moment, it is dark and it is curious and it is wonderful.Overall – A great read but one that leaves you a little perplexed and maybe even uncomfortable.

[bongo_x_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Ms. Barker may or may not be a good writer, but this isn’t a good book. I liked the characters, and much of her writing style, a lot, but there are so many problems.

Very mild spoilers may follow, not really giving away the plot though;


There is no plot. I was actually enjoying the book quite a bit in spite of the problems, but when I got to the end of the 800 pages I realized I didn’t know any more about the story than I did when I read the blurb on the back. There is no story. She sets up this interesting cast of characters and slowly unveils a complex web of some kind of supernatural, psychological, and possibly historical connection that binds them all together. I was intrigued and couldn’t wait to see where this was going. It doesn’t go anywhere. She simply doesn’t explain or even hint very strongly at an explanation for any of the things that were happening, not even how all these people are supposed to be connected except things like "oh, I worked with him on a project a few years ago". Ooh, I didn’t see that coming!

The book just ends. It could have ended like that at any point and been just as satisfying.

The strange part is that much of it is well written, and on the other hand it’s full of weird and cheap writing tricks, as well some just plain bad writing. It sort of felt like she just didn’t trust her writing skills, or Joe Eszterhas was brought in to pump it up.
1. She writes the whole book with the characters thoughts in italics between lines. Only there isn’t really any information there. It’s 95% "hmmm" "what?" "maybe" "so…" and this goes on for THE WHOLE BOOK.
2. There’s a lot of dialog in this book, and 9 out of 10 times one person says something, the other person says "what?" or "huh?" and then the first person repeats it. It’s truly bizarre how often this happens.
3. She writes in a pretty natural style (except for the things I’ve mentioned) so it was kind of jarring when she would suddenly throw these bad creative writing class sentences in, almost all in the exact structure of "the blank blanked blankly on the blank, like a blank in blank" as in "The dead whale bobbed soddenly in the tide, like the last pickle in the jar" (I’m too lazy to look one of hers up, that’s my impersonation). Suddenly there would be a couple of these per page, and then they’d go away for a while. It was like another writer slipped some parts in.
4. She introduces lots of ancillary characters in as part of this web, and then just drops them. At least you get some sort of feel for the main 4 or 5 characters. The others are introduced in ways that seem important. I’m thinking "aha, they both know Mr. X, I wonder what that means?". Turns out it means nothing. There’s lots of revelations that 2 characters have a connection by another character that suddenly shows up, but then that’s it, just the fact that they have a common acquaintance.

When you add that all up it’s a lot like listening to a child tell a long rambling that they’ve forgotten the point of halfway through.

It has a really interesting germ of an idea for a plot, but apparently she couldn’t figure it out.

Sometimes I read a book and don’t love it until the end, this was the opposite. I really don’t know what the point of this book was, it seemed like someone practicing writing characters for when they write a real novel. Even saying all that, it wasn’t at all terrible, or totally unenjoyable, just kind of pointless in the end. I’m sure there’s some sort of "The Tree represents longing" type theory going on here, but it was a flawed theory.

[kirstiecat · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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."

[polarbear123_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was totally surprised to see this book averaging out at 3 and a half stars. For me it went slap bang into my top twenty reads of all time! When you first get the book and see that it is 838 pages long you think you are going to be in for rather a long haul. I polished it off in a few days though and really wanted much more. A lot of the reviewers giving lower scores here have mentioned lack of plot. Who cares! If it is plot you are after that has a nice beginning, middle and end then you need to read something a little lighter. This is a book that makes you think and like all the best books it makes you think about yourself. Don't worry about the plot, just enjoy the interplay between the fascinating and bizarre assortment of characters in this extremely clever and funny novel. Now on to the Yips - soonish.

[clfisha · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ramshackle ghostly, wordy, epic, excellence The truth' Peta informed him, baldly, 'is just a series of disparate ideas which brieflycongeal and then slowly fall apart again...''No,' Kane shook his head, 'I'm not buying that. What's been going on feels really ... really coherent, as if everything's secretly hooking up into this extraordinary ... I dunno ... this extraordinary jigsaw, like there's a superior, guiding logic of some kind...' A chaotic, epic brilliant mess of a book. A book where history bleeds into the present, of cruel practical jokes, cold revenge, of ghostly possession. A book where language explodes onto the page, into the font, into the layout. Where characters stop half way through their sentence tripping over the sudden complex etymology of words. "Yeah. My . . . uh . . . My bat . . . uh . . . my beit . . . bite . . . my boat. . . .A book of lust and love, of extreme comedy, of dysfunctional families and embarrassingly accurate social scenes. A book where I have no clue what just happened but I love it. For there is no nice plot summary here, they flow and eddy, are hinted it, disappear and sometimes come back and don’t expect them all to be resolved. The characters carry the novel and its themes enrich it. Barkers unusual style allows you to dive straight in their souls and swim in dirty waters. She has an ear for natural dialogue and knows how to write with and nail down social scenes. "I couldn't play along because I didn't know what the rules were." The cast isn’t large for a tome of this size but it feels beautifully stuffed. So we meet salad fearing Kurdish immigrant Gaffer, who goes into beautiful monologues in Turkish that no one can understand. We are pulled into upright, uptight Beede’s (non) relationship with his charming, drug dealer son and their love of Elen (a chiropodist, a witch?). There there’s her narcoleptic (possessed?) husband and their gifted son Fleet (who is manically building the medieval Cathedral at Albi out of matchsticks). No one is a kooky oddball stereotype and everyone is pulled into the Darkman's disturbing embrace. It's hard to pin down a favourite though: probably outrageous, chav Kelly who finds god in visions and coincidences or that mocking unseen narrator. Kelly frowned and tucked in her skirt so the wind wouldn't lift it andshow off her thighs. It was a little short -Should'a thought of that-and the fabric was rather flimsy (for something supposedly military)-although she'd never yet seen anyone wearing a mini-skirt in a situation of mortal combat.Except for Lara CroftTank GirlThat pretty cow in Alias-and she always did okay). For such a weird book it flows well, Barker spends time at the beginning careful crafting the characters and building the world, layering its mystery. As a reader you have to relax and go with it, some of it is actually explained in the end and what isn’t well, choose your interpretation or wallow in lovely uncertainty. It’s never odd for oddness sake, its incredibly easy to read and look you can pay attention the 2nd time round. It’s a brilliant book, quite unlike anything I have read and worth trying (50 page rule firmly in place). Lovers of oddity and language, history buffs and anglophiles will lap this up. Those who like neatish tales, wrapped up endings and tight action will probably want to steer clear. Highly recommend and thank you to Anders & visbleghost for sticking it on my radar. 'The truth,' Peta smiled, '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, Kane, that's all.'

[jeanned_14 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Be prepared for a difficult ride if you decide to heft this 838-page exploration of history as a malevolent prankster infiltrating our present lives. This theme is personified in John Scoggin, the medieval court jester who takes possession of a number of the book's characters, including a narcoleptic security guard and an estranged father and son living in the same house. Add an art forger, an unscrupulous builder, a precocious 5-year-old engaged in the chronological construction of a French village, a Kurd with a lettuce phobia, a stolen paralyzed dog (complete with mobility cart) to the cast and it becomes clear that this is a comedy. This book earned Barker the 2008 Hawthornden Prize and a place on the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist. I award this 7 out of 10 stars: the plotting is difficult and the characters unlikeable, but the language is exquisite.

[sn_28 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Now this is a hard one to rate. First of all, it had almost no plot. That may be exaggerating it a mite, but everything that happened seemed mundane and very little was explained. For example, there's a scene around page 275 in which one of the characters arrived at a dinner party because he was elected as Chairman of some committee. Only a measly 400 pages later we actually find out (almost as a throwaway) what the committee is about and it has pretty much nothing to do with the plot.That's what makes rating the book difficult. On one hand there was no point to it, it in no way really warranted 838 pages and, as the ending implied (if I may spoil it somewhat), everything happened by random chance. The characters randomly went howling-at-the-moon crazy (possessed by the ghost of a 500-year-old jester) and just as casually turned back to whatever constituted normal for them. On the other hand, the writing was excellent as were the characters (not even the Goth and the Teen got on my nerves too much), there was ample time for development character-wise after all. It was darkly funny and a bit sad, which is probably my favorite type of story. About halfway through I even had to rush online to purchase a couple more books by Barker. On the third hand, I tend to love these love-it-or-hate-it kind of books (maybe I try to rationalize them more than the average reader, i.e. "Since I already wasted so much time and money on it, would I rather be satisfied with it or not?"), but it's clearly not for everyone.Some other random thoughts:- As a friend of cats, I wasn't too happy with the highly inethical treatment Manny The Cat received.- Barker got die (singular) and dice (plural) mixed up, as in "he felt for his five die".- A couple of times the third-person narrator used the word I, which felt wrong.- Although no one's used the tag, I found it somewhat magical realism -ish. The whelping dog in the rainy forest, e.g, wasn't actually magical, but felt very eerie.- Props for mentioning the Meat Puppets and Frank Zappa.- The use of parentheses was prodigal (which I try (unsuccessfully) to parody here), but, unlike usually, I liked it. It added something. As did the separate fonts for thoughts and translations.- Sometimes there were paragraph breaks which I couldn't fathom, though.- It was one of the weirdest books I've read and I respect that, but it could have been even better. Just add plot.

[princemuchao · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Huge disappointment. This was a very long book (838 pages) and was not worth the effort. The first half sped by quickly, as Barker's strength seems to be quirky character development. Unfortunately, that can only hold up the novel until you realize that the little plot that can be found is not interesting enough to sustain the novel. Loose strands are left all over the place and by the end you realize that a majority of the events that occurred in the book have no real purpose. The resolution, as such, that does occur is mostly uninteresting, incomplete or forced. The author tries to beg forgiveness with a page or two explaining a pithy philosophy of coincidence without meaning, but it just does not wash.Made it all of the way through, but this book killed my desire to read for a month.

[wandering_star_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The experience of reading this book can only be compared to riding a ghost train with its brake cable cut - you hurtle with increasing speed through bizarre and sometimes sinister surroundings, with the occasional flash of illumination to show you where you are. I loved it, but there's no way I can attempt a synopsis. The book, set in twenty-first-century urban-blighted England, covers the lives of an interlinked group of people, and takes in a decades-old grievance, a family feud, cowboy builders, demonic possession, the evolution of language, and illicit love and lust of all kinds. Oh, and a goth with her mouth sewn up. And all this in Barker's traditional rambling, tangential, brilliantly-overworked-metaphor'd style. It took me about 100 pages to have the first idea of what was going on - but after that I was gripped. It's funny, eerie, good hearted and with - I think - serious things to say about modern England, under all that. Despite its length (838 pages) I am already thinking about reading it again...

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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 (most obviously Joyce).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…****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 awesomely 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.****

[bibliobibuli_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Am finally and somewhat sadly at the end of Nicola Barkers Darkmans, which has kept me happy and occupied over the past ... how many weeks is it? I've lost track.Despite being 838 pages long it never felt a long or arduous read, maybe because I was enjoying the joyfully meandering narration so much.To talk about the plot of the novel is almost beside the point. Yes, there are story threads that run through, but they seem almost incidental, and not all are gathered neatly together at the end leaving the reader still caught in the mystery of who and how these folks in a modern Kent town become possessed (it seems) by characters from the past. When I was a kid I loved time-slip novels like Alan Garner's The Owl Service, and Phillipa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, and always squeeze my eyes up tight to try to see a place as it was hundred of years ago, so this aspect of the novel greatly appealed to me.The action doesn't (for the most part) move out of a tiny geographical area, the town of Ashford in Kent. When I've mentioned this to British friends over the past week or two, I've seen their eyes boggle in disbelief that anyone would want to set a novel there.It's a nowhere sort of place, a transportation hub, serving the Eurostar service to continental Europe and torn up by roads. Whatever charm and history it had in the past has become pretty much obliterated in the interest of "development". But Ashford with its bypasses and Tesco's and substandard modern housing estates, is arguably the main character of the book, and the past comes back to haunt ... with a vengeance.There's a relatively small human cast for a book this size, the interrelationships between those individuals are throughly explored.Beede and Kane are a father and son with apartments in the same house while remaining essentially estranged from each other. Beede works in the hospital laundry and is fascinated by the past. Kane deals in prescription drugs, and is haunted by the attempted suicide of his mother many years before.Then there's (let's see ... and do forgive the brackets, one tends to write in long run-on sentence with breathless asides after reading this) Kane's larger than life ex-girlfriend, Kelly Broad, (a girl of the sort we would have called, not very kindly, "a right little scrubber" in my day); Gaffar, a Kurdish refugee who comes to work for Kane and is terrified (to the point of fainting!) of salad leaves; Elen, Beede's chiropodist (who may or may not be a witch); Isadore, her husband, barely clinging to sanity at times; their son, Fleet, building a model of a cathedral from matchsticks. And several others including, the builder from hell, an art forger, and an incontinent spaniel with paralysed back legs.Oh yes, and there's also a shadowy character from the past, a sort of lord of misrule, who appears to be playing some rather nasty practical jokes on the characters.There's an awful lot of talk but in the sharp dialogue and in the asides of the completely garrulous narrator. (I kept thinking that it would be fun to see the novel written as a hypertext novel - it would be a fraction of its length without the detours!)I came away from the book with more questions than answers. But I came away satisfied and I came away wanting more. (And disagreeing vehemently with Chairman of the Booker Prize committee, Howard Davies' snippy comment about how it could have been more tightly edited ... did he get what Barker was trying to do?).I can't think of another novel that manages to be both brilliantly comic and hauntingly sinister at the same time. Darkman's also has its finger firmly on the (British) social pulse, while also being startlingly innovative in form and style. Should it have won the Booker? I wouldn't have been at all unhappy if it had. (Though I still think Animal's People and Mr. Pip will be more popular choices with a more general readership.)

[heff100 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a sensational novel. Utterly assured, deeply subversive, supremely involving. Barker clears a space in your mind and then inhabits it, seeking congruencies at every turn, in much the same way as she portrays one of her characters as doing. It’s extremely clever – no, brilliant. The authorial voice is virtuosic, echoing an entirely justified confidence in the book against the background of the eclectic literary heritage it richly but subtly evokes (say from Richardson to the graphic novel via Dickens and Joyce) and the plot is superbly, seemingly effortlessly constructed. The best english novel of the year – only Coetzee, Adam Thorpe and Tom McCarthy come close. Good lord! It’s on the Booker shortlist…

[candyschultz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have to start off with a disclaimer. Nothing I can say about this book will do it justice. You just have to read it. I suspect it will be loved or hated. I fall into the former group.At 838 pages Darkmans is not what it appears in any way. It reads like a 400 page book, partly due to the arrangement of the text on the page and partly due to the fact that, while you may have no idea what it is about, you cannot put it down. I loved this book. It was like a multicourse dinner by a renowned chef, say Thomas Keller. After many of the sections I had to set it aside just to savor what I had read.The cast of characters is unique. Some come into the story for awhile and then disappear. One of the main characters disappears about 3/4 of the way through and never reappears. Others show up only for a dinner party. I can't say there is a lack of coherence here but it is not the sort of coherence readers are used to.Using the terms loosely, Darkmans follows four or five main characters over the course of several days (or does it?), time is definitely a character and the passage and duration of it are impossible to pin down. There is a chiropodist named Elen, married to Isidore (Dory) who is in security (although where he finds the time for it I could not see). They have a son named Fleet who is either gifted or channeling someone from the reign of Edward IV. Then there is a father and son group, Beede and Kane who have issues which may or may not be the essence of the tale. Beede runs a hospital laundry and Kane is a dealer of prescription drugs. Kane picks up Gaffar, an expatriate Kurd who faints at the sight of salad greens. Kane's ex girlfriend Kelly has a major role as well and probably gets the most laughs. Darkmans steps into the midst of their lives at a point of crisis but just what that crisis is exactly remains obscure. The adventure, if I may call it that, is hilarious, perplexing, and very thought provoking. The ending is not necessarily the ending, or maybe it is.Nicola Barker's opus dances around the edges of being stream of consciousness and magical realism. It does not fit neatly into either category, however, and may need a new category to describe its style. In scope it reminds me of Ulysses (Joyce). Barker throws in topics as diverse as art restoration, chiropody, Russian fighting geese and even my old friend Flannery O'Connor. Characters often speak without knowing what they are saying or why and it may or may not have any relevance to current events. This statement, near the end of the book, may be the best description of the tale, "'The truth, 'Peta informed him, baldly, 'is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again'". It is difficult, if not impossible, to articulate why I loved this book, I guess you have to read it for yourself. It is still not available in the U.S. but you can have it shipped at no charge from this bookseller.