Amazon.com Review
Behindlings, the fifth novel from Nicola Barker, is a welcome return, both in mood and in geography, to the gothic terrain of her Impac Prize winner
Wide Open. Set in parochial Canvey Island, Essex, this book is inventive, funny, unnerving, and often magnificently strange.
Barker's Canvey (once dubbed "Candy Island" by Daniel Defoe) is, with its Wimpy Bar, dreary pubs, and long-cherished grudges, rumours, and secrets, a quintessentially English small town. Its emotionally damaged population is augmented by the "Behindlings" of the title, a gaggle of oddballs who follow, or more precisely obsessively stalk, the novel's enigmatic central character, Wesley. The architect of a chocolate company-funded treasure hunt, author of a pseudo-Nietzschean walking guide and the man behind the daring theft of an antique pond, he is a rather malevolent Pied Piper. Part Alvin Toffler-quoting, peripatetic environmental visionary, part immoral (and maybe downright evil) fraudster, he's also notorious for feeding the fingers on his right hand to an eagle owl "in an act of penance" for accidentally killing his brother.
Barker has always had a penchant for the surreal, and occasionally here both plot and characterization can get swamped in flights of absurdist imagination. She is perhaps too fond of the elaborate simile. The clackety, clackety of the "like" and "as" of her prose style is, from time to time, a little exasperating. Despite this, her narrative is so alluringly, so charmingly odd, bristling with puzzles and etymological games and full of wonderfully, devilishly comic touches, that it's easy to ignore its minor flaws. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
Wesley is not, on the outside, the most prepossessing of men. He is a tramp with a mangled hand, a penchant for attacking sea-fowl and an admiration for the profundities of Alvin Toffler. However, he has a magnetic effect on people. As he pads about the English countryside, he is followed by a diverse collection of groupies as fascinated with his every gesture as primatologists studying the habits of a mountain gorilla. A candy company is behind part of the fascination: they have loosely pegged a treasure hunt, with clues in candy wrappers, to Wesley's habits and quirks. As the novel begins, Wesley has come to the seaside town of Canvey and exerts his peculiar powers of suggestion on a real estate agent, Ted, who finds him lodgings with the town's most scandalous citizen, Katherine Turpin. The Behindlings (as Wesley has denominated his followers) have also, predictably, convened on the spot. Dramatic action, such as it is, revolves around the revelation of the truth about the rumor that Katherine committed incest with her father and aborted his child. While Barker, an idiosyncratic English writer popular in the U.K. (The Three Button Trick and Other Stories; Wide Open), contrives a few clever phrases (at one point, she compares one character's relief at being left alone by his blowhard boss to the "blissful fervor which a ninety year old man might exhibit on discovering-after many years of drought-a small but sweetly intrepid erection floating daintily in the tired suds of a hot bath"), this novel suffers from a general anemia of character and plot.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
