Clear [Paperback]

Nicola Barker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 4, 2005

Longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. A raucous, exuberant novel about the outrageous circus surrounding David Blaine's 2003 starvation stunt at Tower Bridge, from Nicola Barker. On 5th September 2003, New York illusionist David Blaine gets into a small Perspex box next to the River Thames and begins starving himself. 44 days later, he comes out again, four stone lighter. This much is clear. Yet the huge crowds which gather to sneer and worship and get drunk and throw eggs seem to have very different ideas about what -- if anything -- this macabre spectacle might mean. For some it's a religious experience. For others it's the perfect excuse for a post-pub punch-up. For Adair Graham MacKenny -- a 28-year-old fashion victim whose uber-cool landlord is giving him an inferiority complex -- the human zoo which surrounds Blaine is simply a great place to pick up girls. Until an exquisitely shod woman with a plastic bag full of Tupperware calls him a pimp!And Nicola Barker's riotous peep-show of a novel opens out into a hilarious and thought-provoking portrait of a world of illusion, delusion, celebrity and hunger.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With her fresh, confident sophomore novel (after Behindlings), Barker offers a meditation on illusionist David Blaine's feat of self-starvation—44 days spent suspended in a clear box above the Thames River. Analytical narrator Adie, a prickly, literate young man who works in an office overlooking the Blaine spectacle, carefully dissects the psychology of both Blaine and the hordes of onlookers who feed him attention as he slowly starves. Meanwhile, Adie's own drama unfolds, set off by a strange encounter with Aphra, a perplexing girl with a freakish sense of smell and a fetish for vintage shoes who spends her nights on the riverbank watching Blaine sleep. As Adie's involvement with Aphra grows more complicated, his initially cynical interest in Blaine becomes more obsessive. "Perhaps... this loopy illusionist has tapped into something.... A fury. A disillusionment," Adie muses, ruminating on the vileness and beauty that Blaine's presence has brought out among Brits. Despite Adie's determined disdain for the man, the unwelcome "Hunger Artist" leads him to wonder if "Some things are beyond the reach of art. Some words are meaningful beyond understanding." Offbeat and authentic, intellectual and accessible, Barker's is an original voice. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

'The hippest literary novel of the year' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'Nicola Barker's linguistic exuberance got me hooked ! Like an angel dancing on the head of a pin, she takes a brief event in the crowded capital and uses it to whoop and whirl ! impressive, smart, funny, fast' Observer 'Barker knows how to manufacture an arresting image ! she is such a brilliant and original writer' Guardian '***** Amazing' Heat 'This novel is a box of magic' Sunday Herald 'Funny ! sharp ! the sort of book to take on holiday and down in one' Sam Leith, Literary Review 'The writing is impeccable ! Nicola Barker has a way of making you think about things you thought you had shut the door on' Scotsman 'In Clear, Barker's most purely enjoyable novel to date, the depths of everyday madness are dazzlingly illuminated' TLS

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (July 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007193610
• ISBN-13: 978-0007193615
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,879,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Quirky people saying clever things, August 15, 2005

By 

trainreader (Montclair, N.J.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clear: A Transparent Novel (Paperback)

Why am I the first person to review Nicola Barker's "Clear"? It has been prominently displayed for weeks at the Border's bookstore where I purchased it, and you would think that someone would have reviewed it on this website by now. I feel an extra responsibility to get it right. Anyway, I'm pretty confident in stating that "Clear" is not so bad, and not so great.

As a backdrop to what is basically a first person narrative stream of consciousness, we have David Blaine's stunt where he confined himself in a suspended glass tank in London, without eating anything, drinking only water, for 44 days, while London crowds looked on in fascination and disgust. Blaine, of course, is one of those new breeds of extreme magicians/performance artists, who subject themselved to unimaginable hardships, or is it all just some illusion?

In any event, Nicola Barker combines the styles of Whit Stillman (who wrote the screenplays for "Metropolitan," "Barcelona," and "Last Days of Disco"), with Jack Kerouac's classic "On the Road." What you basically have is a bunch of twenty or thirty something men and women who are far too clever, can refer to the most obscure subjects at the drop of a hat, and who listen to the coolest music imaginable. They all have quirky and sometimes androgenous names (e.g. main character and narrator Adair, his larger than life roomate Solomon, Solomon's girlfriend Jalisa, Adair's former male co-worker Hilary, and Adair's two female interests Aphra and Bly). Everyone has something quite deep to say about David Blaine, as well as other unrelated subjects, which get analyzed on an impossibly intellectual level, including (perhaps most interestingly) the western "Shane" (in its novel form). Are otherwise average middle class people who live in England so much more clever than their American counter-parts?

Nicola Barker writes in an interesting and unique voice, which didn't quite do it for me in "Clear." However, if the above sounds interesting to you, you will almost certainly enjoy the book.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through the Looking Glass, July 20, 2005

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 109,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Clear: A Transparent Novel (Paperback)

Clear is the best novel I've read this year. Ms. Barker has reignited my belief that good writing lives . . . and that novels can be innovative, literate, surprising and accessible.

The book's main theme is that even when we think we are seeing, our perceptions of appearances are deceiving us.

What can be more transparent than an illusionist, David Blaine, who sits suspended in a Perspex box above the Thames while he fasts for 44 days? That central image becomes the fulcrum for this insightful, witty novel about modern conceits.

You soon get a hint that the book is in part about writing when the narrator, Adair Graham MacKenny, opens the narration with ribald praise for the language in Jack Schaefer's Shane. Later, Blaine's very illusion is discussed in terms of a Kafka story. Unlike snobbish novelists, Ms. Barker shares everything you need to know to share her point.

As the story develops, you find yourself in the middle of an enigma wrapped in several mysteries, one Aphra by name, who sits every night watching Blaine in the wee hours while others sleep, who keeps dozens of containers of gourmet food which alternative with regurgitated remnants of such food, and wears outrageous shoes. Aphra's shoe fetish nicely matches Adair's foot fetish, and Adair finds himself in enraptured pursuit. As the mysteries about Aphra are gradually resolved, you begin to appreciate Ms. Barker's point about not knowing what we are seeing. In one powerful passage on page 311, she reveals all in describing Blaine's magic:

"He's like a mirror in which people can see the very best and the very worst of themselves."

Clear goes on to make the point that we all use other people in the same way. It's clear!