Customer Reviews

Darkmans

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This incredible, Booker-nominated novel from Nicola Barker hasn't gotten much attention on this side of the pond. This is tragic. "Darkmans" didn't win the Booker either, which doesn't surprise me. The big, anarchic comic novel doesn't do so well with prize juries (think "Gravity's Rainbow," 1973.) But how alive this book is! Barker's touch is deft and quick, and she has an unerring ear for the dialogue (external and internal) of her characters. These include a text-messaging drug dealer who reveals an unexpected compassion, a precocious child building a medieval town out of matchsticks, and the unlikeliest and funniest evangelical convert in recent memory.

I can't do justice to Barker's enormous achievement here. Her great theme is the way the past seeps into the present, the ways we betray our ancestors and also, inevitably, stumble up against them. Ghosts of the past, both recent and ancient, haunt her characters in vivid and bizarre ways. (One character, in a trance, digs for a petrified forest that has sunk below the tide; characters blurt out etymologies like ums and ers.) Her rich sense of history pervades the novel, but "Darkmans" also feels utterly contemporary with its unique form and propulsive prose. You will whip through these 848 pages, breaking only for laughter.

Don't miss this one!

Darkmans is a joy to read - in the literal sense. The sentences are well-crafted, the humor is pervasive and intelligent, the cadence is captivating. Unfortunately, all I'm left with is that Ms. Barker will someday write a great novel - this one just isn't it.

The fatal flow, as others have pointed out, is the incoherent mess of a plot. The book is long (800+) and yet very little happens. What does happen doesn't fully coalesce into any recognizable beast. It's muddled and it's blurry.

The last 20 pages are the most difficult. It's clear Ms. Barker was basically told to wrap things up as soon as possible, and with no clear plot line to seal up, she just threw down some random threads and hoped that no one would notice the frayed ends.

Despite this, I did enjoy reading the book. Her style is enjoyable - she knows HOW to tell a tale. She just needs to find one worth telling.

A wacky, deranged, baffling, fabulous linguistic romp. How many books can boast that? Nicola Barker is clearly insane and loves language and loves history and loves creating real characters. What a surprising pleasure to read this bizarre book!

Darkmans appears to be about damaged or eccentric people who are thrown into everyday, mundane situations. Its bleak, yet funny even though I don't understand what the book was really about -beyond what I described in that first sentence.

The cast of characters comprise of Daniel Beede, his drug dealing son Kane, his endlessly profane ex-girlfriend Kelly and Gaffar, a Kurdish repairman who, after a fight with Kane over the seriousness of Kelly's injuries (she broke her leg falling off a wall), comes to work for him as a courier and also befriends Beede who, of course, shares a house with the son he barely talks to.

Beede's life is one shaped by things of the past -as most lives are, but seems to be haunted by the theft of some antique tiles, and has also embarked on a mysterious project with the forger named Peta Borough that seems to involve strange duplications and research into John Scogin, jester in the court of Edward IV.

Then there is the matter of Fleet, son of Elen and Dory, an eerily gifted and strangely prescient boy who builds a model of the Cathedral of Saint-Cecile with matchsticks. To the growing alarm of Elen and Dory (who seems to suffer from a mental illness somewhere between narcolepsy and schizophrenia), Fleet knows impossible amounts of information about the same John Scogin that Beede is researching. And during Dory's hazy episodes, Fleet calls his father "John".

There isn't much plot, but it does feature an incentive style prose, underlined with some very funny elements -like the fact that everyone appears to know a crap load of miscellaneous information on a wide variety of subjects.

Its an unusual novel to say the least, yet one that I could not put down.

I say this from the depths of my cerebral cortex: I truly have no idea what this book, in toto, is about. Yes, the editorials and other reviewers are correct in that the past, so to speak, is a definite theme - that is, if you grant that there actually is a past, present, and future existing, as we like to think of them, in a causal fashion - a notion this book seems to play merry hell with, I might add. But the "seepage of the past into the present", or however one wants to phrase it, in not what caught this reader's eye. Faulkner and, more recently, Graham Swift in his novel Waterland, are much better at that sort of thing; nor does Thomas Pynchon seem the main influence here - I noticed no triple integrals or higher mathematics in the book. Rather, Barker's master seems to be Joyce and her main concern to be with words, their power over us, their ability to confound us, our helplessness without them. But I'm getting a tad ahead of myself. Here are the three things that I found most striking:

1.) The verve and panache with which the younger set of Barker's characters (i.e., Kelly and Kane) use the modern British idiom. It's truly spot on and delightful. Yank readers be prepared to look some words up, and don't get chuffy about it!

2.) The humour is blindingly funny. I'm thinking particularly of Kelly's - um - conversion to Christianity. What makes these scenes doubly grand, moreover, is however insane and wavering and comical it comes across. - And it DOES come across that way, Deo Laus. - This is actually the way most people I know find some sense of the numinous in their lives. Even the most orthodox believers seldom experience a road to Damascus experience settling everything for all time. It's filled with doubts and apprehensions and yes, comedy. In short, despite (or because of) the high comedy, Kelly's experience rings extraordinarily true to the psychological reality of belief. I was reminded of Nietzsche's comment that he could only believe in a God that could laugh.

3.) WORDS-Indo-European, werdh, Latin, verbum, Sanskrit, vratam command, law. The characters frequently come to the point of mental breakdown and aphasia through constant groping for the right words, especially when the history of the word occurs to them. A sample from Dory's Diary:

"(The whore playing the martyr? What a joke! What a travesty)...Travesty: trans - over + vestire - to dress. I still find myself using words which I can't understand." I might add that "trans" also means "across" in Latin - Crossdresser? The book is permeated with etymological breakdowns (in both senses) like this one. This is why I say Joyce is Barker's true master. Ever had a go at Finnegans Wake?

But, more importantly, these are the passages of the book (and they are legion) that struck home most piquantly to me. I know EXACTLY how these characters feel, and Barker, needless to say, does as well. They feel as if they are losing their hold on what connects them to other human beings, "the shareable part of experience" as it was once put to me by an Oxford don. They feel, in other words, like they are going insane. And the reader, at least this reader, whose head is crammed full of Latin and Ancient Greek, feels the slippage along with them. - As a personal example, I can't say how many times I've mulled over the word "nice" which comes from "nescire" in Latin, to be ignorant. Am I, in some fundamental way that I'm only half consciously aware of calling a person an ignoramus, a fool, an idiot when I say that s/he is "nice"? I have, in fact, had to expunge that particular word from my vocabulary because it troubles me so. For any reader who has reflected on how s/he communicates with others (or fail in some way to do so), these recurrent semantic breakdowns become eerie almost to the point of terror as they mount throughout the book.

But, as I say, I don't really know what this book is "about", if anything. The truth is....well, what Peta says near the end, "The truth is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again..." p. 824. This is a very good description of what happens in the book as well. If there were just a tad more to it, I would give it five stars.

It took me about 100 pages to realize that I was not ever going to "get it", so I settled in for the ride and just enjoyed the craziness.

There's somethings in this book that made it enjoyable, and some things that ruin it, unfortunately. I loved the humor and the characters in this book, some scenes made me even laugh out loud. It almost reminds me of Confederacy of Dunces. The downfall of this book is the length, I think it could've gone through some serious editing, or even the way the incidents are arranged. Through most of the book Barker is building up to something, but I wasn't sure what. I was expecting something crazy at the end, something that would tie all the randomness together, but it landed flat at the end. Now, even though it's too long and there's a little lack of a plot, I would still consider this a decent read.

First, a big THANKS to Nicola Barker for writing this book! Excellent! The people in her book are a little reminiscent of those in Joyce Cary's First Trilogy (real people, with eccentricities), but she defines them in a more interesting way. Her writing is also reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon's writing in Gravity's Rainbow (another deep thinker with a desire to entertain). But her writing stands on its own, and her style is singular. Her understanding and creation of people and their dialog is awesome. Her writing is almost cinematic in style; it could easily be transferred to a script - not that it's simplistic, but rather that it's fully-fleshed (where necessary). The basic plot is deep enough to keep it mysterious throughout the book, and the I was immersed in the lives of the characters to the end.

Darkmans could be an exciting short tale, were it not for the fact that it's 838 pages long.
Keeping the reader engaged over such lenght is difficult enough when you have an exciting plot but it becomes an impossible feat when you have barely a plot at all, which is the case here.

Nicola Barker tries her best to conjure a spooky tale where various characters in modern-day Ashford are supposedly haunted by the ghost of an evil medieval jester but, really, even the spookiness gets diluted and loses steam over the course of so many pages.

The ending, which could have been great (in a Shyamalan's way, if you know what I mean), is just rushed which is surprising considering the amount of words that are used to build much less essential passages.

The literary trick of interspersing the dialogues with words/sentences reflecting the characters' thoughts (a way to communicate the sense of unbalance or confusion they often fall prey to) gets on your nerves after a while and just gets in the way of the narrative's flow.

Again, I can clearly see a great piece of short-fiction stemming from the same material and eerie atmoshpere but, as it is, Darkmans is just an overly long novel with very little to keep the steam going.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. The jacket was cool, and the blurb on the back sounded interesting. I know that this style of writing is popular: jumping around and recording what is going on in people's heads and their bodily reactions. I have never warmed to it, and it probably reveals a fuddy-duddy character defect on my part. Sorry! I prefer linear progress, paragraphs, and more conventional character development.

Barker did develop her characters, but I didn't care about most of them. They were just too strange. Gaffar the Kurd was the closest to a real person, aside from his 'problem' with lettuce. Beede, Kane and Elen could all be interesting and sympathetic, and then we had to have Beede the Cold Bugger, Kane the Unconcerned and Elen the Martyr resurface.

I know this was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it was a bit too dark for my taste in comedy. For instance:
It isn't funny when something nasty happens between two little boys (Steven and Fleet) and the one doesn't want to visit the other any more. Been there, done that with one of my sons, and your child's fear is not amusing.
I thought the whole 'possession' thing, with John Scogin and his nasty tricks and Dory and Fleet was just creepy. Fleet was just a child saddled with some evil cloud, and Dory was obviously pretty disturbed, and I don't see a whole lot of humour in either situation.
Fleet's building fascination initially was pretty cool, and the interaction between Elen and the chap on the beach was actually semi-normal, in giving a rationale for this behaviour and holding out hope of how it could be something positive. Then we descend into the bizarre again, with the sideline about the chap's daughter and what horrible thing will happen because of her later in the history of the book's characters. What was the point?
Beede recreates, with Peta's help, subtly changed items in Tom's house just to drive him nuts? Who's the sick one here?
Probably the worst thing that happened in the book, as far as I was concerned, was hanging the cat. That was just sick and pointless.

Actually, I'm not sure that I ever figured out the premise of the book. It was too disjunct, with multiple story lines, none of which made much sense or went anywhere on its own. I thought about listing them, but realised that was pointless, too. Any one of the themes could have been developed into something interesting and amusing, but as it was it was a frustrating hodge podge.

That doesn't mean that I disliked the book completely. The scene with Gaffar in the grocery was pretty funny, as was the part with the young woman doggedly removing collars from the trees. Actually quite a few of the scenes with Gaffar were funny, come to think of it, and Kelly was actually a pretty good character, too.

I suppose my biggest problem with the book was the pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and cruelty. No one trusted anyone - do people really suspect all motives like these characters? If so, they would never have hired a crooked builder! I don't know if the evil was supposed to somehow be coming from John Scogin, and I don't understand the significance of people (Beede and Dory primarily) being only able to think of words in German. I felt that quite a bit of the book was the author showing how clever she was with words, and how many random knowledge tidbits she could hang out there to be admired.

"Darkmans" reminded me of Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" in the style of writing and my lack of interest in most of the characters. Now, if Gaffar were in a book, with some semblance of a plot, that might be pretty amusing!