Darkmans (Paperback)

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Key Phrases: missing dog, light fitment, cheese aisle, The Witness, Daniel Beede, The Darkmans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

There isn't much plot to Barker's Man Booker-shortlisted novel (after Clear and Behindlings), but a cast of eccentric characters, a torrent of inventive prose and an irresistible synthesis of wickedly humorous and unsettlingly supernatural elements more than compensate for the loose itinerary. The novel is set in a contemporaneous British district bisected by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel's international passenger station, a sore point for one of the central characters, cranky 61-year-old Daniel Beede, distraught at the loss of local landmarks. Beede is estranged from his prescription drug-dealing son Kane, though they share a flat, where Gaffar, a muscular Kurdish refugee with a rabid fear of salad greens, takes up residence. Beede is friends with Elen, a podiatrist, and with Isidore, Elen's paranoid and narcoleptic husband; their young son Fleet is a spooky prodigy who, in one of this intricate tale's several instances of mind-bending nuttiness, may actually be Isidore's ancestor from nine generations ago. This improbable premise is supported by the boy's propensity for quoting bits of the biography of King Edward IV's court jester, one John Scogin, the dark man who haunts the book. Despite the story's plotless sprawl, any reader open to the appeal of an ambitious author's kaleidoscopic imagination will relish this bravura accomplishment.
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Review

Praise for Nicola Barker: 'Dazzling!She celebrates the complexity of human experience.' The Times 'Insanely inventive. Her vision of a marginal Britain populated by drifters and desperados is fired by a comic energy that dances on the edge of self-combustion.' Guardian 'Barker's eccentrics are the stuff of pure farce. And they allow her to reinvent, joyously, the cogs, gears and mechanics of the genre. She knows, as Wodehouse also knew, how to rev up the language, do baroque variations on a phrase, even break into a kind of poetry.' New York Times --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 848 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; First Printing edition (November 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061575216
• ISBN-13: 978-0061575211
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #130,089 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Barker's Carnival, January 8, 2008

By	Eric Lundgren (St Louis, MO) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars too damn long, July 6, 2008

By	Simone Oltolina (Morbio Inferiore, TI Switzerland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Going "mad"! Losing "It"! - What am I saying?, February 27, 2008

By	Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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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.