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Amazon.co.uk Review
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.
Would-be-prizewinners and cranks are not the only ones drawn into his orbit. Josephine Bean, a local nurse and environmental campaigner; Katherine Turpin, a lascivious beansprout farmer maligned in his walking book; Arthur Young, a former employee of the treasure hunt's sponsors and Ted, the island's estate agent and closet seamstress, all seem to have a few reasons of their own for keeping an eye on Wesley.
Barker has always had a penchant for the surreal, and occasionally here both plot and characterisation can get swamped in flights of absurdist imagination. She is perhaps, too fond of the elaborate simile. The clackety, clackety of the "like a" and "as a" 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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
‘Marvellously inventive, a cornucopia of cornucopias all the way to its brilliant non-ending – its refusal to end. It is a new kind of book, and an intense kind of joy.’ Ali Smith, TLS
‘Compelling. Barker’s narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll.’ Michelene Wandor, Sunday Times
‘Dazzling…She celebrates the complexity of human experience.’ Frank Egerton, 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.’ Alex Clark, 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. Sheer wit and energy make “Behindlings” an excellent candidate for a cult novel – and not just a very good novel about a cult.’ Michael Pye, New York Times
‘Fucked up, fucked off and totally, weirdly brilliant.’ Eithne Farry, Elle
‘Extraordinary. Full of deadpan wit, black comedy and visual slapstick, the novel delights most through its imaginative extravagances.’ Katie Owen, Sunday Telegraph
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Wesley glanced behind him. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Barker is clearly a genius. She writes such astonishing prose that constantly surprises with its leaps and bounds of imagination. Her ear for dialogue - the pauses and non-sequiturs - makes her troop of characters vivid with inner life and a wonderful weirdness. Astute, colourful, obscenely brillaint writing.
When I did get into the groove, I was really happy to have made the effort, because this is word-wizardry at its best. It's totally bonkers, of course, but it doesn't try too hard, not being weird for the sake of it. Planet Barker is England, but seen through the bottle in a Smirnoff ad. Everything about a backwater south coast town is lovingly depicted - the seaside bars in their ramshackle glory, the roundabouts, the industrial no man's land, the suburban bungalows - yes, it's all there, but slightly skewered.
That's the magic of Nicola Barker's writing: it takes the everyday world and makes it astonishing. The same goes for the characters. She almost revels in their ordinariness - the hapless real estate agent, the perfumed librarian - but then makes them do strange and wonderful things.
The world she creates is so unmistakably her own, but at the same time welcoming; there is no knowing coolness or trendiness aimed at alienating or provoking for the sake of it. It's as English as a cup of tea and as weird as outer space. Actually, it feels like home.
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