Darkmans [Hardcover]

Despite being 838 pages long Darkmans never felt a long or arduous read, maybe because I was enjoying the joyfully meandering narration so much.

To talk about the plot of the novel is almost beside the point. Yes, there are story threads that run through, but they seem almost incidental, and not all are gathered neatly together at the end leaving the reader still caught in the mystery of who and how these folks in a modern Kent town become possessed (it seems) by characters from the past. When I was a kid I loved time-slip novels like Alan Garner's The Owl Service, and Phillipa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, and always squeeze my eyes up tight to try to see a place as it was hundred of years ago, so this aspect of the novel greatly appealed to me.

The action doesn't (for the most part) move out of a tiny geographical area, the town of Ashford in Kent. When I've mentioned this to British friends over the past week or two, I've seen their eyes boggle in disbelief that anyone would want to set a novel there.

It's a nowhere sort of place, a transportation hub, serving the Eurostar service to continental Europe and torn up by roads. Whatever charm and history it had in the past has become pretty much obliterated in the interest of "development". But Ashford with its bypasses and Tesco's and substandard modern housing estates, is arguably the main character of the book, and the past comes back to haunt ... with a vengeance.

There's a relatively small human cast for a book this size, the interrelationships between those individuals are throughly explored.

Beede and Kane are a father and son with apartments in the same house while remaining essentially estranged from each other. Beede works in the hospital laundry and is fascinated by the past. Kane deals in prescription drugs, and is haunted by the attempted suicide of his mother many years before.

Then there's (let's see ... and do forgive the brackets, one tends to write in long run-on sentence with breathless asides after reading this) Kane's larger than life ex-girlfriend, Kelly Broad, (a girl of the sort we would have called, not very kindly, "a right little scrubber" in my day); Gaffar, a Kurdish refugee who comes to work for Kane and is terrified (to the point of fainting!) of salad leaves; Elen, Beede's chiropodist (who may or may not be a witch); Isadore, her husband, barely clinging to sanity at times; their son, Fleet, building a model of a cathedral from matchsticks. And several others including, the builder from hell, an art forger, and an incontinent spaniel with paralysed back legs.

Oh yes, and there's also a shadowy character from the past, a sort of lord of misrule, who appears to be playing some rather nasty practical jokes on the characters.

There's an awful lot of talk but in the sharp dialogue and in the asides of the completely garrulous narrator. (I kept thinking that it would be fun to see the novel written as a hypertext novel - it would be a fraction of its length without the detours!)

I came away from the book with more questions than answers. But I came away satisfied and I came away wanting more. (And disagreeing vehemently with Chairman of the Booker Prize committee, Howard Davies' snippy comment about how it could have been more tightly edited ... did he get what Barker was trying to do?).

I can't think of another novel that manages to be both brilliantly comic and hauntingly sinister at the same time. Darkman's also has its finger firmly on the (British) social pulse, while also being startlingly innovative in form and style.

Should it have won the Booker? I wouldn't have been at all unhappy if it had. (Though I still think Animal's People and Mr. Pip will be more popular choices with a more general readership.)

I must begin this virgin thread by declaring, loud and proud, that I am a big Nicola Barker fan. And having just read Darkmans, I can honestly say that it is a big Nicola Barker.

Nicola Barker writes about the south east of England - small towns and suburbia. In Darkmans, she visits Ashford in Kent - disappointingly without a single reference to the tank (try googling "Ashford Tank"). Her Ashford is a mediocre town of housing estates, modern shops and the Channel Tunnel rail link. Barker's characters, invariably, are a little eccentric and quirky, but not usually in any dangerous way. Darkmans is no exception - the principal characters are Beede and Kane, a father and son; Dory, Elen and Fleet, a family; and Kelly, Kane's ex-girlfriend. And there are also a dozen or so bit part players. The delight is that none of the characters is a stereotype. None is outstandingly rich or poor; outstandingly bright or dim. They are all ordinary folk, trying their best to play to their strengths. Of the principal characters, two really stood out - Fleet, the gauche five year old who builds models from matches and adores Michelle, the lame dog; and Kelly, a Vicky Pollard character who discovers religion.

Barker's world, as well as being eccentric, also relies on coincidence. Relationships overlap, characters play different roles for different people. In Darkmans, as the novel progresses, various characters also start to develop a close relationship with the past - specifically the time of Henry VIII's court and the building of Albi cathedral in France. This preoccupation with the past gradually takes on a more and more sinister air and starts to interfere with present day relationships. But no amount of sinister plotting can deviate Barker's characters away from their principal purpose - exploring the mundane in quirky new ways. Thus tense moments of great drama and suspense can dissipate, for example, into worrying about Michelle creating a mess on a car seat.

The length of the novel allows some quite complex character development, and also, crucially, time for each character to spend time interacting with others. The small cast makes this a very intense and claustrophobic process. But again, Barker is masterful in dissipating tension through the use of very, very dry humour. And even though, at 840 pages, the novel is physically heavy, it doesn't outstay its welcome. The reader is left wanting more.

The plot, whilst driving the novel inexorably forward, can feel almost incidental. It is typically tight in parts and loose to the point of frustration in others. In true Barker style, for example, the grand resolution at the end resolves only trivial details that the reader probably didn't even notice at the time Mostly the novel remains an enigma.

Does Darkmans deserve to be Booker shortlisted? Yes.
Does it deserve to win? Perhaps.
Will it win? Almost certainly not - long, comic novels never do.

I'm not going to go into long plot explanations - others have done it already far better than I could. I just want to say that this is a magnificent novel. I've not read any Nicola Barker before, and I was just blown away by the sheer audacity and exuberance of her prose. Yes, this book is long, but within a few pages I was completely gripped, barely able to put it down as it built up an exquisite dramatic tension. Barker develops, layer by layer, scene by scene, an almost anarchic assortment of characters, throws them together and shows us the unpredictable results. It's an almost cinematic approach to novel-writing, and makes for a demanding read - you work hard to piece together the clues scattered in her narrative - but it's totally engaging and thoroughly rewarding.

Not for a long time have I come across a writer with such a playful feel for language. Her observations, too, are startlingly fresh and apt. Yes, the novel does rely heavily on coincidence, but then so did Thomas Hardy. I don't think her aim is to be 'realistic'. We're drawn into a more magical and mysterious version of the 'real' world, and leave the novel both entranced and enriched by the experience.