The Yips [Hardcover]

'Stuart Ransom, professional golfer, is drunkenly reeling off an interminable series of stats about the women's game in Korea (or the Ladies Game, as he is determined to have it); 'Don't scowl at me, beautiful ... !' - directed with his trademark Yorkshire twinkle, at Jen, who lounges, sullenly behind the hotel bar.'

The Yips opens with Jen and Ransom and Gene in a Thistle hotel bar in Luton's Arndale centre. Nicola Barker's latest novel is mostly dialogue - it starts in a fairly tame way with some semi-drunken chat about female Korean golfers led by the washed up has-been. As the evening goes on it becomes borderline surreal - is Jen a genius or a wind up artist,? Does Gene have psychic powers? Why is Noel ready for a fight? Barker lets the novel unfold through intercut scenes, forming impressions of her characters that are confirmed or shattered by later events. Barker is an adept at constructs that build but have their own instability and will come tumbling down. It's a type of farcical satire that reminded me of Tom Sharpe, though it is unique to Nicola Barker, and it is both bonkers and wonderful and doesn't play by any of the more obvious narrative rules.

Late in this long novel Jen is describing a fantasy self help book about stuff to Gene:

'' 'Yeah, stuff. Like here's some stuff, here's some other stuff, here's some more stuff. Just stuff - more and more stuff, different kinds of stuff which is really only the same stuff but in different colours and with different names; stuff stacked up on top of itself in these huge, messy piles...'
'Sounds a little unstable,' Gene frowns, concerned.
'Oh yeah' Jen chuckles - it's all very precarious. that's part of the fun. It's constantly threatening to topple over - to crash'
'And when it does?'
'Then it does! It topples! It crashes! the shit hits the fan for a while and, then the fallen stuff just reconfigure itself and everything pretty much goes back to normal.'

It could be taken as a description of Barker's own style. She piles up narratives next to each other, introduces complications and misunderstandings and instability until it reaches a tipping point and comes crashing down and then things reach a new equilibrium. She is pitch perfect with the dialogue and ranges from moving to funny, and often both, within an interchange. I imagine that there is a sharp divide in her readers -those drawn in and intrigued and hugely entertained and those who find it all overly contrived. I'm in the former group though I found the ending here somewhat lacklustre. In the main, I enjoyed the ride hugely.

Nicola Barker writes quirky, dialogue based novels that are humorous, surreal and very stylized. Most of them are long. Her characters are eccentric and contrived; her situations are improbable and her plots are skeletal at best.

That's what she does. If that doesn't float your boat, you won't like The Yips and you won't like her back catalogue. Personally, I love Nicola Barker and The Yips is up there with her best works - Clear and Behindlings. It knocks the Booker shortlisted Darkmans into a cocked hat.

So. The Yips (dreadful title) promises to be a novel about golf and Luton. This is not a promising start. In truth, though it is a novel about unfulfilled potential and loneliness - with laughs.

The Yips has a large cast - perhaps larger than it feels when you add in all the supporting roles - of grotesques, freaks and fools. As much as there is a story, famous professional golfer Stuart Ransom is its centre and all other actions spin off him. He is an Alan Partridge character, caught up in his own legend, referring to himself in the third person, whilst never realising that those around him find him mediocre. The other main star is Gene, the multiple cancer survivor who juggles three jobs and has talents he daren't pursue. Then there's Esther, Stuart's ebullient manager who speaks in Jamaican patois. There's Valentine and her unusual mother. And Jen - a barmaid who just likes stirring things. Plus plenty of others, of course.

The novel is heavily referential and very clever. Although it might appear to be meandering and freeform, it is expertly controlled. Details that might look like padding are there for a reason. This can make the whole thing feel contrived - and to a large extent it is. The Yips has a faux-realistic feel whilst actually being very stage managed. But despite the wild coincidences and improbable back stories, there is a relentless internal logic. One moment the reader will be laughing at the actions of a character, the next moment it will become clear that, given the unlikely circumstances, the action is perfectly sensible. It's a deadpan, Paul Merton-esque surreal humour.

In amongst all the farce there are very real ideas at play. One of the most striking set conventional thinking on its head, portraying the burkqa as a garment of liberation. But the constant theme is one of what might have been. Missed opportunities, wrong decisions, wasted talent. There's real pathos mixed with the faint glimmer of hope as the reader sees new opportunities. If only the characters would see them too...

Nicola Barker expertly drip feeds information to create paradigm shifts - you witness a scene and only later come to understand it. And when you think you've got it, something else comes along to make you reappraise the situation further. But the moments of revelation are not always delivered quickly. For example, the significance of the opening scene, where Stuart Ransom sits in a hotel bar and meets a rather emotional chap called Noel, only starts to become apparent about half way through the novel.

Nicola Barker brings a feeling of warmth and generosity to her writing. It would have been easy to write a hatchet job on golf clubs and dreary home counties towns, but this is resisted. Despite the greatly exaggerated characters, the tacky scenes and the irrelevance of gol-oll-oll-ulf, there are home truths and the novel is actually about people like us, with our belief systems and our prejudices.

For my money, Nicola Barker is just about the brightest, edgiest writer around. This novel is a tour de force, it fizzes with energy and ideas. Hopefully it will be the one that sees her recognised finally as a heavyweight talent.

I love Nicola Barker's work. It is eccentric, it meanders about. It is dark and odd and strange, and a lot of the time it doesn't really go anywhere. This kind of thing, I have to say, usually drives me bonkers, but with Barker's work it doesn't. The Yips is an odd novel, which really ambles about all over the shop. Nothing is resolved, many of the characters appear briefly and then their stories never really get taken up. Not a lot happens. But I love it anyway. Stuart Ransom is a professional golfer and wild child who has become a bit of a drunken, annoying has been, and who now has the yips, a nervous condition in golfers that means that their hands shake so much they are unable to play properly. He washes up in a hotel in Luton to open a second rate golf course, and ends up entangled in the lives of everyone he bumps into over a few rather surreal, chaotic days. The book involves Nazi relics, a man who has survived cancer nine times, a disillusioned lady vicar, an avant garde tattooist with agoraphobia and a whole host of other, improbable characters.

If you like neat and tidy stories with a beginning, middle and end, this will not be for you. Otherwise you might find you really enjoy it.