Customer Reviews

The Yips

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

 

 

'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.

I really did want to like this book.

Like others before me I suspect, I had this 'great idea' of reading all the books on the Man-Booker long list as a way of introducing myself to a stack of writers I knew little about.

This was number 2.

I've reached the 22% point according to my Kindle stats, and I think I'm throwing in the towel. I just... cannot... face another page because I'm certain the next page will be the same as the one before and the hundred or so before that.

Yes, the author can write and she has undoubted skill. But really, what is she wasting that skill on here? I've read no reviews yet -- not even the ones here on Amazon -- but I see she currently has 2 five star reviews, so someone likes this. I bet some of the paper reviews talk about a "richly comic landscape" and a "stream of hilarious characters" and all that sort of stuff.

My first complaint is that, more than a fifth of the way into the story, nothing has actually happened. Some people talking in a hotel bar... a bloke talking in bed.... yep, that's it. People talking, talking. Just jabbering away aimlessly.

Second, everyone talks in the same way. This sort of gabbling, solemn-articulate, urgent, sub-Pinteresque platitudinous guff. I can see the author just sitting there, tapping away for hours, pumping out this stream of stuff without knowing where the stream is heading. On! On! More! More! just throw out more dialogue. There is one woman who is a bit nuts whose gabbling, solemn-articulate, urgent sub-Pinteresque platitudinous guff is a bit more deranged than the others, but that's it really.

Third, and this is what I find most dispiriting -- I simply do not care about any of these people. We don't want every character in a novel to be nice and decent and heroic. Heaven forbid. But please, give us just one. Give us just a sniff of one somewhere in the first 22% of the 'work' or there is a hefty chance that the other 78% will lie undiscovered. Give me something to cling onto, to like, to admire, to freakin' care about.

I like comic novels as much as the next normal person. What's not to like about a good chortle? But some "richly comic landscapes" are weirdly lacking in comedy. This is one. Did any reader manage to issue a guffaw during the first 22%? I certainly didn't.

Someone somewhere will call this "beautifully observed" with "sharply drawn portraits". I know this because someone always does. The reality is that no one in the first 22% of this book is lifelike or believable. These are late-night sitcom creations. People who fart boisterously in public and mutter strings of stuff about golf courses in Krakow that you just know are lines lifted arbitrarily from the web and plastered in.

Bah!

I genuinely hope that others have better luck than me with this. Tell me I don't get it; tell me I'm a Philistine; tell me I'm as shallow as one of the author's bar-fly bores. I believe you. This is on the Man-Booker long list for god's sake so it must have merit. I'm too old, I'm too stupid. I believe you. I believe you.

Onto number 3. Farewell number 2.

-------------------

Edited to add -- This review says it relates to the hardcover edition. It is actually the Kindle edition, though that shouldn't make a difference, apart from being easier to determine the percentage read.

I bought this book for a golf mad friend of mine after seeing it reviewed on Newsnight's Late Review and an interview with Nicola Barker. It promised to be everything that it turned out not to be. Maybe someone at the BBC is a good mate of Ms Barker's because they did a great sell job on the show. Anyway, I returned it which I don't do unless a book is REALLY bad, over-rated or just plain dull. This was all three.

First, to be clear I read it on Kindle and it wasn't helped by poor structure/layout so that it wasn't always obvious who was speaking. Which, perhaps, also reflects badly on the writing?
Back at the book... Similar to another reviewer, I read all of the previous year's Booker short list as a means to find out what current literature is highly rated and maybe why. This year I have only picked up The Yips from the last list (so far) and have to say that it is not up to last year's standard. I finished it so I guess it held my attention/interest enough but I suspect that without the Booker naming I would have dumped it long ago. It is a long Tom Sharpe-esque farce of interlinking characters and stories which are all, individually, disasters in the making.
Did I warm to any of the characters enough to care about them? No. Did I learn anything about life, me, those around me? No. Did any of the individual narratives support an entire book? No. Would I recommend this to anyone else? No. Do I understand how it made the Booker short list? No.
Sorry, maybe it's just me - and I am a golfer so the basic subject matter isn't a turn-off - but a Tom Sharpe meets Gordon Brittas meets Rev meets... without any funny moments is just not that entertaining.

Nicola Barker has a great back catalogue of English novels, set largely in a Southern England which is never quite as we know it. The Yips continues this theme, focussing on the troubles of a formerly high-ranked golfer who has the yips and some of the strange and weird characters he encounters whilst staying for a few days in Essex. As ever with Barker there is surrealism, excellent characterisation and beautiful writing, I found this to be a superior novel to "Darkmans", her much praised previous novel, as it managed its ending much better. Whereas Darkmans seemed to peter out, the Yips ties up the disparate threads of narrative satisfyingly by the end. Recommended.

The cleverness was the merging of several apparently diverse stories until they all became linked. Only one character was an obvious type when first introduced but even that typecast was modified as the story developed. The ending was unexpected!

This is an inventive and funny read. It's a little uneven - as the previous reviewer stated, there are far too many meaningful conversations and these seem contrived. Overall I enjoyed this - it doesn't deserve all the gushing reviews from the press, but it was pretty good.

My pick of the moment is the hilarious surprise hit Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys. Very funny indeed.

Not really about golf at all. Mildly amusing in parts, but quite hard to follow and not very plausible overall.