Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11494 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 pages

Review
'This is the work of a very fine storyteller indeed.' The Times 'The writing is often hilarious. Barker carves up the suburban dinner party savagely, and anatomises the dodgiest builder on Earth!Nicola Barker's writing is hugely attractive, because it conjures images and ideas from a tremendous wealth of inspiration. It is the product of a powerful, sprawling imagination.' Daily Telegraph 'a loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. Barker is a great, restless novelist, and "Darkmans" is a great, restless novel. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren't 838 more.' Guardian 'When a new novel by Nicola Barker arrives, there is a host of reasons to break into a smile. Chief among them is that she is one of the most exhilarating, audacious and, for want of a better word, ballsy writers of her generation. And, in a publishing terrain that often inhibits ambition and promotes homogeneity, there is nobody writing quite like her.' Observer 'A visionary epic.' Sam Leith, in the Spectator 'Books of the Year' 'Darkmans is all about the ebullience of language, the erruption of the past into the present, the seriousness and darkness of jokes. It defies moderation because it celebrates misrule. Highly original and interesting, and doing it with conviction and sharp humour. I know I whipped through its more than 800 pages with attention unbroken. And I know that the very night I finished it, it showed up in my dreams. Seriously.' Literary Review 'An idiosyncratic, witty and utterly original vision of Albion.' Independent on Sunday 'There is a constant sense she might launch us into the minds of one of her psychotics and leave us there, and this gives her books a fearsome energy.' Independent 'Barker's flair for acidic description and ability to buff up the most tired old cliche and make it gleam serve her well in rendering this landscape in all its mundane splendour. Barker's fiendish sense of humour and her unshirking determination to play hardball with language make the journey there a rip-roaring and invigorating ride.' Glasgow Herald 'This book describes a world in which people, families, communities and old value systems have gone adrift. Paradoxically, while signifying loss, discontinuity, destruction, Barker's narrative also conveys a notion of people held together: this flowing, discursive storytelling washes along like the Thames itself, embracing everything. Surreal and satirical vision of modern life.' Financial Times Magazine 'Inventive, witty and well staged.' Sunday Times 'The wildest, cleverest, most original novel published this year. Even previous experience of Barker's haunting imagination did not prepare me for the tour de force that is Darkmans.' Ruth Scurr, TLS 'Books of the Year' 'There's been nothing in English quite like Nicola Barker's Darkmans - except maybe Barker's own novel Behindlings. Barker is an original, linguistically, formally and stylistically.' Ali Smith, author of 'The Accidental', in the TLS 'Books of the Year' 'Rich, sensual, almost synaesthetic powers of description and association.' TLS 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

The hip, the square and the crazy trip over their pasts and each other in this boisterous latest from Barker (Clear, 2005, etc.), a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. The primary focus of the novel, set in Ashford, England, near the Channel Tunnel, is on two families. There is a father, Beede, and his son, Kane. Kane is a cool prescription-drug dealer. Beede is stuffy, civic-minded and pedantic; he supervises a hospital laundry. They tolerate each other warily; their one great crisis occurred when Kane's mother (Beede's divorced wife) died painfully after a botched suicide attempt. The other family consists of Isidore (or Dory), his wife, Elen, and their five-year-old son, Fleet. Dory, who pretends to be German, is a mess, narcoleptic and paranoid. He suffers dangerous "episodes" of which he has no memory. At times he is possessed by a medieval jester called John, who once burned down a barn with people inside. Little Fleet is weird too (he knows about John). The sane one is Elen, who radiates calm and commonsense. She's a podiatrist who has treated Beede and Kane and is the link between the families. There is a third family, the Broads, a collection of lowlifes. Foremost among them is punk, anorexic Kelly; she has a big mouth but a good heart. The novel generates heat but no light. The hijinks (searching in a haunted forest for Dory, for example) are enhanced by playful typography and counterpointed by erudite riffs on, among other things, similarities between the medieval and modern worlds. The past weighs heavily, even on the Broads. The questions pile up but go unanswered; projected climaxes (a rooftop encounter between Dory and John) fizzle out. As in her previous work, Barker is still seductive, idiosyncratic and infuriating. "Everything is arbitrary" says a character who is the designated truth-teller. That's quite a cop-out. If you go with the flow and reconcile yourself to the lack of plot, you'll find plenty to enjoy. (Kirkus Reviews)

Scotland on Sunday
'...an ambitious, daring, delightful and compelling work...it is
fearfully gripping...'

Susan Mansfield
'Her books are experimental in style, endlessly inventive.'

Customer Reviews

Very weird
This is one very weird book. Once you've established that and come to terms with it, it's much easier to enjoy. It's written in a style which I found intensely irritating, full of irregular paragraph spacing and with an obsessive overuse of brackets, and while I came to tolerate it I certainly never grew to like it.

For the first hundred or so pages I disliked it so much that I seriously considered giving up (an extreme measure for me). After that I became more engrossed in the story and decided to keep reading, which I am glad I did. Because for all its oddness, Darkmans is never dull and never predictable.

The story is hard to synopsise, but it centres around an unlikely group of eccentric characters living in the town of Ashford, who become caught up with the restless spirit (possibly) of a medieval jester. The characters are weird and not necessarily believable, but are original and fascinating at the same time and to my surprise I had warmed to most of them by the end. The plot (such as there is one) is too surreal to be followed closely.

Although I did find the style of writing annoying, it was effective. The sense of unease, of 'wrongness' is conjured up vividly, and I always felt disquieted whilst reading. There is a sense of a battle between the characters' desire to continue as normal and the dark undertones of the supernatural which keep forcing their way through the veneer of normality.

The reviews on this site prove what I suspected all along - you'll either love this book or you'll hate it. It certainly is the kind of novel people feel strongly about, one way or another. Although having said that I have rated it three stars, I suppose because I feel torn between the two extremes.

What's harder to say is which category any reader would fall into. I would say that readers who like gothic themes, surrealism, fantasy and experimental writing would be more likely to enjoy it than those who don't. But the only way you'll know for sure is to read it and find out...

Love or hate
Anyone who has trawled through all the reviews can see for themselves, opinions are usually either 5 stars or one star. There are a few middling but not many. I hated it. I agree with those who say the style of writing is particularly irritating and bears no resemblance to real life dialoge, there is a dreadful lack of plot (okay for some books, but the blurb leads one to expect the opposite)and its, quite frankly, boring. And for 840 pages, thats a lot of boredom.

I lot of hype in my opinion - the prose is far beneath the quality of that required for such a long work lacking in anything else to keep ones attention.

I have read a lot of strange books, I like different ideas and whacky reads. This wasn't one of them. Although I don't often give up on a book, 60 pages in, I feel there are too many good books out there to waste the time required to trawl through this.

Dull (boring)
This is one of the most boring books I've ever read. The constant (about 3 times in every paragraph) use of brackets is really off putting (the author constantly points out the obvious) and hugely irritating and pointless (she uses these to include information that has no need to be in brackets). I trawled through it hoping that something may happen in line with the back cover description to no avail (it didn't happen).

Many times throughout the book I had to put it down out of sheer frustration it made me so angry. I would have binned it long before the 800 and odd page finale if I wasn't on holiday with no book shops to hand. Don't buy it. The only positive point was one chapter in which a repressed, stuffy character is forced to join a dinner party with a group of middle class couples - this is the only part of the book that I enjoyed. So thats about 25 pages out of 800+ that I liked - not much bang for your buck.