Books : Fiction : Contemporary Fiction: 1970 Onwards : Authors A-Z : B : Barker, Nicola

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Darkmans

Nicola Barker
Clear: A Transparent Novel

Nicola Barker
Wide Open

Nicola Barker

Wide Open, Nicola Barker's fifth book and winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2000, has taken all the elements of her first book, Love Your Enemies, and made them into a shimmering, simmering heart-break story. Written seven years ago, when she was 27, Love Your Enemies' ten short stories were enticingly strange, full of ugly truths, askew beauty. The locations were unglamorous and the characters ordinary, and damaged by life. Barker's writing was full of humour, an acidic wit that stripped away all sentimentality, but left a sheen of sadness.
Wide Open is set on the Isle Of Sheppey, "a strange place, flat and empty like the moon." On the island is a nudist beach, a nature reserve, a wild boar farm and not much else. The landscape is bare, but the characters in are brim-full. There's Luke, who specialises in dot-to-dot pornography, and lippy Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. Jim and Nathan end up on Sheppey too, as well as the mysterious figure of Ronnie who is "plain as a boiled sweet" but whose eyes are "deep, complex, dark ringed".
Each one is drifting in turbulent, emotional currents, fighting the rip tide of a past, bleak with secrets and fear. "Hell wasn't black after all. It was an endless, hollow, grey colour and it felt slippery. Nathan could find no finger holds. Even though his hands were still small. He was 8 years old and there was nothing to cling onto." As an adult Nathan works in a Lost Property department, an irony that is almost brutal in its compassion.
Wide Open lays bare the damage done, the awful connection between the characters, which stretches back to childhood. It is beautifully written, crisp, darkly funny and, for all its weighty themes, light as joy to read. --Eithne Farry
Darkmans

Nicola Barker
Reversed Forecast: AND Small Holdings

Nicola Barker
Heading Inland

Nicola Barker
Five Miles from Outer Hope

Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker's teen queen heroine, Medve, has no truck with the niceties of polite expression. Medve is six foot three and living with her family in a crumbling art deco hotel on a small island, off the coast of England. She is "single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning", with a foul mouth and scattershot approach to story telling. Medve means bear in Hungarian and she gives the novel all the bite, ferocity and feral charm of her namesake.
Five Miles From Outer Hope is a compact book but, as usual, Nicola Barker manages to compress an awful lot in under 200 pages. Her work is darkly comic--weird, furtive and slightly rude. Her characters are unlikely, sometimes unlikeable, but they pack a huge punch. Medve is a roiling mass of hormones, her sister, Christobel, has swapped her "lovely breasts ... tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth's wing, pale as a priest's kiss" for "tits like torpedoes"; brother Feely, age four, is obsessed by the melancholy death of Shiro Chan, Queen of the Deer of Nara, and plump pre-pubescent Patch, the youngest girl, is knowledgeable and secretive. Into this family affair comes 19-year-old La Roux, a deserter from the South African army (The Sauce) with ginger hair, "very bad skin and even worse instincts". Medve and La Roux embark on a barbed flirtation,full of simmering sexuality and bad intentions, which ends in the very destructive "Operation Vagina" involving crochet knickers and a "five inch, red-coloured, jelly-textured, thirty-seven-scraggy-legged centipede." Things are never the same again.
Nicola Barker's superb sixth book is sly and subversive --Eithne Farry
Behindlings

Nicola Barker

Behindlings, the fifth novel from Nicola Barker, is a welcome return, both in mood and in geography, to the gothic terrain of her Impac Prize winner Wide Open. Set in parochial Canvey Island, Essex, this book has more in common with the television comedy The League of Gentlemen and the cult film The Wicker Man than a work of contemporary literary fiction. It is inventive, funny, unnerving and often magnificently strange.
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
Behindlings

Nicola Barker

Behindlings, the fifth novel from Nicola Barker, is a welcome return, both in mood and in geography, to the gothic terrain of her Impac Prize winner Wide Open. Set in parochial Canvey Island, Essex, this book has more in common with the television comedy The League of Gentlemen and the cult film The Wicker Man than a work of contemporary literary fiction. It is inventive, funny, unnerving and often magnificently strange.
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
The Spell (Hesperus Classics)
Five Miles from Outer Hope

Nicola Barker

Nicola Barker's teen queen heroine, Medve, has no truck with the niceties of polite expression. Medve is six foot three and living with her family in a crumbling art deco hotel on a small island, off the coast of England. She is "single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning", with a foul mouth and scattershot approach to story telling. Medve means bear in Hungarian and she gives the novel all the bite, ferocity and feral charm of her namesake.
Five Miles From Outer Hope is a compact book but, as usual, Nicola Barker manages to compress an awful lot in under 200 pages. Her work is darkly comic--weird, furtive and slightly rude. Her characters are unlikely, sometimes unlikeable, but they pack a huge punch. Medve is a roiling mass of hormones, her sister, Christobel, has swapped her "lovely breasts ... tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth's wing, pale as a priest's kiss" for "tits like torpedoes"; brother Feely, age four, is obsessed by the melancholy death of Shiro Chan, Queen of the Deer of Nara, and plump pre-pubescent Patch, the youngest girl, is knowledgeable and secretive. Into this family affair comes 19-year-old La Roux, a deserter from the South African army (The Sauce) with ginger hair, "very bad skin and even worse instincts". Medve and La Roux embark on a barbed flirtation,full of simmering sexuality and bad intentions, which ends in the very destructive "Operation Vagina" involving crochet knickers and a "five inch, red-coloured, jelly-textured, thirty-seven-scraggy-legged centipede." Things are never the same again.
Nicola Barker's superb sixth book is sly and subversive --Eithne Farry
Reversed Forecast

Nicola Barker
Darkmans

Nicola Barker
Wide Open

Nicola Barker

Wide Open, Nicola Barker's fifth book and winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2000, has taken all the elements of her first book, Love Your Enemies, and made them into a shimmering, simmering heart-break story. Written seven years ago, when she was 27, Love Your Enemies' ten short stories were enticingly strange, full of ugly truths, askew beauty. The locations were unglamorous and the characters ordinary, and damaged by life. Barker's writing was full of humour, an acidic wit that stripped away all sentimentality, but left a sheen of sadness.
Wide Open is set on the Isle Of Sheppey, "a strange place, flat and empty like the moon." On the island is a nudist beach, a nature reserve, a wild boar farm and not much else. The landscape is bare, but the characters in are brim-full. There's Luke, who specialises in dot-to-dot pornography, and lippy Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. Jim and Nathan end up on Sheppey too, as well as the mysterious figure of Ronnie who is "plain as a boiled sweet" but whose eyes are "deep, complex, dark ringed".
Each one is drifting in turbulent, emotional currents, fighting the rip tide of a past, bleak with secrets and fear. "Hell wasn't black after all. It was an endless, hollow, grey colour and it felt slippery. Nathan could find no finger holds. Even though his hands were still small. He was 8 years old and there was nothing to cling onto." As an adult Nathan works in a Lost Property department, an irony that is almost brutal in its compassion.
Wide Open lays bare the damage done, the awful connection between the characters, which stretches back to childhood. It is beautifully written, crisp, darkly funny and, for all its weighty themes, light as joy to read. --Eithne Farry
Behindlings

Nicola Barker

Behindlings, the fifth novel from Nicola Barker, is a welcome return, both in mood and in geography, to the gothic terrain of her Impac Prize winner Wide Open. Set in parochial Canvey Island, Essex, this book has more in common with the television comedy The League of Gentlemen and the cult film The Wicker Man than a work of contemporary literary fiction. It is inventive, funny, unnerving and often magnificently strange.
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
Clear: A Transparent Novel

Nicola Barker
The Three Button Trick: Selected Stories

Nicola Barker
Underwords: The Hidden City: The Booktrust London Short Story Competition Anthology

Diran Adebayo, Nicola Barker, Andrea Levy, Paul T. Owen
Small Holdings

Nicola Barker
Love Your Enemies

Nicola Barker