It's astonishing. Probably the best British novel I've read of the last ten years. A story of drug-dealing, chiropody, etymology, and madness. A whodunnit where the culprit is history itself. A dizzying lurch through the subconscious of the Thames estuary...
I had read Clear by her before, which was very clever, but pretty lightweight. This is... just... magnificent.Posts: 17027 | From: your gaff, nicking stuff. | Registered: Oct 2002
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I read 'Five Miles From Outer Hope' and it totally put me off her. Seriously irritating 'look-at-me-aren't I-clever' writing style. Does 'Darkmans' have the same style, Toro?
Posts: 3266 | From: London | Registered: Sep 2002
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Yeah, I haven't read that, but I know what you mean about the style. It's far less obtrusive than in Clear, at any rate, and far more helpful to the narrative, given how much of it is concerned with the weird edges of the characters' conscious motivations.
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I looked before I started the thread to see had there been a previous Nicola Barker discussion.
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I thought it'd been an impressive feat of memory...
That link has another link to the lifetime of that magazine Carcass edited. I'd forgotten that whole thing.
Posts: 20721 | From: Far away, without a city wall | Registered: May 2002
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Ha ha, brilliant! Yeah, it's a fair cop guv, it was a total U-turn. Basically, I loved 'Five Miles From Outer Hope' for the first 50 pages but then the style really started to grate. By the end of the book I wanted to throttle Nicola Barker. The irritating narrator did remind me of Morvern Callar, but I'm sorry I ever mentioned 'Vernon God Little'. VGL is in a different league to either of those books.
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For me, she totally has the style under control by Darkmans, but I can see how it would be as annoying as hell before she learned to use it properly...
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Finished it. Very enjoyable; I'm still not sure what it was about, but enjoyed it nonetheless - a mix of Twin Peaks and Hollyoaks, it felt like at times.
Posts: 6300 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:Harriet Lane: Writer Years ago, I was given Nicola Barker's novel, Five Miles from Outer Hope, to review. After 10 minutes on the sofa, I was longing to hurl the novel, with force, at the wall. Conscious that a fellow human had toiled over it for months, possibly years, I raised my violent feelings with my editor, but he insisted that I file a review. I started off by saying lots of nice things about Barker's exuberant imagination and zest for wordplay, but finally my irritation stormed the copy. "Quite early on, Barker's arch, flamboyant, look-at-me playfulness starts to get in the way of her characters ... It's inventive, and my, it's original, but it's also strikingly self-conscious." On publication, Barker sent the literary editor a hate limerick. "Pity poor Harriet Lane/With her prose so unstructured and plain ..." . Sadly, I can't remember the rest. Maybe she had a point. What do I know? I'm not a novelist, just a reader of novels.
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