Darkmans, by Nicola Barker

Possessed by history; The past presses on the present in Darkmans, a novel about a long-dead king's jester, a precocious child and the debris of history that keeps floating to the surface
Nick Owchar
29 December 2007
Vancouver Sun


DARKMANS
BY NICOLA BARKER
HarperCollins Canada, 848 pages ($26.95)
Paperback, $15.95, coming in January

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One reason Nicola Barker's novel, Darkmans, made the Man Booker Prize short list this year, but didn't win, was that it isn't reader-friendly enough, Giles Foden, one of the judges, suggested in an article in The Guardian this fall.

The novel's sprawling length and wild "zeal for language," seemed too indulgent, he said. "[W]ith much more disciplined handling, [the novel] could have been a Middlemarch for our times."

And then there's the pesky secondary voice, set off from the main narrative by italics, that the judges didn't seem to like. Too many tricks, it seems, for the judges, who selected Anne Enright's The Gathering instead.

Barker's novel is indeed steeped in trickery, as well as supernatural suggestiveness and gloom. (The book's title refers to an old English term for "night.")

It takes us to present-day Ashford in Kent, a city that is "a fantastic contradiction" of clashing identities. In a landscape dominated by suburban development and strip malls, "at its centre," Barker writes, "beats this tiny, perfect, medieval heart."

Ashford seems to be a portal for something. What exactly?

There are clues: Characters have visions of a cackling old man on horseback, of hovering shadows and blackbirds. Young children sing madrigals and can't explain who taught them these songs.

In the hands of another writer -- perhaps Clive, the other Barker -- such gothic devices would briskly become a story of terrifying demonic possession.

Nicola Barker's purpose is otherwise. Her cast of characters includes hapless Beede, a hospital laundry supervisor, and his son, Kane, who deals drugs to a highly receptive clientele.

"Kane takes nothing to heart," Beede complains. "He lives in the moment. If he doesn't like a situation then he walks away from it or he devours a pill to blank it out."

His complaints are unfair. When his ex-wife died, Beede emotionally detached himself from his grieving son. Beede tries to make his selfish actions sound generous: "If there was one thing I could do for him, it would be to leave him to his own devices. Not to criticize. Not to control."

Clearly, Kane's pharmaceutical career springs from this parental neglect. So does his inability to keep a relationship, like the one he had with his ex-girlfriend Kelly -- although, considering that she's a profanity-spewing teen with a family tree full of thieves, they might have broken up for other reasons.

Kane finds himself irresistibly drawn to Elen, the wife of one of Beede's friends. Elen's family circumstances are desperate. Her husband, Isidore (Dory), suffers from memory loss, insomnia and paranoia.

Dory and Elen's five-year-old son, Fleet, is an odd child. His language is precocious and he's so obsessed with a certain cathedral that he builds a model out of matchsticks in the dining room.

Fleet speaks often of an imaginary friend named John, regaling anyone who will listen with salty stories of John's chaotic relationship with King Edward IV.

John, it turns out, is John Scogin, jester to Edward and a subject of research for Beede. During Dory's mental lapses, which send him wandering aimlessly, Fleet sometimes refers to his father as "John."

Scogin was a savage maker of mischief in Edward's court, and this points to the purpose behind the medieval references and Scogin sightings that the Booker judges felt were indulgent.

The nature of history is Barker's great concern. Asked to describe Darkmans, she has explained that it's a book about how history "isn't just something that happened in the past, but a juggernaut with faulty brakes which is intent on mowing you down."

In place of a conventional plot, she gives us metaphors of the past's pressure on the present. Kane struggles to cope with (or forget) the grim circumstances of his mother's death. Beede can't come to grips with the theft of precious antique tiles from a historical renovation project he was once involved with. Language breaks down into a mishmash of tongues. Elen and Dory's home, built on a soggy hillock, is falling apart -- and it doesn't help matters that they've hired Harve, Kelly's swindler uncle, as their contractor. Harve is a vicious person whose selfish gestures are perfectly in keeping with Scogin and his era.

History, in this novel's presentation, isn't a smoothly flowing river; it's clogged with all sorts of debris that floats up at unexpected moments. For Barker, the past is most vibrantly alive in language, in the way it seeps into modern usage.

No one better illustrates this than Kelly, Barker's star creation. Take a look at her reaction to the news that her family might be related to a court physician who wrote about Scogin. It's a spectacular high-low outburst of family pride:

'Jus' gimme a kiss, you big ape. ... D'ya hear that, Doc? ... We got breedin'. We got pedigree! ... Like all those natty little mutts at Crufts. We're up there, mate. We arrived! We pulled it off! Ding-dong! ... Ding-bloomin'-dong!'

With her burgundy hair, combat miniskirt and skinny white legs, Kelly seems like a Dickensian waif who's channelling the Plasmatics. But that's the point of Barker's story: Characters are possessed by history.

And that brings us back to the secondary narrative voice in italics. Hardly a gimmick, it provides a humorous, mocking commentary on the narrative, a reminder that the right response to any official version of history is a healthy dose of irony and amusement.

Still, this is a heavy thesis with which to frame a novel, and so the book won't be to everyone's taste, especially those who need their novels to get somewhere quickly. Darkmans is for readers who enjoy nimble wordplay and are patient enough to wait as the characters' lives slowly intersect and draw closer to an ensemble encounter that, unfortunately for Harve's shiny Toyota, brings the house down. Ding-dong!