Darkmans

Nicola Barker

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, January 26th 2008

Nicola Barker’s latest novel, Darkmans, made this year’s Man-Booker shortlist, and deservedly so. The plot is sprawling and intricately crafted, containing a cast of idiosyncratic and variously unhappy individuals whose stories converge slowly and inexorably as the novel progresses.

We start with Daniel Beede, who is fighting solitary a rearguard action against the tide of modernisation that is erasing the heritage of his home town of Ashford. When his drug-dealer son, Kane, discovers several of his ex-girlfriends are involved in secret correspondence with his father, he starts prying into his father’s affairs (assisted by a Kurdish immigrant, Gaffar, who makes up for his lack of English by his enthusiasm and an uncanny ability to befriend almost anybody).

The trail leads to comely young chiropodist Elen and her Isodore, who is in some kind of business with Beede. Kane soon becomes obsessed with Elen, while Isodore himself is haunted/possessed by an alter-ego, the spirit of a medieval jester who seems intent on asserting his malevolent personality on the present in a contagion that spreads to all those around him.

The more Kane discovers, the less his father (or anything else for that matter) turns out to be what he has assumed, and it becomes increasingly obvious that events are being orchestrated by somebody or something unknown. Barker blends mystery, jealousy, love and the supernatural into a novel of the present suffused with echoes of the past, a potent and bewitching brew that leaves the reader thirsty for more.