'the insignificant weft and weave'

Burley Cross Postbox Theft
by Nicola Barker

Barker's previous novel Darkmans was a vastly ambitious (not to mention weighty) tome that looked at a couple of days in that most modern of towns, Ashford - Gateway to Europe, and was literally bursting at the seams with inventiveness in language, character and form. Not exactly a book to recommend to friends but one that those who had made their way through it would talk excitedly about, and a nod from the Booker panel duly followed. So I was very excited to get my hands on her new book, 'a comic epistolary novel of startlingly originality and wit', and therefore hugely disappointed to find it to be an occasionally humorous but mainly verbose, slow and uncompelling read.

As is obvious form the title and cover art the set up is that we are reading the contents of the recently broken into postbox in the 'chocolate box' village of Burley Cross in West Yorkshire -'a tiny, ridiculously affluent, ludicrously puffed-up moor-side village, stuffed to capacity with second-home owners, southerners, the strange, the 'artistic', the eccentric and the retired'. Whodunnit? Well, I guess we're supposed to find out as Barker slowly builds up her cast of characters and their intersecting relationships and story-lines. The case is laid out first by Sgt Everill as he hands over the job that very nearly broke him to PC Roger Topping (described in a later letter as 'a huge, forlorn elk, a tragic bison, lumbering about the place in that improbably gigantic pair of perpetually squeaking loafers of his like some heavily tranquillised mastodon'). We then read through the stash of letters found dumped in the alley that runs behind the local hairdressers, a litany that shows 'how fiercely different local factions like to guard their own patch' and includes their personal obsessions - planning permission, bequests, privacy, debt, manhole cover theft, unrequited love...

One immediate problem that occurred to me was that if this was a theft then presumably the incriminating letter(s) won't be amongst the stash found dumped in the alley behind the village hairdressers; therefore if we're going to learn anything from what we read then it's certainly going to be by taking the long route round. And it is a long route. Twenty seven letters over 360 pages. The first challenge that a reader might raise, questioning whether we're really a nation of letter writers any more, is handled conveniently by placing an attractive new member of staff in the sub-post-office who tempts the residents of Burley Cross to put pen to paper with a new fervour. However, I'm not sure if I swallow that people are in the habit of writing letters that run to more than ten pages and are written in a vernacular that so closely apes the speech of each author. We have digressions, parentheses and even footnotes in some cases, all of which help Barker in her acts of ventriloquism - and to be fair she is very good at creating the voice of each character this way - but it always feels more like speech written down rather than like reading a real letter. The one instance in which it really works is when we read the transcript of a tape recording made by local music star Frank K Nebraska to his agent, complaining abut his ghost-written memoir. The foul-mouthed, 14-page tirade, delivered whilst going to the toilet, is hilarious, leaving you almost disappointed when the tape runs out.

Much of the writing is caught up in the service of illustrating these grotesque character studies, the language profane, idiomatic, vernacular, but every now and then (but far too infrequently) something beautiful emerges - in fact to describe the infrequent, badly distributed kindnesses of one character Barker uses the image of 'those tiny scraps of burned newspaper that fly out of a bonfire - delicate tornadoes - on a gusty autumn afternoon'. It's a shame because the book is in part a paean to the lost art of letter writing. However annoying and unlikeable many of the village residents are Barker is essentially writing a sympathetic homage to the disappearing village community.

I know that pubs are on their way out (hundreds are closing every week), that they're merely a sad reminder of things past (the way we once were, The Good Old Days), just like 'community spirit' is, and communities themselves, and churches, and local bobbies, and pickled walnuts, and brass bands at fetes, and tall hedgerows, and handwritten letters, and home-cooked meals, and sparrows, and boredom, and books, and gob-stoppers, and ladybirds, and innocence...

It doesn't matter how many times I tell myself that life is too short to waste time finishing books that one isn't liking, I still find it hard to condemn a book without finishing it, ever hopeful that it might redeem itself by the end. It was that rather than a burning desire to know whodunnit that kept me persevering to the final letter, more fool me, I'll just have to be sterner with myself next time. Perhaps I should write myself a strongly-worded letter.

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Joker in the pack

Darkmans
by Nicola Barker


Near the beginning of this vast novel there is moment of schadenfreude.

'At approximately the half-way point, his trousers started slipping; the fabric locked just above his knees, and he tumbled. It was a dramatic fall - a jester's fall - with all the additional frills and embellishments.
Beede closed his eyes (in an effort to repress a sharp bark of laughter-

Where did that urge come from?)

- then he turned his face away, waited patiently for a slight lull in the traffic, and moved implacably onward.'

I mention it because it is a good example of a few things which typify this book. There is the textual wordplay, there is the mention of a jester and be assured there is a jester in this novel. Not simply the haunting presence of John Scogin, court jester to Edward IV, whose voice pushes its way into the text and who exerts his influence on several characters like a puppet master but also the author herself who peppers this book with so many nudges and winks that you can almost hear her chuckling away.

Set in Ashford, 'Gateway to Europe', this is, we are told, a very modern novel. But for Barker 'history isn't just something that happened in the past, but a juggernaut with faulty brakes which is intent on mowing you down'. She has given her characters Dickensian names; we have Beede (a venerable man indeed) and his son Kane (a drug dealer) whose relationship is so fractured that their meeting in a restaurant at the beginning of the novel is purely coincidental and they refuse to enlighten each other as to why they might be there. During their stuttered exchange Kane sees a man on a horse, dressed in yellow, but when he looks later to see a man dismounting he has mysteriously changed and become Beede's friend Isidore who may or may not be German but who is definitely suffering from some form of mental illness. Confused? We haven't even begun yet. Isidore's son Fleet is a very special child indeed, having built a replica of a church and medieval village from matches at home and frequently reciting history with more authority than any 4 year old could possibly have. His mother Elen, a chiropodist, seems to exert an extraordinary pull on the men she meets whilst hiding a livid set of bruises on her wrist. Kane's ex-girlfriend Kelly, a fantastic creation, is a foul mouthed chav who hooks up with Kane's henchman Gaffar, a Kurd with an extreme fear of lettuce. And we still have yet to meet the forger Peta Borough (!) who may have an explanation for much that happens in the 838 pages of what is an exhilarating and far from disorganised journey through a couple of days in this less than ordinary town.

It is easy to see why the Booker jury found it difficult to award the prize to a novel that is bursting with so many ideas. Even the text is uncontrollable, punctuated by parenthesis and italicised interruptions from the jesting spirit but as the forger Peta says; 'language won't be restricted. Because language is uncontainable. Like a fast running river. It bubbles up and splashes and spills'. For some it may be a quirk too far but I found it an incredibly unsettling experience to read a text so unrestricted and felt the genuine horror of the characters as they found themselves no longer in control of the words that left their mouths. It is all done with such humour as well. Barker has created some brilliant comic characters in Kelly Broad, daughter of the infamous Dina ('Jabba the Hut with a womb, chronic asthma and a council flat'), whose filthy utterances continue unabated even after she has a close brush with God. Gaffar too provides some classic moments, his frustrations voiced in Kurdish and printed clearly for us to read in bold Gothic type. As he watches the classic documentary Touching The Void with Kane it is Kane who observes 'one irreducible fact is that people who climb mountains are invariably cunts.'

What this all means is harder to decipher but there is plenty of fun to be had with the past, as another character mentions; 'It's a fascinating business. Kind of like solving a crime. Like unravelling a mystery story. All the clues are in the text and your job is simply to sniff them out'. Which isn't to say that it's any fun for the characters involved. Far from it. The jester Scogin is a malevolent influence on this novel as you would expect from a man who became notorious for locking several beggars in a barn and then burning it to the ground.

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