Darkmans Double

Here's the shortlist for the Ondaatje Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature to a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry which is "of the highest literary merit", and judged to convey a sense of place :

Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Paradise with Serpents by Robert Carver
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
On Brick Lane by Rachel Lichtenstein
Sea Holly by Robert Minhinnick
The Discovery of France by Graham Rob

The only novels on the list are Darkmans (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and Sea Holly, the first novel by Welsh poet Robert Minhinnick. More on all the titles on the Guardian website.

The winner will be announced on 28 April.

Brilliantly Comic, Hauntingly Sinister

Am finally and somewhat sadly at the end of Nicola Barker's Darkmans, which has kept me happy and occupied over the past ... how many weeks is it? I've lost track.

Despite being 838 pages long it never felt a long or arduous read, maybe because I was enjoying the joyfully meandering narration so much.

To talk about the plot of the novel is almost beside the point. (This idea that there's this "3 act arc" of Western story telling just doesn't work here.) Yes, there are story threads that run through, but they seem almost incidental, and not all are gathered neatly together at the end leaving the reader still caught in the mystery of who and how these folks in a modern Kent town become possessed (it seems) by characters from the past. When I was a kid I loved time-slip novels like Alan Garner's The Owl Service, and Phillipa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden, and always squeeze my eyes up tight to try to see a place as it was hundred of years ago, so this aspect of the novel greatly appealed to me.

The action doesn't (for the most part) move out of a tiny geographical area, the town of Ashford in Kent. When I've mentioned this to British friends over the past week or two, I've seen their eyes boggle in disbelief that anyone would want to set a novel there.

It's a nowhere sort of place, a transportation hub, serving the Eurostar service to continental Europe and torn up by roads. Whatever charm and history it had in the past has become pretty much obliterated in the interest of "development". But Ashford with its bypasses and Tesco's and substandard modern housing estates, is arguably the main character of the book, and the past comes back to haunt ... with a vengeance.

There's a relatively small human cast for a book this size, the interrelationships between those individuals are throughly explored.

Beede and Kane are a father and son with apartments in the same house while remaining essentially estranged from each other. Beede works in the hospital laundry and is fascinated by the past. Kane deals in prescription drugs, and is haunted by the attempted suicide of his mother many years before.

Then there's (let's see ... and do forgive the brackets, one tends to write in long run-on sentence with breathless asides after reading this) Kane's larger than life ex-girlfriend, Kelly Broad, (a girl of the sort we would have called, not very kindly, "a right little scrubber" in my day); Gaffar, a Kurdish refugee who comes to work for Kane and is terrified (to the point of fainting!) of salad leaves; Elen, Beede's chiropodist (who may or may not be a witch); Isadore, her husband, barely clinging to sanity at times; their son, Fleet, building a model of a cathedral from matchsticks. And several others including, the builder from hell, an art forger, and an incontinent spaniel with paralysed back legs.

Oh yes, and there's also a shadowy character from the past, a sort of lord of misrule, who appears to be playing some rather nasty practical jokes on the characters.

There's an awful lot of talk but in the sharp dialogue and in the asides of the completely garrulous narrator. (I kept thinking that it would be fun to see the novel written as a hypertext novel - it would be a fraction of its length without the detours!)

I came away from the book with more questions than answers. But I came away satisfied and I came away wanting more. (And disagreeing vehemently with Chairman of the Booker Prize committee, Howard Davies' snippy comment about how it could have been more tightly edited ... did he get what Barker was trying to do?).

I can't think of another novel that manages to be both brilliantly comic and hauntingly sinister at the same time. Darkman's also has its finger firmly on the (British) social pulse, while also being startlingly innovative in form and style.

So would I recommend it to Malaysian readers? Several other readers of this blog (Janet, Animah and Leon) have already read and enjoyed it. Definitely, if you are strong enough to lift a copy and can embrace exuberant messiness!

Should it have won the Booker? I wouldn't have been at all unhappy if it had. (Though I still think Animal's People and Mr. Pip will be more popular choices with a more general readership.)

Links to other reviews:

Matt Thorne in the Independent
Alex Clark in the Observer
Suart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday