[gluckmeea]

Fausto was right (I belatedly reply). I did love this. Here's what I wrote at the time in the context of reading through last year's Booker shortlist:

I was intrigued by this 836 behemoth as soon as I heard about it, but put off reading it because of its sheer size. I could get wider coverage of the shortlist much more quickly by reading the other slim volumes in contention.

Well, it was certainly worth the wait (weight?) in the end, as I hefted the mammoth thing onto the tram and off for a couple of weeks, initially utterly perplexed, and gradually slightly less perplexed as I made my way through this very strange book.

Initial superficial impressions were not favourable. The book is printed in a sans serif font which may be fine for reading on screen, but does not look good on paper. Later in the novel it morphs into a germanic style font whenever someone speaks in a foreign language, a stylistic tic I actually quite like. The other thing that irritated me, though, was the bizarre paragraphing. Many of my students are under the impression that there are two sorts of paragraph breaks. One that requires an indent and one that necessitates merely a line break. Barker and/or her publishers are evidently suffering from the same misapprehension.

Quibbles aside, I was soon utterly entranced by the novel, which follows a group of interconnected characters around Ashford and its environs in south west England. Ashford is a very modern town, the gateway to the Channel Tunnel, but history is intruding in a very macabre and sometimes violent way. I guess you could call it a ghost story, but that doesn?t quite get to the nub of what this novel is about.
In fact, I?m still not really sure what the novel is about, despite having finished it and liking it immensely. If I had to pin it down is some way I would say that it?s a cross between a Haruki Murakami novel and the excellent Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. Barker has all of the weirdness and unexplained supernatural phenomena that Murakami employs, and as with his novels I was prepared to just accept the world on the author?s terms and go along for the rich and wonderful ride. In terms of subject matter and ?feel?, it felt very close to Mantel?s novel, which also deals with ghosts and like Barker?s deals with very grim subject matter that is leavened by the blackest of humour. And it should be made clear that Darkmans is very funny.

The best thing that the novel does, however, is create characters with real emotional depth. Most of the characters are quite closed off particularly the father and son, Daniel and Kane Beede, who might be termed the main protagonists. But there?s enough space to slowly draw out their inner quirks and foibles and the pain that keeps them apart despite their physical proximity. They?re also given a wonderful supporting cast of oddballs and freaks, most endearingly (and amusingly) Gaffar, a Kurdish boxing champion who has a morbid fear of salad.

On the sentence level, Barker is perhaps not as impressive a writer as the likes of Anne Enright, but unlike Enright she?s got a hell of a story to tell, and it?s not like anything that you?ve ever read before. I still think that Lloyd Jones will take out the prize, but it would be real nice to see a book as odd as this one get all the publicity.