Nicola Barker’s Darkmans was the ‘dark horse’ of this year’s Man Booker shortlist. As we all know, it didn’t win, but in my humble opinion, Darkmans is a literary masterpiece – and one of the most endlessly fascinating books I have ever read.
Reading Darkmans is a bit like watching one of those nature documentaries where the camera lingers on an utterly ordinary, banal, patch of lawn, slowly drilling down to capture the intricate anthropological detail of the insect life buzzing among the blades.
This 800-plus page novel takes place over just a few days in Ashford, England, a nondescript town most noted for its position at the mouth of the English Channel Tunnel. Its characters are similarly ordinary – on the surface, at least. There is Beede, a formerly passionate community activist, now hardened against modern life by a disappointing crusade that ended in the significant loss of a part of the town’s history. His son Kane is a prescription drug dealer who has ‘gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti’.
Darkmans opens with this determinedly opposite father and son meeting by accident in a sordid cafe, the scene of a drug deal. It is here that Kane meets his father’s friend Elen, a chiropodist with a mentally disturbed husband, Dory, and a decidedly eerie young son, Fleet. Elen once treated Kane’s long-dead mother and remembers him as her stoic carer, an observation that delivers the first of many chinks in Kane’s meticulously assembled armour. This chance meeting is also the beginning of Kane’s reawakened interest – or obsession – with his father.
Other characters include Kane’s anorexic ex-girlfriend, Kelly; a Kurdish immigrant, Gaffar, who becomes Kane’s right-hand man (and suffers from a fear of salad); a seemingly proper academic with a wild side and a mystery-loving ice queen art forger who seems to hold the key to several secrets. Nicola Barker has said that as a writer she is ‘presenting people with unacceptable or hostile characters’ with the desire ‘to make them understood’.
Nobody is who they seem in Darkmans. Kelly, who comes from a ‘notorious’ family of slackers and swindlers, is actually a misunderstood sweetheart, despite her short skirts and rough drawl. ‘Venerable’ Beede, who presents himself as straight-up and transparent, is embroiled in secrets involving debt, desire and revenge. And Kane, introduced as ‘easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral)’, is gradually revealed to be not only kinder, but far smarter than he looks.
‘Darkmans is really about history’ says Barker. ‘The history’s the missing character.’ History is most obviously embodied by John Scogin, an infamous court jester (and favourite of Edward IV) who seems to possess Dory, and, at times, both Kane and Beede. Most of what we know about Scogin comes from six-year-old Fleet, who solemnly tells stories of ‘John’s’ escapades, often at highly incongruous or inappropriate moments. Fleet’s stories often echo earlier, fragmented, versions, as dreamed or acted out by other characters.
But history is everywhere. The recent past is the key to the true nature of most of the characters. Beede’s manic opposition to progress is rooted in bitter experience. The icy lack of rapport between him and Kane begins with Beede’s reaction against Kane’s mother’s smothering presence. Kane’s job as a dispenser of ‘pain relief’ can be traced to his caretaking role with his mother and witnessing her suffering. Dory’s schizophrenia is related to his move to Germany as a child and his wrenching separation from the English language.
‘All struggles could be encapsulated as some kind of battle between an object’s natural function and its actual – often thwarted – circumstances,’ observes Elen. There are multiple interpretations of characters and events, and it is up to the reader to decide which to go with, and how deep to delve. For instance, there are plausible psychological, supernatural or even spiritual explanations for many of the strange happenings in the book.
None of those explanations are without holes, but that is (I’m sure) part of the point of it. In life, the truth is not black and white. No one narrator is ever completely reliable. Motives are usually mixed.
This is the kind of novel that offers fresh waves of understanding on a second reading, as the clues planted early in the novel and resolved at the end are encountered anew. Why does Beede keep labelled boxes in his bedroom, containing, among other things, a cat and a chipped mug? Why does Elen find a hospital-issue spoon in her pocket on the beach? And why is Gaffar afraid of lettuce?
Darkmans is an intellectual adventure of the highest order – and entertaining into the bargain. No wonder it took four years to write.
first published/broadcast on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, November 2007
