Stopping for now. Maybe I'll take a run at it later.

This was one of the more confusing books I've read in the last few years, but ultimately, also one of the most satisfying; I spent the first half banging my head against the wall because there was just so much stuff going on, and the second half shouting around my fist because it was falling together in completely crazy, unexpected ways. Very enjoyable! Most definitely a great read to ring in 2008! I'd certainly look for more of Barker's books after this. ( )

God this was difficult. I'm in two minds about it. On the one hand there are some outbursts of exceptionally fine writing, like this from chapter ten:

“Dewi chewed solemnly on a heavily-salted tomato sandwich as he peered through his living room window, his dust-iced skin zebraed by the sharp stripes of winter light which gushed, unapologetically – like hordes of white-frocked debutantes flashing their foaming silk petticoats in eager curtsies – between the regimented slats of his hand-built shutters.”

On the other hand her tricolons can descend into lists of extraneous words that obscure the text like a sort of soft sleet.

It's a unique piece of work; the only novel that's sent me to google to see if there really is a Wimpy's on Canvey (there isn't). Everything's more or less off kilter and there's a hallucinatory quality to the world in which the characters are strange visions.

And that's a problem because the characters aren't in any sense real; I just didn't care whether they lived or not. Another problem is the lack of plot. You probably thing I'm very old-fashioned, expecting novels to have characterisation and a plot, but I really think they tend to have them because that's what makes them enjoyable. This barely has a narrative.

This brings me to wonder what the point of this novel is. If anything, it appears to be about the hopeless search for meaning, both for the characters in life and for us (the reader) in the book. I don't think I'm wrong in thinking that the whole novel is a perverse piss-take by Barker. Here's an example from chapter forty-seven:

“It was impossible to see far in the soft sleet, the half-light. Perhaps God was masquerading – Ted thought, scowling – for fun or out of sheer viciousness, as some kind of cack-handed amateur artist; roped in to paint the scenery for a bad school drama; working for nothing and – by the shoddy calibre of his output – without enthusiasm; wholly intent upon making the whole dmn world int a heavy-handed caricature; a sketch; a border; a wing; a back-drop.”

Barker being God. I enjoy intellectual games in a novel, and this would have made a superb short story. Personally I found five hundred pages of having the piss taken out of me a bit much. On the other hand it's exercised my brain. ( )

I read an odd little book called Behindlings by Nicola Barker. I’d ordered this one at the same time as Clear, which I found pretty compelling. The girlfriend had had a go at Behindlings before me, and she said that she just couldn’t get on with it.

I, on the other hand, am a big big fan. The story is, without doubt, fucked up. The main character is some kind of genius nomad who inexplicably has people who quite literally follow him 24/7. He sets puzzles for them, but never speaks to them. The story finds him as one group tries to solve an epic puzzle which involves many aspects of his past, drawing in people who thought he’d left them long behind.

Barker is a wordsmith of the highest quality, endlessly inventive and witty. She has a deft turn of phrase, and can throw you off the trail of what to expect from a paragraph. She writes in very much a stream-of-consciousness style, with numerous asides and parentheses, putting every thought of each character down on the page, even if it sacrifices grammatical correctness. The story is all.

It’s an acquired taste, no doubt, but worth persevering with. If I went back and re-read this, no doubt I’d find a hell of a lot more foreshadowing and clues in the early chapters, even though this isn’t a whodunnit. It’s not really anything genre-wise, just a story of this man and his groupies, for want of a better word. And it’s brilliant. ( )