Nicola Barker
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Nicola Barker
During his commute to a job spraying weed killer outside of London, Ronny passes a man standing on a bridge, waving at the cars—every day, no matter what the time or the weather. One day, when Ronny drives by, the man is hanging over the bridge, as if he might jump. Instinctively, Ronny pulls over and begins talking to the stranger. Ronny discovers the man is also named Ronny, wears his kind of white shoes, and knows his older brother Nathan.
The rest of Wide Open’s characters are as intriguingly peculiar as the two Ronnies. Nathan, the son of a pedophile, works in the Underground’s Lost Property department logging missing items. Sara is Ronny’s neighbor in the beach town of Sheppey, where she runs the family boar farm. Lily is her precocious teenaged daughter, born without fully formed organs or properly clotting blood. Luke, a handsome neighbor who swims in the nude and smells of fish, is a former pornographic photographer. Connie, Sara’s niece, is a visiting optician searching out her father’s past with a bundle of strange letters.
Nicola Barker
If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV’s infamous court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive – for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII’s physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin’s biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of—uh—salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?
Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford (a ridiculously modern town), about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It’s also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark—quite unspeakable—into its ear.
Darkmans is the third of Nicola Barker’s visionary narratives of the Thames Gateway. Following on from Wide…
