Wide Open

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Reading a Nicola Barker novel is like taking a very odd drug. Her characters are unlike anyone you’ve ever met—and for that, perhaps, there’s reason to be grateful. Take the cast of Wide Open, which includes Ronny, a homeless man we first meet waving at passing cars from a bridge. Only it turns out his name is not Ronny after all, but James, a name he subsequently bestows on the real Ronny, who is thereafter called Jim. Even though James/Ronny is right-handed, he insists on using only his left hand, because it helps him “concentrate.” Then there’s the real Ronny, a.k.a. Jim, who is utterly hairless. Not to mention Nathan, Ronny/Jim’s brother, who works in the Lost Property department of the London Underground; Sara, proprietor of a boar farm in the beach town of Sheppey; and Sara’s daughter, Lily, an angry, dirty 17-year-old who worships a boar birth defect she calls the Head. There’s also Luke, a fat, handsome pornographer who smells like fish; Constance, an elfish optician in search of her father’s past; and above all, the ghost of Big Ronny, Nathan and Ronny/Jim’s father, who liked little boys.

Basically, these are all really, really creepy people, who do creepy and frequently nonsensical things. But the story Barker weaves out of their interactions is as compelling as anything in recent fiction, even if it operates by a narrative logic known only to the author. The reason is Barker’s prose: vivid, urgent, wholly original. “He felt very strange, all of a sudden,” one of her characters muses, “like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Not one bit.” Wide Open may on occasion feel like a bad dream of one sort or another, but the overall effect is more than absorbing: it’s positively hallucinatory. —Mary Park

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Wide Open, Nicola Barker’s fifth book and winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2000, has taken all the elements of her first book, Love Your Enemies, and made them into a shimmering, simmering heart-break story. Written seven years ago, when she was 27, Love Your Enemies‘ ten short stories were enticingly strange, full of ugly truths, askew beauty. The locations were unglamorous and the characters ordinary, and damaged by life. Barker’s writing was full of humour, an acidic wit that stripped away all sentimentality, but left a sheen of sadness.

Wide Open is set on the Isle Of Sheppey, “a strange place, flat and empty like the moon.” On the island is a nudist beach, a nature reserve, a wild boar farm and not much else. The landscape is bare, but the characters in are brim-full. There’s Luke, who specialises in dot-to-dot pornography, and lippy Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. Jim and Nathan end up on Sheppey too, as well as the mysterious figure of Ronnie who is “plain as a boiled sweet” but whose eyes are “deep, complex, dark ringed”.

Each one is drifting in turbulent, emotional currents, fighting the rip tide of a past, bleak with secrets and fear. “Hell wasn’t black after all. It was an endless, hollow, grey colour and it felt slippery. Nathan could find no finger holds. Even though his hands were still small. He was 8 years old and there was nothing to cling onto.” As an adult Nathan works in a Lost Property department, an irony that is almost brutal in its compassion.

Wide Open lays bare the damage done, the awful connection between the characters, which stretches back to childhood. It is beautifully written, crisp, darkly funny and, for all its weighty themes, light as joy to read.—Eithne Farry