If you prefer banal symbols freighted with meaning to plot, Nicola Barker is your woman

Readers familiar with Nicola Barker’s hyper-caffeinated style will be surprised by the almost serene first few chapters of her latest novel. It’s 1984 and we are in Pett Level, Hastings, a marginal location even by Barker’s standards (previous novels have been set in Luton, Ashford, and the Isle of Sheppey), and a well-travelled man named Franklin D. Huff is investigating a series of events that took place there many years earlier.

The events themselves are nebulous. Something about miracles, romantic affairs, and a saintly child deformed by thalidomide. Before Huff can find any answers, though, countryside serenity is replaced by the quirks of Barker’s reckless imagination.

As is usual with Barker’s fiction, the story is a blurb-writer’s nightmare. She prefers a constellation of seemingly banal symbols freighted with meaning — a cryptic number, a coat, a hair-clip — to plot. Above all else, she enjoys spooky, ungraspable forces attached to ludicrous situations. Posting an envelope becomes a supernatural catastrophe; a pilgrimage to Douai Abbey leaves Huff with painfully sealed buttocks; sudden landslips swallow sheds and bungalows.

Characters take turns narrating chapters in the fervid first person — exclamation marks and italicisations are used as blunt instruments to signal their agitation — except for a few interludes that are in a cracked kind of third person from the perspective of a parrot.

Weirder still is a country bumpkin called Clifford Bickerton, who is perhaps the furthest Barker has ever gone in her quest to cajole her audience. He is a dull, sidelined figure who finds himself conscious of his plight as a work of fiction, and begins railing against (what he sees as) the flaws of the novel. ‘The book’ll bomb,’ he remarks (meaning In the Approaches). ‘It’ll be remaindered two days after publication and I’ll be remembered as one of her most unsuccessful characters, ever.’