Welcome to surreal Luton

Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain  more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or other, it is not in London, not in the Midlands; its architecture is frightful, its pretentious but tatty hotels are full of middle management businessmen, its streets full of Vauxhalls driven by men with delusions and tattoos. It’s true Barker territory: the utterly grotesque sheltering amongst the banal.

The action of the novel, which is wide-ranging and hasn’t what might be described as a plot, centres on a drunken golfer, Stuart Ransom, still a minor celebrity, who has unplumbed depths of self-esteem, despite the fact that he has the nervous disorder focal dystonia, known as ‘the yips’, is bankrupt, and his manager, a hilariously funny Jamaican woman, is due  to have a baby at any moment.

Stuart is lodging in a Luton hotel. The part-time barman, who also reads meters,  is Gene, who has survived serious cancer seven times. He is married to a lady vicar, very troubled by her calling, but with imagined artistic leanings. Jen, the barmaid, 19, has ‘three Es at A-level, but a PhD in bullshit’.  

She is a fantasist of a very high order who never stops talking: a veritable gushing fountain of words. Also in the story is a woman who was struck by a golf ball, launched by Ransom, and has gone mad and become incontinent. She claims to hate her cats, once her passion, and — worse — she now imagines she is French and called Frédérique. Her cod French is wonderful. Understandably, she is causing her daughter, Valentine, a pubic-area tattooist, absolute hell. Apparently some women, many of them Japanese, like a tattooed facsimile of a modest growth of pubic hair where they haven’t any.