A h(a)ppy ending for Nicola Barker – a true experimentalist

Nicola Barker has just won the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction with her new novel H(a)ppy. She earned it. If anyone is writing fiction that deserves to be called experimental at the moment (the rubric for the prize is ‘fiction at its most novel’), it’s Nicola Barker. Everything she does, as far as I can tell, is completely original – her work has included medieval jesters, dyspeptic golf pros, Indian mystics, Paraguayan guitarists and David Blaine – and each novel finds its own completely new form.

In the case of H(a)ppy, that form is in a constant state of collapse and reinvention – to the extent that certain words in the text are printed in purple or pink, and whole pages turn into concrete poetry, typographical white noise or stuttering repetition. Kate Womersley’s Spectator review spoke of ‘something harsher and brisker than many novel-readers are used to‘.