In fiction, as in other branches of the creative arts, reputation is all, or nearly all. One of my most cherished bookworld fantasies involves a bored literary agent plucking A. S. Byatt’s latest (not the internationally celebrated author, but an A. S. Byatt who has laboured on unregarded for 40 years) from the unsolicited manuscripts pile and then, a few moments later, in a spirit of mild bewilderment, putting it back. Read cold by someone unfamiliar with the dazzling encomia that litter Nicola Barker’s book jackets, Behindlings, you fear, would produce a similar result.
Two years back Miss Barker’s Wide Open won the IMPAC award, ‘the English-speaking world’s largest prize for a single work of fiction’. It was this lucrative vote of confidence, presumably, that explains the resolute determination to please oneself that shines through the 500-plus pages of her new one. Set amid the grim vistas of Canvey Island, incorporating all manner of fancy typography and stylistic tics, it tracks the progress of a curious and voluble vagrant named Wesley. One hand missing, a figure of apparent charisma and notoriety – there is talk of publicity photographs, paternity suits, Guy Fawkes Night drownings – Wesley is forever one step ahead of the conscientious yet always bickering band of the title. Stalked by Jo, Patty, Shoes, Hooch and the others, our man’s meandering trail takes him among other places to a local estate agent’s office, the library (where he makes an assignation with the librarian) and to a house-boat whose owner is treated to a thermos-flask of ant lemonade and a spirited conversation about a three-year-old copy of the National Geographic.
Nothing wrong with obliquity, of course, but 50 chapters of it? 200,000 words of it? Barker, half-a-dozen books and a recent big-money change of publishers beneath her belt, clearly knows what she is doing and means every word of these endlessly repetitive dialogues, all glossed up in arbitrary italics, like this, and rococo descriptions of food, scenery and physical appearance.
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