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.
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