This far from flimsy novel has been written and published with remarkable speed. Little more than a year ago, on 5 September 2003, the American illusionist David Blaine entered his Perspex box beside the Thames, eventually to emerge after 44 days of starvation. His feat of heroism, madness or self-punishment (interpret it as you will) is the core of radium that provides Nicola Barker’s work with its furious, dangerous and (one hopes) therapeutic energy.
The reception of Blaine’s survival in, literally, an unremitting glare of publicity, eerily paralleled that of Princess Diana’s death. The attitude of the press and the crowds that would now cheer him and wave to him and now at best show him the finger or at worst pelt him with eggs and tomatoes, alternated between deification and a diabolic malevolence. It is of these people, some transient visitors to the Thames-side site and others almost resident there, that Barker writes, when not writing of Blaine himself.
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