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.
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