Darkmans

Darkmans by Nicola Barker is the most modern novel I have ever read.

I was set up to be unimpressed.  Its a brick of a novel - at 838 pages my  paperback copy weighs in at more than 2.5 lbs.  In addition to its doorstop quality, the novel is published in a sans serif font and is littered with italics - two things that generally drive me nuts.  Furthermore, Barker's use of large spacing to denote inner thoughts of her main characters took me several hundred pages to get used to - and all that empty space contributed to the large size of the final product.

I thought it would be a chore to read, and I had already given myself permission not to finish if I couldn't make it through before my library check out expired.  But about 300 pages in, I began to have a hard time putting it down.  By the end I was actually disappointed that it wasn't even longer.

The novel follows seven main characters, all loosely connected and living in Ashford, England at one end of the new Channel Tunnel.  The book opens with Daniel Beede, a man who had originally petitioned for the location of the Channel Tunnel, but when the plans called for the destruction of a historic property his support turned to protest.  His failure to halt the construction haunts him daily.

There was an ugly scuffle.  But he saw it!  He stood and watched -- three men struggled to restrain him -- he stood and watched -- jaw slack, mouth wide, gasping -- as History was unceremoniously gutted and steam-rolled.  He saw History die -- 

NO!
You're killing History!
STOP!

Kane, Beede's son is also haunted by history, as he flashes back to his mother's slow wasting death while he, a teenager, acted as her sole caretaker.  In their own ways, each of the other major characters carries the weight of their history on their shoulders, and each are also plagued by the kind of modernity symbolized by the Channel Tunnel.  There's Isidore, an apparently mentally ill security officer, his wife Elen, a chiropodist, and their autistic son Fleet; Kelly Broad, Kane's teenage ex girlfriend; and Gaffar, a Kurdish immigrant who acts as personal assistant to Kane in his dealing of prescription drugs.

Kane, Beede, Dory, Elen, Fleet, Kelly and Gaffar are all to varying degrees also haunted or inhabited by something more insidious - the Darkmans.  Is the Darkmans the spirit of John Scoggin, a jester to the court of Henry VIII? Is it perhaps the small angry bird Phlegein?

Or are these characters each falling prey to their own mental weaknesses and driven by History. Perhaps the Darkmans is just a manifestation of their various schizophrenia, autism, drug use, etc.  Or maybe Elen, who appears to be at the center of all of this, is actually causing these possessions or hallucinations.  I spent the better part of this novel wondering if something supernatural was actually occurring, and I'm not sure I have a conclusion.

The past keeps piling up.  Yes.  But that's only normal, surely?  Sometimes I wonder if I am the only one who sees it, if I am the only one who sees the same tree -- the same old book, the same wall, the same piece of road -- as thousands of eyes have seen it before, and who feels the weight, the terrible weight -- the actual weight -- of all this apprehension.  As if I am the only one who feels history, who sees the atom of pure emotion raging away behind everything.  The buzz and clash of the atom.  This awful friction.  This urge to truth.  This urge to destruction. This urge to vengeance.  Oh God!  Where does it flow from?  Why?  For what?!  And how much longer can I possibly be expected to hold it all back?

Her imagery is immediate and visceral;  the characters, eclectic and engaging; the plot, haunting.  Its a book I'll be thinking about for weeks to come.

As an afterthought, this is the third novel I have read that was nominated for the 2007 Booker prize - and each of these have been truly fantastic.  It must have been a very hard choice for the committee, and I'm torn about whether I would have picked this one, or Animal's People.  The Committee chose The Gathering, which was also excellent, but perhaps predictably resembles many other past winners in ways that neither Darkmans nor Animal's People did.

Animal's People

Animal’s People is a beautiful, heartbreaking and wonderful story about one of the modern era’s most terrible tragedies.  I knew very little about the Bhopal/Union Carbine Disaster that took place in India in 1984 until i looked it up mid-read.  And although this novel is set in the fictional Indian city of Khafpur, a very similar thing has happened in at about the exact same time to this community.

Animal is born days before the disaster strikes.  One night, there is a problem with the chemical plant in town (owned by the Kampani).  Poisonous gas is released into the streets, immediately killing thousands of residents, including Animal’s parents and family.  The effects linger, tormenting and killing thousands more with respiratory and nerve damage, and these effects continue on for years.  Animal, our narrator, is struck with crippling disfigurement in his childhood, which the doctors attribute to the disaster, including the American doctoress Elli, who has set up a clinic to help those sickened by the disaster. 

The novel’s backdrop is the ongoing court case.  The Amrikan Kampani has eluded legal consequences in the nearly 20 years since the disaster struck.  Apparently by bribing Indian authorities, it has paid no damages, had no assets seized, and has not been tried.  The Kampani has not even cleaned the contaminated groundwater at the site of the old chemical plant, or told authorities what exactly was in the poisonous gas – claiming “trade secrets.”  As with every great book these events are only a part of the story, but this backdrop particularly resonated with me.  This novel should be read by all those politicians who have recently been claiming we should abolish or seriously downsize the EPA to enable corporations more freedom.

Animal is another great reason to read this novel.  He narrates the book in a series of tape recordings, to be later transcribed and translated into English – a crazy vibrant jumble of Hindi/Urdu/French/English at that.  Although he is vulgar, sex obsessed, and selfish, he is also a deeply caring, long-suffering, and hopeful supporter of his desperate community.  And while occasionally Indra Sinha was a bit heavy handed on the “finding the humanity in the Animal” theme, I was ultimately brought to tears by Animal’s story.

The Gathering

Veronica Hegarty has lost her mind and her life is a train wreck.  Her favorite brother Liam has been found dead, a suicide, at the age of 40.  Her marriage has been on the rocks, her relationships with her numerous family members range from uncomfortable to estranged, and her memory is fading or invented.  I loved this novel.

Veronica, the eighth of 12 children born to an Irish family in the mid-twentieth century, narrates her grief in a vivid, visceral and graphic way.  For a woman with so many relationships, she has almost no intimacy, except once, long ago, with her brother who is now dead.  She is overwhelmed by this loss:

"And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone.  It seems like such a massive waste of energy - and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking.  We each love someone even though they will die."

But Veronica has a secret about Liam - at least she is pretty sure she does.  Memory is such a strange beast though, she finds that if she tries hard enough she can conjure a memory about almost anything - even if she knows it couldn't have happened, or if she knows it happened to her sister and not herself.  But what she knows - that Liam was "interfered with" as a boy of 9 - she has never told anyone in the family.  This play with memory, and the "something immoral about the mind's eye" that Anne Enyeart explores through Veronica's narration is what captivated me so thoroughly.  Because the narration skips across time, and because Veronica blends fiction, memory, and the here-and-now so seamlessly, the facts surprise us even as we anticipate their telling.

It's not a comfortable book.  (I could have written this entire review on the various and creative symbolic meanings of penises in the novel, for example).  Enright doesn't shy from some of the hardest subjects I can think of: suicide, child molestation, infidelity, alcoholism.  But Veronica becomes such a real and sympathetic character that I had a hard time putting the book down.