Five Miles from Outer Hope (edition 2001)

Ok this novel really deserves a 3 1/2. I toyed with giving it four stars but it wasn't quite there. Barker's writing style is still fantastic but the story isn't as bizarre and enchanting as Darkmans. In a way, this is more like a weird feminine John Irving-esque sort of novel where the British family of misfits are all named after Thurber dogs and seem like the kind of people who will always struggle to find their place in this world. While the mother goes galavanting across American prisons marketing her anal probe, the rest of the family in England houses a South African who doesn't want to serve in the military. This is set in the 80s and the plot really centers around this farcical series of tricks played upon the guest and the main character. It's fun but it doesn't leave your head spinning with quite the same vigor as I'd like.


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It’s a while since I read a Nicola Barker novel and when I noticed she’s just published a new one (‘The Yips’) I found I hadn’t read ‘Five Miles from Outer Hope’, written now some twelve years ago and well before ‘Darkmans’, still a favourite of mine.

This novel seems to be much lighter in tone for the most part, stacked with adjectives to give a wild exuberance to it. Opening the book at random, for example, I find the narrator, Medve, up early in the morning about to go fishing – ‘I have an emergency banana stuffed into my woolly pocket, for energy. And frankly, I’m most miserably in need of it – feeling as I do, at that precise moment, about as well worn and washed out as a busy whore’s best knickers – but I hold off peeling and devouring it (time is of the essence) and plod bravely onwards, my stomach growling, all the while, like a territorial Alsatian’.

I think this gives some of the tone of the book with the sentences blossoming outwards, helping to convey the animation of this sixteen year old narrator. As usual with Nicola Barker, you never quite know where’s she’s heading and it’s a matter of enjoying the turns of the novel and the wording as well as thinking about what she is saying. ‘Five miles from outer hope’ sounds rather pessimistic an image but I think the novel remains buoyant. ( )

All you need to know about this book can probably be summed up in the first sentence: "It was during those boiled-dry, bile-ridden, shit-ripped, god-forsaken early-bird years of the nineteen eighties". If that makes you smile, you'll probably enjoy the rest of it. If it makes you roll your eyes, then you might as well stop reading there.

Medve, the narrator of this book, is a smart but self-conscious sixteen-year-old with a gothically weird family. The action, such as it is, takes place in June 1981, as Medve attempts to look after her disintegrating family (although she's a bit too self-centred to notice what's really going on) and flirts and fights with a "skinny, self-centred, stupid, impolitic m------f------r" of a deserter from the South African army.

But the story is not really the point - it's Medve's voice that the book focuses on. Barker hits the tone perfectly - just the right mixture of pretentiousness and hostility. I spent a little while wondering what the book was actually about, but then I stopped worrying and decided to enjoy the ride. ( )