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Darkmans by Nicola Barker
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Darkmans (edition 2007)

by Nicola Barker

Series: Thames Gateway (3)

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9562421,787 (3.71)162
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all... If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier? Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It's also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark - quite unspeakable - into its ear. The third of Nicola Barker's narratives of the Thames Gateway, Darkmans is an epic novel of startling originality.… (more)
Member:thequay
Title:Darkmans
Authors:Nicola Barker
Info:Harper Perennial (2007), Paperback, 848 pages
Collections:Your library
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Work Information

Darkmans by Nicola Barker

  1. 20
    The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas (Widsith)
    Widsith: Both slightly bonkers Kent-based novels-of-ideas with supernatural elements...I think Barker is the better writer, but Thomas has the whole geeky-cool angle covered.
  2. 00
    The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (krist_ellis)
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» See also 162 mentions

English (22)  Dutch (2)  All languages (24)
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
Really enjoyed this hard to describe book. A lot seemd to be about History, not just the history of an area or country, but your personal history and how it can seep into and haunt your present. Another feature was an exploration of language , relationships and communications. ALl of which makes it sound boring or esoteric, which it definitely is not. Funny and quirky. ( )
  cspiwak | Mar 6, 2024 |
Darkmans was shortlisted for the Booker in 2007, but I bet I’m not the only one who bought it and then left it unread on the shelf because of its intimidating size. It’s 838 pages long, and although it soon becomes unputdownable, the first hundred pages or so are rather confusing. I had to stop, start again, and keep notes to keep track of what was going on, until I had grasped who the characters were and had some inkling about the plot. What there is of it…

The most disconcerting character of all is the medieval past bleeding into the prosaic town of Ashford in Kent. If you’ve taken the Eurostar through the Chunnel to Paris, you may have glimpsed Ashford, but all that I remember of it is a vast, echoing, fully automated carpark to return the hire car. But Ashford has a medieval heart (which actually began with a Viking settlement in 893AD, see Wikipedia) and the character of John Beede in this novel is deeply hostile to modern developments i.e. boring suburbs, shopping malls, and freeways.

Beede is a model citizen, but he is deeply conservative about place and he has never recovered from the Chunnel’s access route ploughing through Newington where his maternal grandmother lived. Insult was added to injury when he campaigned to save an old mill mentioned in the Domesday Book, and slaved away at dismantling it brick-by-brick so that it could be re-erected, only to have it collapse because recent improvements had made it unstable. Worse still was that he became a suspect when some very special tiles went missing, a minor plot point which returns later on in the novel.

Beede’s son Kane, aged 26, is a dealer in prescription drugs, and while these two share a household, they have nothing else in common and lead entirely separate lives. Until, that is, something very odd happens when they both happen to be in a café called The French Connection. There is a fleeting image of a medieval horseman, and then another horseman turns up. This one – as real as the 21st century life around them – is ridden by Isidore (Dory), who appears to suffer from some kind of mental disturbance, possibly a fugue state. He doesn’t remember how he came to be riding this horse, which belongs on some nearby farmland. Beede rescues Dory from the awkwardness of this situation by taking the horse back and recovering Dory’s car. But the impression of a horseman out of time and place remains.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/19/darkmans-by-nicola-barker-bookreview/ ( )
  anzlitlovers | Aug 19, 2018 |
A really long review but i'm kind of angry that i spent good money on this... I came to this book after reading Raw Shark Texts which is awesome, and wanted something similar. fail.

Darkmans reads like "master's thesis on court jesters (yawn) meets Enid Blyton for adults sans plot"

Darkmans was horrible, clunky, and after 686 pages, the story never really started, never makes any sense. is there a plot? not sure. and there's barely an attempt to tie anything together at the end... there's a few hours of my life i'll never get back.

CRAPTASTIC PHRASES:
these were so awful that i marked them in the book as i read.... there were many more..
* "for all intents and purposes.."
* "..that the most ferocious curmudgeon would do well to take umbrage at"
* every thing was "quite...." or "so very ....." "awfully..." - channelling Enid Blyton
* there's stacks more but i forget

PLEASE NO MORE PARENTHESES??
Part1 is 126 pages and is almost unreadable. I felt like i had Attention Deficit Disorder. I could hardly read a sentence before it was split with parentheses containing some lame witticism or pun. i thought maybe the author was "narrating like a 16yr old". it would be a nice trick, but she wasnt.

GAFFAR TRANSLATIONS?
Gaffar is a kurdish character in the book.. he cant speak english all that well. i "think" that the sections in the book where he's talking in kurdish have been set bold. But somehow the characters in the book seem to understand kurdish perfectly... and reply...???

IT'S ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS
about 2/3 of the way through the book i got a feeling that long, barely interesting, sections of the book were completely pointless, completely unrelated to the tiny thread of plot that was in this book. a few i remember:
* the Keeper of the Forest and his dog - quite a few pages spent on this and then...? what was that for?
* Beede's crazy moment in the house with the blood in the bathroom - never mentioned again..?
* Gaffar, his religious order and the fear of salad? (oh dear how many pages were wasted on this??)
* i know there's more but i forget

I'M RANDOMLY SPEAKING WEIRD LATIN STUFF
toward the end of the novel, most of the main characters eventually start mixing up their words with german or latin, or quoting whole sections of some incredibly dull text on court jesters. but they dont seem to think this is weird. they dont turn to other main character and ask "is the same happening to you?" seems a bit unlikely...

NO ATTEMPT TO TIE ANYTHING TOGETHER
well ok in the last few pages we get a couple of lame attempts
* we find out scooby-doo style who it was that nicked the tiles (it was old man johnson by the way)
* Darkmans gets mentioned for a couple of sentences - who? what? where?
* we get a few sentences about gaffar's sect but nothing meaningful ( )
  calvin_xa | Jan 4, 2015 |
Fantastical in a strangely grounded way--dirty but elegant--forgetful but memorable. This book screams BritLit to me, and often I enjoy it (but not too often--i see a Booker Prize winner and steer clear). But sometimes i just can't stretch my mind across the Pond and into that world. This book just didn't work for me. ( )
  kbullfrog | Jun 17, 2014 |
This book is sort of like if you put Cloud Atlas into a blender. I certainly enjoyed it, though I was about halfway through before I became really engaged. When you're dealing with an 838-page novel, that's a pretty big commitment.

I found the characters very lovable and intriguing. Geez, my favorite thing ever was Beede asking Gaffar in mangled Turkish whether his father gets "leaf afraid." YES, so great.

Ultimately, though, I wanted it to cohere a bit more at the end. I felt like we were building toward something huge that I never got to witness. Did I miss it?

It might just be that I've been so deep in the 19th century lately that I have a preference for endings that add up to something less ambiguous and more definite. It might be that I need to go back and reread more slowly. But my guess is more that it's difficult to take things that have been deliberately scrambled and fragmented and then connect them. ( )
  thatotter | Feb 6, 2014 |
Showing 1-5 of 22 (next | show all)
Barker is good at capturing the bizarre things people say, and there are some very funny moments. But after 800-plus pages the humour wears thin and the literary game-playing grows tiresome.
 
This is the work of a very fine storyteller indeed, one who has already won prizes for her fiction and doubtless will go on to win more. Perhaps not since Robertson Davies – whose What’s Bred in the Bone, also a jesters-and-forgery-themed drama of small-town fathers and sons, is in many ways the faerie godfather of this one – has there been so able a welder of the academic and the arcane.

 
Darkmans is a considerable work, but Barker does take 838 pages to say a little less than [Alan] Garner conveys in 173 [pages of The Owl Service]. One gauge, perhaps, of the difference between talent and genius.
 

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Epigraph
These demanders for glimmer be for the most part women,
for glimmer, in their language is fire.

Thomas Harman - A Caveat for Common Cursitors 1567
Dedication
For Scott Ehrig-Burgess in Del Mar,
who filled out that comment card.
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Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford; the Gateway to Europe.
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Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Darkmans is an exhilarating, extraordinary examination of the ways in which history can play jokes on us all... If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favorite pastime was to burn people alive - for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of - uh - salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier? Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford [a ridiculously modern town], about two very old-fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It's also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark - quite unspeakable - into its ear. The third of Nicola Barker's narratives of the Thames Gateway, Darkmans is an epic novel of startling originality.

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