Further praise for Behindlings:
‘Barker’s work always has linguistic gusto and self-awareness; it is always anarchic and lovingly perverse, taking its readers with relish down unrecognizable roads and challenging narrative. With Behindlings, Barker, already a story-maker of astonishing energy, finds even more freedom of form. Imagine an Ealing comedy, but rewritten by a Surrealist. Behindlings has the energetic verve of Five Miles from Outer Hope and the remarkable lyrical strangeness of Wide Open. There is a playful immediacy, a swiftness and lightness of style and an almost Dadaist liberation here which shifts the writing on to a new level and into a new and true originality. Plot, in fizzing, exploded pieces, is all surface, and dialogue, full of half words, forgotten syntax and unended phrases, is as messy as talk is in life. This is the sort of novel which changes things – transforms closed narrative into openness, quirky Englishness into startling passion, and the Essex Estuary, with its modern wastelands and left-over oil terminals, into something poetic. An earthy, hilarious, romping runaway, Behindlings acts in itself as an argument for narrative originality and against all forms of homogeneity. It is marvellously inventive, a cornucopia of cornucopias all the way to its brilliant non-ending – its refusal to end. It is a new kind of book, and an intense kind of joy.’
ALI SMITH, TLS
‘Written with the exuberant, violent energy of a Saturday morning cartoon show, laced with the easy bits of Wittgenstein. Behindlings are like trainspotters – they’re hobbyists, insulated by their enthusiasm. They are the stuff of pure farce. They allow Barker to reinvent, joyously, the cogs, gears and mechanics of the genre. She knows, as Wodehouse also knew, how to rev up the language, even break into a kind of poetry. She knows the funniest gags are sometimes just statements of the obvious, what people can see. Sheer wit and energy make Behindlings an excellent candidate for a cult novel – and not just a very good novel about a cult.’
MICHAEL PYE, New York Times
‘Barker’s twisted take on people and reality is as intriguing as a half-remembered dream, her writing grabs you, twisting you into a skein of voices, rhythms and personalities which drags you along in its bewildering, bumpy wake. Like all the best storytellers, Barker begins in medias res, plunging the reader into confusion, challenging us to make sense of the overspill of information. Barker lets her bizarre, beguiling creation wander off into the mist, unknowable and untameable. Wesley is a great fictional creation. Never explained, never fully described, he is a down-at-heel hero, a rucksack carrying refusenik whose rebellion against capitalism and consumption has caught the public imagination, making him an icon of independence to the disaffected of the twenty-first century. If there are any rules left in novel writing, Barker breaks them all. Beautifully. I think she’s brilliant.’
Scotsman
‘Fucked up, fucked off and totally, weirdly brilliant.’
EITHNE FARRY, Elle
‘Behindlings has an almost dream-like quality, as it tells the tale of a crusty Pied Piper figure who, by some indefinable magnetism, has acquired a cult following in deepest, dullest Essex. People are obsessed with Wesley – they are, in his words, his “behindlings”. They make Canvey into a literary Royston Vasey, a portrait of small-town torpor that’s so acutely observed it becomes surreal. An exquisite diversion and, more importantly, a true original.’
Arena
‘Behindlings is a magnificent novel and arguably Barker’s best to date.’
The List
‘Barker’s narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll without a hint of literary cloning, generating her own distinctive voice. The stark Essex landscape, chillingly described, is host to grim and displaced lives. Unexpiated actions of emotional betrayal hint at more serious matters of morality and conscience under Barker’s fearless imagination. At the end, of course, winner cannot take all, for there are no winners in this compelling novel.’
Sunday Times
‘She’s wayward, and uninterested in what conventionally passes for publishable work. There’s a lurid but skeletal quality to her writing – as if you get something deep in the feeling, and something decorative in the writing, and an unnerving space between. This is a kind of perfectly English work of art. It has a slinky, teasing exactness in the writing.’
Telegraph
‘Always a visceral writer, never one to be restrained by decorum, taste or euphony, here she explores power, hunger and attraction ever more sharply.’
Independent on Sunday
‘Demotic, chancy prose, which bubbles with cranky metaphors and enjoyably perverse ideas. Barker has created a unique world – vivid, stylish and bracing.’
Financial Times
‘Barker’s Canvey Island represents a world at once familiar and bizarre – a bleak huddle of takeaways and dreary days, bungalows with chipped paint and fading furnishings in a contemporary landscape that aches with grim nostalgia; retro-land without the glamour of irony perhaps. This is an intriguing satire on the nature of celebrity and the current confused state of our culture. Playful, dark, comic and cruel.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Wonderfully surreal. Barker’s seemingly limitless imagination keeps you guessing until the end of this highly original read.’
Red
By the same author
Love Your Enemies
Reversed Forecast
Small Holdings
Heading Inland
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
The Three Button Trick (Selected Stories)
With special thanks to Mr Alvin Toffler for his widely celebrated genius, to Mr Vic Chesnutt for his unabashed lyricism, and to Bill Menniss (proprietor of the incomparable Landgate Books, Rye), for laughing so mercilessly at my origami.
Copyright
Flamingo
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Published by Flamingo 2003
Previously published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2002
Copyright © Nicola Barker 2002
Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-39703-7
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