Darkmans

By Nicola Barker, Harper Perennial, 848 pp., $16.95

by Justin Bauer

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Published: Dec 18, 2007

Nicola Barker must be at least a little nonplussed with the reception her latest novel, Darkmans, has received in its native England. In large part, it's been glowing, with good notices and a spot on the Booker shortlist. But even among British reviewers, who tend to be more colorful and definite than their American counterparts, certain phrases reappear, almost with a will of their own, from one review to the next. One of those, delightfully, is "salad-fearing Kurd." But another one is "trust me." That's dismaying enough, but when "trust me" comes in conjunction with an 800-plus-page length, it's almost an assurance that the book you're considering is like a vegan cupcake — unsmiling nourishment, deceptively tarted up, and awfully hard to finish. Instead, what Barker accomplishes is the sort of comprehensive and wide-ranging novel that towers over the single-note memoirs, genre pieces and pink-cover chick-lit books that so outnumber it. Barker incorporates patricians and guttersnipes, serious ontological meditation and slapstick, modern anomie and historical scholarship and pulp-terror dread into a single package, like the great Victorians could, or Ackroyd or Amis would do 20 years ago. She sets a full table; Gaffar, the salad-fearing Kurd, is just the frosting.

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