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| View Larger Image | Darkmans
by Nicola Barker
| | List Price: | $16.95 | | Price: | $11.53 | | You Save: | $5.42 (32%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 93217 | | Studio: | Harper Perennial | | | Binding: | Paperback | | Number Of Pages: | 848 | | Publication Date: | December 01, 2007 | | Publisher: | Harper Perennial |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 13 reviews)
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Strange (in a good way) 
Reading Darkmans is a lot like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together when you only have every other piece. The complex cast of characters interacts in ever stranger ways as the novel progresses. Reality takes frequent breaks, and the plot pieces Barker gives us just don't fit together. Nevertheless, Barker's high-speed prose kept my interest for 800+ pages, and there was never any question that I would finish the book (and quickly). Though thoroughly entertained while reading, I was extremely disappointed at the end of the book when the puzzle remained completely impenetrable. Darkmans was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize.
August 06, 2008 | |
Technically Well-Written, but Nowhere Plotlines
Darkmans is a joy to read - in the literal sense. The sentences are well-crafted, the humor is pervasive and intelligent, the cadence is captivating. Unfortunately, all I'm left with is that Ms. Barker will someday write a great novel - this one just isn't it.
The fatal flow, as others have pointed out, is the incoherent mess of a plot. The book is long (800+) and yet very little happens. What does happen doesn't fully coalesce into any recognizable beast. It's muddled and it's blurry.
The last 20 pages are the most difficult. It's clear Ms. Barker was basically told to wrap things up as soon as possible, and with no clear plot line to seal up, she just threw down some random threads and hoped that no one would notice the frayed ends.
Despite this, I did enjoy reading the book. Her style is enjoyable - she knows HOW to tell a tale. She just needs to find one worth telling.
July 12, 2008 | |
too damn long 
Darkmans could be an exciting short tale, were it not for the fact that it's 838 pages long.
Keeping the reader engaged over such lenght is difficult enough when you have an exciting plot but it becomes an impossible feat when you have barely a plot at all, which is the case here.
Nicola Barker tries her best to conjure a spooky tale where various characters in modern-day Ashford are supposedly haunted by the ghost of an evil medieval jester but, really, even the spookiness gets diluted and loses steam over the course of so many pages.
The ending, which could have been great (in a Shyamalan's way, if you know what I mean), is just rushed which is surprising considering the amount of words that are used to build much less essential passages.
The literary trick of interspersing the dialogues with words/sentences reflecting the characters' thoughts (a way to communicate the sense of unbalance or confusion they often fall prey to) gets on your nerves after a while and just gets in the way of the narrative's flow.
Again, I can clearly see a great piece of short-fiction stemming from the same material and eerie atmoshpere but, as it is, Darkmans is just an overly long novel with very little to keep the steam going.
July 06, 2008 | |
Too dark, too little humour 
I wanted to like this book, I really did. The jacket was cool, and the blurb on the back sounded interesting. I know that this style of writing is popular: jumping around and recording what is going on in people's heads and their bodily reactions. I have never warmed to it, and it probably reveals a fuddy-duddy character defect on my part. Sorry! I prefer linear progress, paragraphs, and more conventional character development.
Barker did develop her characters, but I didn't care about most of them. They were just too strange. Gaffar the Kurd was the closest to a real person, aside from his 'problem' with lettuce. Beede, Kane and Elen could all be interesting and sympathetic, and then we had to have Beede the Cold Bugger, Kane the Unconcerned and Elen the Martyr resurface.
I know this was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it was a bit too dark for my taste in comedy. For instance:
It isn't funny when something nasty happens between two little boys (Steven and Fleet) and the one doesn't want to visit the other any more. Been there, done that with one of my sons, and your child's fear is not amusing.
I thought the whole 'possession' thing, with John Scogin and his nasty tricks and Dory and Fleet was just creepy. Fleet was just a child saddled with some evil cloud, and Dory was obviously pretty disturbed, and I don't see a whole lot of humour in either situation.
Fleet's building fascination initially was pretty cool, and the interaction between Elen and the chap on the beach was actually semi-normal, in giving a rationale for this behaviour and holding out hope of how it could be something positive. Then we descend into the bizarre again, with the sideline about the chap's daughter and what horrible thing will happen because of her later in the history of the book's characters. What was the point?
Beede recreates, with Peta's help, subtly changed items in Tom's house just to drive him nuts? Who's the sick one here?
Probably the worst thing that happened in the book, as far as I was concerned, was hanging the cat. That was just sick and pointless.
Actually, I'm not sure that I ever figured out the premise of the book. It was too disjunct, with multiple story lines, none of which made much sense or went anywhere on its own. I thought about listing them, but realised that was pointless, too. Any one of the themes could have been developed into something interesting and amusing, but as it was it was a frustrating hodge podge.
That doesn't mean that I disliked the book completely. The scene with Gaffar in the grocery was pretty funny, as was the part with the young woman doggedly removing collars from the trees. Actually quite a few of the scenes with Gaffar were funny, come to think of it, and Kelly was actually a pretty good character, too.
I suppose my biggest problem with the book was the pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and cruelty. No one trusted anyone - do people really suspect all motives like these characters? If so, they would never have hired a crooked builder! I don't know if the evil was supposed to somehow be coming from John Scogin, and I don't understand the significance of people (Beede and Dory primarily) being only able to think of words in German. I felt that quite a bit of the book was the author showing how clever she was with words, and how many random knowledge tidbits she could hang out there to be admired.
"Darkmans" reminded me of Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" in the style of writing and my lack of interest in most of the characters. Now, if Gaffar were in a book, with some semblance of a plot, that might be pretty amusing!
May 15, 2008 | |
If "Too Cute" Could Kill ...
If Too-Cute could kill, this bloated tome would be a weapon of mass destruction.
The author's style is "unique" only in that it's self-indulgent to the max, and virtually unreadable. Multiple times on each page the author finds ways to insert herself, intruding on the story, fracturing the already impoverished reading-dream. The missing paragraph indents -- flush left lines -- in dialogue and narrative on almost every page and the nonsensical lapses into bold face make following the prose an ordeal -- 838 pages of stylistic/formatting blunders no one at Harper Perennial caught? That made me wonder if an editor had ever even looked at this novel; or if he/she did, whether he/she just threw up his/her hands at the quantity of mess and walked away.
The author offers aside after intrusive aside in italics -- lame, single-word-on-a-line commentary; unnecessary stage directions, etc. -- or sometimes even places them in parentheses -- lordy, the linguistic shenanigans she does get up to! The "character studies" here are long, tedious, and bring the story flow, feeble as it is, to a dead stop -- more unedited, amateurish self-indulgence.
Honestly, this book looks and reads like it was self-published via the "You Write It/We Will Print It," author-on-a-budget package.
The only valid comparison I can see between Darkmans and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is that they are both VERY LONG BOOKS. And Gravity's Rainbow is long for a good reason. I could tell from the first 30 pages of Darkmans that this author had nothing to say except "Look at me!" Yeah, well, I'm sorry I did.
"Short-listed," my posterior.
April 17, 2008 | |
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