TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker review: 'a joy and a challenge'
Despite their often ludicrous behaviours and insufferable egocentricities, Nicola Barker’s characters always have a human hinterland, writes Stuart Kelly
Nicola Barker is such a mercurial, capricious novelist that it is sometimes occludes the fact that she is a profoundly serious writer. She cannot be accused of playing the naïf, in that the unsettling innocence of her works is both hard-earned and hard-nosed. It is at the same time a joy and a challenge, an irreverence and a gauntlet; perhaps no more so that in the opening of TonyInterruptor: “One day, he just stood up in the middle of a live music performance and said: “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?”
It is the catalyst for the novel’s choreography, as we move from the reaction of the band (“they weren’t a band, they were just random individuals ‘performing’ together”, Barker writes, with inverted commas like acid drops), to the teenage girl, India, who recorded it and put it online, to her father who teaches at the same university as one of the band members, Fi Kinebuchi, who was married to the star jazz trumpeter, Sasha Keyes, to his agent and so on. The novel is driven by the chaos of unintended consequences, and the idea of improvisation – the tension between randomness and intention – holds the stories in orbit.
In terms of Barker’s oeuvre, TonyInterruptor has more in common with The Yips or In The Approaches than the Booker shortlisted and appropriately titled Darkmans; but its interests – what is spontaneity? what is integrity? – align it more with The Cauliflower, about the guru Sri Ramakrishna. Stylistically, Barker is almost preternaturally attuned to register. There is, for example, a list of reviewer clichés about Sasha Keyes’ music, and in a bravura passage the reader is presented with a critical review of the significance of the intervention of “TonyInterruptor”, real name John Lincoln Braithwaite. (The reader is told, mock-solemnly, “He is real. When he cuts himself shaving he bleeds blood, not ideas. He does real stuff. He has real virtues, vile habits and serious aspirations”).
But the reader who takes the critique of the fictitious art-happening at face-value as a form of self-description, a metatext if you will – “to saunter boldly and audaciously into the artificial confines of ‘art’… and then to poke his tongue out at them… without any hint of sophistry or self-consciousness” – is brought up sharpish in the same chapter with one character’s indignant unpicking of the preconceptions of the review. Sandwiched between is an incident with India learning the word “sprezzatura”, the practiced nonchalance at which Barker excels.
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I cannot think of many other novelists who could use the word “fie” unironically, or have a running joke about (and epigraph from) Mark E Smith. There is a precision in how Barker zooms in on characters and then floats aloof from them (unjudgementally). It reminded me most of novels like The Loved One and The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold by Evelyn Waugh, precarious in their horror and humour. Martin Amis does get a mention, although Barker’s characters never grate against caricature the way Amis’s latterly did. In fact, a decent simile for their difference would be to compare Basil Fawlty and Victor Meldrew: they have the same manic energy and “unspeakable” quality, but you cannot imagine John Cleese carrying off the One Foot In The Grave episode “Timeless Time” with the hinted at, never again mentioned lost child.
Despite their often ludicrous behaviours and insufferable egocentricities, Barker’s characters always have a human hinterland. I cannot decide if parts of the novel are cunningly devised traps – is it significant that Sasha Keyes’ mother is called Marian, like the Irish romantic novelist, and is a piano tuner rather than a concert pianist? To use one of her neologisms, is that “pointless, effete, highbrow sanctimoniousness-ness-ness”?
There is a fluency across the novel that allows for little oases against the roiling streams of consciousness. There is a moment when Braithwaite is contemplating his smoking – “a condensed and bastardised form of fire-watching. A meditation without the portentousness of a mediation” – that reminded me of Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. There is a poignant slash excruciating description of one character’s sexual fantasy about Anders Danielsen Lie being derailed by thoughts of where Norway ranks in the World Index of Healthcare Innovation.
If the novel does have an ember of redemption, it comes in the father’s words towards the end: “we’re all just trying to stagger our way through this shitstorm with some tiny shred of dignity still intact”.
TonyInterruptor, by Nicola Barker, Granta, £16.99. Nicola Barker is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 10 August.
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