Gassy Ghost: Darkmans by Nicola Barker

My award, my rules. Darkmans might have been barely noticed when it was published late last year, while To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, but I don't care. Darkmans moves to the top of the list, and if you've got a problem with that I'll fight you with my (small, weak) fists. Here, I proudly present you with a big, fat, smart, sassy, rude novel about a drug dealer, a Turkish immigrant with an irrational fear of lettuce, a chiropodist, an art forger, and the farting ghost of a 15th century court jester. It's also about language, and the pressing, almost suffocating weight of history. Oh, and it's hilarious.

Nicola Barker is a serious writer, for sure, whatever that means. She's also a comic genious. I'm a woman obsessed.

Check her out:
Growl! I'd marry, you, Nicola, if I weren't so damned straight!

Darkmans (apparently an old thief cant for nighttime, in addition to the title of the novel) takes place in Ashford, a bland English suburb sort of like the horrible Canadian one where I reluctantly travel to work every day. Remember that in Europe, of course, anything new has literally bulldozed over centuries of history. Enter Bede, an elderly man who works in the hospital's laundry and who tries to save the old. He once succeeded in saving the Channel Tunnel from destruction but, because of a complicated mix-up involving some stolen antique shingles, has ended up dull and embittered. Bede has a son named Kane, who sells drugs pilfered from the very hospital where his own father works. Kane finds his father hugely annoying, fancies himself the anti-Bede, and is himself "easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral)".

Now, listen closely because this gets complicated: Bede is secretly in love with a chiropodist named Elen. Elen has a husband named Dory who (unbeknownst to the characters in the novel) appears to have been possessed by the spirit of John Scogin, the long-dead court jester to King Edward IV (famous for his theatrical farting, for constantly accusing the Queen of adultery, and for setting fire to a church full of beggars). Elen and Dory have a young son named Fleet who is precocious and unnerving. In addition to busying himself with building an exact replica of the Cathedral of Saint-Cecile out of matchsticks, Fleet also possesses inexplicably detailed information about the life of John Scogin. There's also Kelly. She's Kane's delightfully and endlessly profane girlfriend. She has a broken leg, is weirdly sweet despite her filthy mouth, and comes from a long line of criminals so that her entire family is despised by the residents of Ashford. Finally, there's Gaffar- a Turkish immigrant who speaks almost no English, but who has somehow ended up in the middle of this whole mess. While Dory unwittingly replays Scogin's famously malicious pranks, all the characters occasionally lose their grasp on modern English, sputtering whatever Anglo-Saxon or Latin root the word they're looking for came from. Eventually, we see that history itself is sort of the joker here, and each character has his own complicated relationship with it, reacting differently each time it bites them in the ass.

In addition to being huge and brainy (did I mention that it's 838 pages long?), Darkmans is hilarious. Kelly's obese and mean-spirited mother is "Jabba the Hut with a womb, chronic asthma, and a council-flat." Gaffar speaks brilliantly and eloquently in Turkish (represented by italicized lettering), but the only word the other characters can make out is "thermos." One of my favourite lines comes from Kane, puffing on a joint and casually informing us that "one irreducible fact is that people who climb mountains are invariably cunts".

The novel - alright, I'll say it again - is funny and smart as hell, but never, ever sloppy. It's expertly constructed and brilliant. It did NOT win the Man Booker Prize in 2007, but how could it have? Ali Smith recently said of Nicola Barker, "An extraordinary writer; we're lucky to be alive at the same time as her."