‘This is a strange narrative,” says Mira A, the narrator of Nicola Barker’s new novel, H(A)PPY. The same could be said about any of Barker’s 11 previous novels: she specialises in formal eccentricity, thematic novelty, stylistic excess. In the Impac award-winning Wide Open (1998), she brought together a cast of damaged loners on the Isle of Sheppey; the Booker-shortlisted Darkmans (2007) is an almost 900-page tale of medieval revelry set in modern-day Ashford. But her new book is perhaps her strangest yet, an avant-garde slice of dystopian science fiction that thumbs its nose not just at the conventions of the genre, but at the broader principles of good storytelling.
The basic set-up is not, at first glance, particularly original: Mira A lives in the far-distant future, after “the Floods and the Fires and the Plagues and the Death Cults”, when The Altruistic Powers provide a calm and orderly existence for The Young, free from strong emotion, egotistical impulses or sexual desire. Angela Carter wrote a television script with a similar premise in 1970. But the generic scaffolding is here constructed for entirely unconventional purposes, and things soon become distinctively Barkeresque.
It is clear from the start that the perfectly regulated society that Mira A inhabits is Barker’s idea of hell. The Young have their thoughts recorded on an Information Stream and their emotions measured by a Graph, which changes colour if anything excites them. This is reflected in the novel’s layout: emotive words (“embarrassment”, “inadequacy”) show up in different colours on the page. Similar typographical effects indicate that Mira A is not in full control of her narrative. When she tries to say how happy she is, the word appears as “H(A)PPY”, that parenthetic “A” suggesting some kind of glitch.
Things deteriorate when she encounters a clip of the Paraguayan guitarist Augustín Barrios and begins illegally researching his life and work. As she struggles to keep her emotions in check, her narrative comes apart, and the book turns into a ragbag of decorative flourishes. Some pages are set out like concrete poetry: on one, the text bends around the shape of a guitar. Others consist of a single sentence, repeated over and over down the length of the page, except for a hieroglyph at the centre.
It is a small miracle that this uncompromising anti-novel about the collapse of narrative absolutely works. But I must confess that I found the performance more impressive than enjoyable, certainly in comparison with Barker’s last novel, The Cauliflower®, a gloriously warm and witty jaunt around the life of the Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna. I think it’s because Mira A’s voice is (of necessity) so cool and clipped and frankly post-human.
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Barker is as innovative and idiosyncratic as she has ever been here, but her flamboyant sense of humour — her most appealing quality — has little room to emerge.
Heinemann £20 pp282