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Yips
By Nicola Barker
Hardback (other formats)
RRP £18.99
Our price: £15.19
You save: £3.80
In stock, usually despatched within 24 hours.
Trade review
Synopsis
Book Details
| Publisher: |
|---|
| Fourth Estate |
| Publication Date: |
| 05-Jul-2012 |
| ISBN: |
| 9780007476657 |
Guardian review
the guardian Wed 18 July 2012
Nothing odd will do long, said Dr Johnson. So what of Nicola Barker, who writes long, and does odd? The Yips is, true to form, both. In the bar of "a clean but generic hotel" next door to the Luton Arndale Centre we discover Stuart Ransom, a boorish pro golfer long past his best, cack-handedly flirting with teenage barmaid Jen and taxing kindly part-time barman Gene with his views on Korean lady golfers ("much fuller tits than the Japanese").
We go on to meet Valentine, an agoraphobic second-generation tattooist with a thing about 1940s design, who specialises in inking pubic hair on to Japanese ladies; her batty old mother (brain-damaged, we learn, after being struck by one of Stuart's stray golf balls); Gene's wife, Sheila, a depressed C of E vicar; semi-creepy unlicensed sex-therapist Karim and his burqa-clad wife; Stuart's bumptious, loyal, heavily pregnant Jamaican manager Esther
These characters, none of them ostensibly close to what realist novelists would think of as realistic, are knitted in a sort of cats' cradle the shuttling fingertips of the author always visible, yet never exactly an annoyance. Goodness, you get the sense she's having fun. No writer who includes a punch-up on a giant chessboard can fail to, probably.
Nicola Barker is such a strange writer, though. She's like no one else. There's the basic oddity of the presentation, for a start Barker indents paragraphs and direct speech seemingly at random, yet those indentations are very much deliberate. That's the least of it. The relationship between the prose on the ground and the overall architecture, such as it is, gets odder the more you look at it. There's little sense of a grand plan, but thematic internal rhymes make themselves known: characters talking about themselves in the third person; characters being drawn into small spaces; tattoos or burqas or houses as boundaries of confinement or safety; shakes in the hands; bruises; even bugles. It's as if something numinous, something following a dream-logic of its own, is directing or at least influencing the action.
Barker is at once sui generis and the Google-age inheritor of a tradition. The first third or so of the book gives us a Chaucerian sketchshow sequence of comic set-pieces full of sexual snap, sociological crackle and scatological pop. But then it takes a left turn into Shakespeare territory: hectic with coincidences, long-lost kinsmen, shifting identities and magical transformations. There enter in questions of what it is to be consumed by love or lust, by shame, by the longing to be someone else or nobody. It sneaks up on being moving.
Stuart, whose humiliating condition gives the novel its title "the yips" are the sort of nerves that make even the shortest putt an agonising ordeal becomes almost marginal. The action is on Sheila (whose Riot Grrrl student self is threatening to re-erupt), on Gene (who, essentially, goes gaga for Valentine) and on Valentine herself, whose situation becomes so strange it's not just the avoidance of spoilers that prevents me going into it.
At the centre of it, clad in "an eye-wateringly tight white catsuit" and masquerading, to the confusion of all, as a freelance beautician, is Jen. Is she an idiot or a genius? A sexual sophisticate or a teenager with a crush? Is she pulling the levers, or is she actually, she doesn't seem to know herself. Jen is the novel's trickster spirit, its Puck or its Pandarus (though neither of those ended up getting shut in a car boot and shitting themselves). At one point, she's asked for her basic philosophy:
"'No philosophy. No guidance. No structure. No pay-off. No real consequences. Just stuff and then more stuff.'
'Stuff?' Gene double-checks that he's heard her correctly. 'Yeah, stuff. Like, here's some stuff, here's some other stuff, here's some more stuff. Just stuff more and more stuff, different kinds of stuff which is really only the same stuff but in different colours and with different names; stuff stacked up on top of itself in these huge, messy piles '
'Sounds a little unstable,' Gene frowns, concerned.
'Oh yeah' Jen chuckles 'it's all very precarious. That's part of the fun. It's constantly threatening to topple over to crash.'
'And when it does?'
'Then it does! It topples! It crashes! The shit hits the fan for a while, then the fallen stuff just re-configures itself and everything pretty much goes back to normal.'"
This, as well as sounding like the literary-theoretical manifesto for a Nicola Barker novel, is also quite a good description of real life. With all its loose energy, its generosity of attention and invention, its puckishness and wild similes, its lyric intensities and its sudden lurches of feeling, The Yips is a novel that's more than just odd. Will it do long? I hope so.
Sam Leith's The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury.
Observer review
the observer Sat 30 June 2012
Nicola Barker's new novel is set in Luton one of the least favoured cities in England, at least when it comes to fiction, which is, one assumes, why it endears itself to her. Barker's books have always been set off the beaten track: Canvey Island, the Isle of Sheppey it was Luton's turn. The Yips, her ninth novel, is a rum, virtuoso, slow-release saga. It features a failing golfer, Stuart Ransom, who, in spite of his stricken career, is larger than life. He makes up for his lost swing with the filthy entertainment of his "conversation": "I'm gonna screw his head off like it's the lid on a kids-size bottle of friggin' ketchup." Barker shows herself here to be a value-added ventriloquist (it is that "kid's size" that clinches the golfer's curse).
The Yips, by the way, are a reference to Bruce Lee's martial arts instructor the Yip Man. But knowing this will make one none the wiser. Remember: in Barkerland, it is the norm to be weird. A conventional character could not survive her narrative. Readers are thrown in at the deep end: we meet Valentine, a sexy, agoraphobic tattooist, daughter of the late Mr Tucker, a collector of Nazi memorabilia. We meet Valentine's mother, who has been hit on the head by a golf ball (guess whose?) and translated, in every sense, by her head injury. She now believes she is French, has renamed herself Frederique and has a libido in overdrive. Valentine confiscates Frederique's vibrator but welcomes Karim, a Muslim sex therapist, into their lives (in a priceless passage, Karim explains how God and sex are titillatingly fused). Thanks to his arrival, Valentine gets the opportunity to beat her agoraphobia with the help of a burqa borrowed from the sex therapist's wife.
And then there is Gene who might come dangerously close to qualifying as normal were it not that he has survived cancer seven times and is married to the celestially unhinged splendidly characterised Sheila, a vicar called by God while travelling on a train. And that is not to forget Jen who works at the Thistle hotel and whose want of A-levels has not quelled her wacky garrulity on all subjects.
There are moments when Stuart Ransom has the vulgar bravura of John Self in Martin Amis's Money. And occasionally, the novel also reminds one of Hilary Mantel a comparable master of dark comedy. But Barker is unique and it is for the pleasures of her style that one reads her. What she shows with more relish than any novelist alive is how often conversation is competitive language as serious sport. And she is a demon miniaturist with a genius for detail. She does not miss a midge, a sequin, a peanut tossed into air And while she is in no danger of winning Literary Review's bad sex award, she deserves a prize for most original sex scene a wonderful seduction that begins with a piggyback: "The world's greatest stress-buster, it never fails."
Yet for all its zany distinction, this is not a book for an impatient reader because of its freewheeling, take-it-or-leave-it afterthought of a plot. But if you were to launch yourself upon it and find it brought on a headache, you might like to consult with Barker who has an inspired description of exactly how that feels: "A tiny but strenuous game of tennis being played by two wasps using gongs for rackets."






