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.
