Nicola Barker explores the lives of half-a-dozen fucked up characters with a combination of warmth and dark humour.
It's the first Barker novel I've read and I'll be reading more. I love the way her writing style slides away, stopping short of exposure, leaving space for the reader to work in. I also love the life she brings to these characters and the small, harsh details of a violent, damaged world - holding a dying wasp in your hand, the neck would that refuses to heal, the lingering smell of fish on a pornographer - that comes to dominate people's lives, leaving stains they carry to their graves.
Most of all, I love the way she treats all this, with a twisted humour that doesn't mock, but shines a warm light over these lives, allowing the appeal of peripheral characters in an uncaring world to burst out in a spotlight which seems to go on and off between chapters. A nudity beach next to a pig farm. The obsessive collecting of shells along a shore. The symbolic burial of a runt boar.
Yet its bizarreness never seems surreal, just the oddness of life played out against a backdrop of deviance and weird games that, in this world, never seem anything less than normal...
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