Two of the contemporary novelist and short story writer Nicola Barker’s works are set in Kent. The first, `Wide Open’ (1998) , while it starts in London, mostly occurs on the Isle of Sheppey. Described by the Kirkus Review as `a wayward, often puzzling, but ultimately rather haunting story about a group of outcasts, all in flight from a variety of real or imagined horrors, who collide on a desolate patch of British seacoast’ (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nicola-barker/wide-open-2/), this is the location where the great German émigré author Uwe Johnson spent his final decade (see entry for him).
`Darkmans’ from almost a decade later, coming in at 838 pages, is three times the length of the earlier work, and one of the very few literary novels set in Ashford. The plot occurs over only a few days. The key characters are Beede, the father of Kane from whom he is estranged (but who he meets by accident in a café right at the start of the novel), Pete Borough a forger, and Beede’s chiropodist Elen. Her German husband Dory, and her son Fleet are also involved, as it Kelly, Kane’s girlfriend and one of her friends Gaffar, a repairman of Turkish origin.
`Darkmans’ is a work of great virtuosity, and received recognition by Barker’s being awarded the Hawthornden Prize. Part of the power of the work is the ways in which other planes of history and their influence on the present weave their way through the work – particularly the interest in John Scrogon, jester to Edward the Fourth, whom one of the characters is researching. The other is the ways in which is captures through the family of Elen a part of English, even Kentish, society, that barely figures in most works of literature before – a sort of problematic underclass, somehow getting by, but also causing problems by terrorising the society in which they live in.
Despite the two works mentioned above, there is no indication in Barker’s biography of any link to Kent in terms of residence or family. She was born in Ely in 1966, but moved to South Africa when she was young; living there till she was 14. She seems to have been based in East London in recent years. The appeal of Ashford was probably for the same reason as her choice of other locations from the Isle of Sheppey to Luton in her novels – a mixture of marginality and neglect. Through Beede’s link with the demonstrations against the Channel Tunnel too there is a reference to Ashford being a place associated with strong links, and equally strong antagonisms, with Europe – the logo of the town has sometimes been `Gateway to Europe’ – one that was rewarded by a healthy `Leave’ majority in the area for the 2016 EU Referendum. Beede’s struggle, like that of many activists through the 1980s to the early 1990s, was unsuccessful. Since 1999, the Eurostar train has departed (though not with great daily frequency) from the international station close to the town centre.
Mostly because of these train and road links, Ashford has figured as a place of great promise, though its real identity, as any walk around the small town centre will show, is as a market town adjacent to the Weald and the nearby Romney Marsh. In the work of figures like H G Wells, Joseph Conrad, Derek Jarman and Denton Welch, the place is one mentioned almost as an aside, somewhere they are passing through or transiting. This is despite a history going back several hundred years.
As a review of `Darkmans’ makes clear, the final significant achievement of the novel is the ways in which it displays new possibilities for language and narrative. Barker herself in an undated interview in the Times Literary Supplement stated, with what one hopes is self-critical irony, that `I would love to be able to engage with profound ideas but in a really simple of way. I tend to engage with profound ideas but in the most complicated/demanding of ways’ (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-nicola-barker/). In a review of the novel in the Guardian, by fellow novelist Patrick Ness, he states that her skill `is forcing broken language out of [her characters’] mouths and scattering it across the page, “ducking and diving between the words … deceiving and then disappearing”.’ Most of all, he continues:
`Darkmans is a novel about language. Whatever its ability to connect human beings, whatever its false or true suggestions of real communication, language is un-containable. “Like a fast-running river. It bubbles up and splashes and spills.” It is “sometimes more of a … a roar, and sometimes just a titter. Sometimes a yuk-yuk-yuk or a hoarse guffaw or a tee-hee-hee, or a single, sharp Ha! (It [is] nothing if not variable).” (Patrick Ness, `A Roar, a Titter and a Tee-hee-hee’, Guardian, 5 May 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview3)
In that sense, though in very different ways, Barker’s focus is in the same area as Russel Hoban, in his great `Riddley Walker’, where, in the post-nuclear world, the memory of Ashford is captured by its new name: `Burnt Arse’.