Who reads Nicola Barker? The press release for her latest novel, I Am Sovereign, proclaims that Barker has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and The Goldsmiths Prize, whilst she has also been thrice nominated for the Booker and even nabbed a spot on the Women’s Prize longlist. It’s a laundry list of prestigious literary awards and nominations yet, who reads Nicola Barker?
I don’t. Or at least I didn’t until I was tasked with this review. Judging from the number of ratings her books get on Goodreads, the vast majority of the reading public don’t read Barker either. What’s happening here? Barker’s journey as a novelist is mirrored rather well in the career of Ali Smith. Both started out at nearly the exact same time, both are awards magnets, and both have an equally fractious relationship with the concept of form and The Novel. Yet, you thought Autumn was sensational but you never got around to H(a)ppy.
Perhaps the answer to my question could be found within Barker’s work. Perhaps, I thought, I’d discover the key to her chronic unpopularity in there. And I think I did. And didn’t.
I Am Sovereign is a small work on a vast scale. We meet Charles, a man who is 40 but looks 50, makes boutique teddy bears, wears T-shirts with quirky slogans on them and is completely emotionally stunted. He’s trying to sell his house. Avigail (yes, with a V) is his estate agent. She thinks Charles is an utter liability because every time prospective buyers view his house he mentions what an easy task burglars once had getting in. Wang Shu and Ying Yue are the mother and daughter who are viewing Charles’ house today. Oh, and because it’s 2019 and narrative is dead (RIP) the entire action of this 224-page novel takes place within this 20-minute house viewing.
Conventional
Quickly we realise that Barker isn’t going to give us anything conventional. The narrator of this novel is very much Barker herself. She even refers to herself as The Author in later chapters. She, along with the reader, ponders what these characters are thinking, what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, explores their pasts and explores their futures (if they even have futures after the novel ends). You begin to think is this some sort of Huis Clos situation? Is Buñuel sitting behind a camera in the corner of the room?
We are always present within the minds of each character. We learn that Avigail, for example, is currently trying to hide from Ein Sof, the Kabbalistic essence of God which she starts believing is closing in on her (it causes her to jump over the garden wall at one point). Charles’ mind is a wreck of past abuse and trauma which leads him to over-think and over-intellectualise his every thought and movement. He has become reliant on the teachings of a life coach named Richard Grannon, who much like Vonnegut’s Bokonon, acts as a Shamanistic figure throughout the novel, enrapturing not only Charles, but Barker herself.
The further the book goes on the more metafictional it becomes. For example, at one point the novel completely halts and we are presented with a notice telling us that one character has disallowed Barker access to his thoughts and feelings. Barker rebuffs his rebuff by going back and writing him out of the novel. She then apologises to her copy-editor and begins to worry about her word count (she’s adamant to keep the book at novella length). It’s all very Goldsmiths Prize.
Yet Barker manages to keep everything together, even when the novel itself completely falls apart. There is a lot packed into 20 minutes. I’m suddenly reminded of those wonderful cyst popping videos on YouTube. They always look so unassuming on the surface, be they sebaceous cysts, or pilar cysts, or even pores of winer (I take my cyst videos very seriously). But always, harbouring just beneath the skin, is a glorious repository of golden joy. I Am Sovereign is much like that. Actually, if I Am Sovereign were a cyst video it would probably be called CYST-RAM SHANDY.
But now I’m back at my original question. I Am Sovereign is a brilliantly constructed, often hilarious, and wildly clever little novel. But it seems almost wholly created for the judges and juries of literary prizes. Critics will probably enjoy Barker’s postmodernist dalliance too, calling it experimental and plotless. But who will read it? If the Goodreads ratings of her other novels are any indication, maybe around 500 people. But what a great time those 500 will have.
