2006 is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Tiger Woods' reputation is entirely untarnished and the English Defence League does not exist yet. Storm-clouds of a different kind are gathering above the bar of Luton's less than exclusive Thistle Hotel. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a man who's had cancer seven times, a woman priest with an unruly fringe, the troubled family of a notorious local fascist, an interfering barmaid with three E's at A-level but a PhD in bullshit, a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more pious wife. But at the heart of every intrigue and the bottom of every mystery is the repugnantly charismatic Stuart Ransom – a golfer in free-fall.
Burley Cross Postbox Theft by Nicola Barker.
Reviews
The Scotsman
Stuart Kelly
“With the gloriously baroque characters constantly in danger of lighting out on a frolic of their own, The Yips is held together with a precisely choreographed plot: in some ways it is reminiscent of the later farces of Joe Orton, or the novels of PG Wodehouse. When Ransom is leafing through Gene’s book collection, Barker winks at the reader when he ponders a line from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War – “simulated chaos is given birth from control” ... Just because it is often laugh-out-loud hilarious doesn’t stop The Yips from being a book with serious concerns. If Darkmans was haunted by the ghost of history in the shape of the malevolent, mediaeval jester Scogin, The Yips is haunted by the ghost of celebrity.”
23/06/2012
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The Spectator
Justin Cartwright
“[An] unrelenting torrent of dialogue and farce, which rolls on for over 500 pages. But there is a very serious talent and a very serious intent behind this apparent gallimaufry. Barker captures — and lovingly distorts — both the rhythms and the banality of language. She is, as it were, Harold Pinter on crack. ”
21/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Michael Prodger
“There is no real story and, again typically for her, the book belongs to no recognisable genre. Barker doesn’t deal in dry experiments of form and this novel is sometimes snortingly funny, borderline farcical, and written largely in dialogue. If it has a narrative arc at all, it deals with a small slice of time in which a series of already messy lives intersect and become messier still. It is an entertainment cut with emotion, a hoot with a heart.”
20/07/2012
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The Guardian
Sam Leith
“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.”
18/07/2012
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The Times
Ruth Scurr
“Into her web of overlapping, intersecting conversations, Barker weaves eclectic cultural references. “I’m completely obsessed by Louise Bourgeois,” Valentine announces. On to her own leg she has tattooed two bricks, evoking Bourgeois’s drawings of women’s bodies merged with houses. Valentine is agoraphobic and cannot ordinarily leave her home, described as a series of rooms reminiscent of Bourgeois’s Cells. The eroticised figure of Valentine’s mother recalls Bourgeois’s most renowned sculpture, the spider, Maman … scatological, mischievous, subversive and original.”
14/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Edmund Gordon
“There is nothing conventional about The Yips. The opening scene (an inconsequential drunken chat between Ransom, Gene and Jen in the hotel bar) lasts 56 pages; such plot as there is doesn’t come into focus until well after page 200. Strange, enigmatic scenes (a rat swimming around a bathtub watched by a semi-circle of cats, for example) rise up from the propulsive current of Barker’s prose and are never fully explained. Indeed, the novel’s main flaw is its occasional habit of becoming difficult to follow. But this doesn’t detract from its originality, its charm or its peculiar beauty. ”
08/07/2012
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The Observer
Kate Kellaway
“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 ... 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."”
01/07/2012
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The Independent
Tom Cox
“Loathers of self-consciously literary writing put off by comparisons to Ali Smith can relax: Barker's much more fun and childlike than that. The odd stuff is so frequent and breakneck-paced, though, that it often ceases to be memorable. I wanted Barker to slow down: to flesh out her descriptions with the kind of colour another chronicler of Little English lives, Philip Hensher, did in last year's brilliant The King of the Badgers. ”
21/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Keith Miller
“The Yips has a classic Barker plot in that nothing much happens for 200 pages, then all hell breaks loose. The author relies quite heavily on the perversity of her characters in the final imbroglio; and she relies a little too heavily on conventional realist pieties in its resolution, if you ask me. It may be brave of her to eschew an obviously engaging writing surface in favour of a spiky and challenging one, and to refrain from making her characters too lovable. But it’s not for her virtue that she deserves to be read; it’s for pleasure. Apart from all else, she is very good on love, of both the married and the physical sort, assuming they are two different things – which, of course, the realist tradition tends to assume they are.”
15/06/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Stephen Abell
“Barker has provided a dramatisation of Tolstoy’s homely dictum that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. The Yips, which is Tolstoyan in its heft if not its tone, is a compendium of unhappy families, being unhappy in often staggeringly unusual ways ... The cartoonish subjects are matched by colourful, overwritten metaphors. Gene’s eyes are, improbably, in one paragraph, “two errant kites on unreliable strings” and “hatching frogspawn in a murky pond”. We are reminded that Barker is a novelist of both the epically large and trivially small. She gives us culture-clashing, scale-shifting, bad-taste writing. The result is more consistently surprising than War and Peace, at least.”
12/07/2012
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The Daily Mail
Amber Pearson
“… a kind of simulated chaos that somehow manages to stay the right side of absurd. Just don’t go hoping for a neat resolution.”
28/01/2012
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The Literary Review
Simon Baker
“There are some good moments in The Yips, mostly adroit descriptions ... Too often, though, the prose lacks such a level of control, to the point where it seems careless. Not all writers limit themselves to the unobtrusive ‘said’ when attributing speech, but in this novel, which is written almost entirely in dialogue, there is a bewildering profusion of verbs and adverbs; they not only get in the way but also tend to weaken what has been said by providing an unnecessary, often banal, commentary on it.”
01/08/2012
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The New Statesman
Claire Lowdon
“The external, omniscient narration reads mostly like (very florid) stage direction, which brings us to another problem: comic timing. Farce relies on speed. Translate action into words and the loss of pace can be fatal: “Ransom ebulliently high-fives [Stan]. The high-five is accompanied by a sharp tearing sound (as one of the jacket’s armpits finally gives way). The golfer’s brows rise (his expression a combination of admiration and surprise – as if he thinks the teen has just discharged a loud fart). Stan returns his gaze – slightly bemused (plainly thinking the same about the golfer).” Potentially funny onstage (if fart jokes float your boat) but clunky on the page. ”
08/08/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Philip Hensher
“The Yips is a very challenging novel, and perhaps in the end a disappointment – it lacks a crucial degree of refinement and polish in the execution, and sticks too narrowly to a particular tone of voice. It isn't the first Barker novel that I set down with relief, and picked it up again with a little unwillingness, but it is the first that made me feel that I'd been forced through a difficult and wearing experience without much reward ... The problem with the novel is, I think, that it limits itself to so narrow a mode. Almost the whole novel is set as dialogue, and Barker's dialogue here is extravagantly baroque.”
01/07/2012
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