Into the Great Wide British Open

In an era of talk-show hosts and the self-loving blather of the chattering classes, is the confessional mode of speech a vice? "The need to unburden was a selfish need" goes a line in the English author Nicola Barker's new novel, Wide Open, and ultimately the novel addresses the question of the line between the need for revelation and the desire for indulgence. Even as characters are drawn out of their shells, nothing is ever fully 'wide open'.

Barker assembles a cast of Londoners, misfits all, for her novel. Lily, the girl born wihtout fully-formed organs: Sara, Lily's mother and a boar farmer: Luke, the former pornographic photographer who smells of fish; Ronny, missing his big toes. At the slippery heart of her tale are two adult brothers, Nathan and Jim (whose name is really Ronny--all will be explained later) and Nathan's quest for redemption at not forcing his brother to escape from their pedophilic father.

The plot is driven by Ronny's entry into Jim's life and how that entrance brings about revelations (opening up, as it were) and conciliations--between Nathan and Jim, Lily and Sara, Sara and Luke. Aptly enough for a novel about the neglected, Nathan works at the Lost Property office of the London Underground, the repository of the forgotten. Like the objects that pass through Nathan's hands, the characters stand in limbo--existing but unrecognised.

If it sounds confusing, it is. Not many novels open with two people with the same name, as Wide Open does with two Ronnies: the Ronny without the big toes and Nathan's brother. Even fewer rename a main character some way into the text, as happens when Nathan's brother is rechristened Jim by the other Ronny. Clarification is not high on the novel's priorities, either.

In the same way that all her characters choose to retreat from society to hide their lurid pasts, Barker opts for layer upon layer of density. Perhaps some things are not meant to be understood. Like Luke's bizarre join-the-dots form of pornography, the strength lies in what is actually missing--to be wide open is to be exposed, to be "wide open as a can of worms." Revelation, for the reader as much as the characters, is best in limited quantities.

Despite the initially complicated plot, the undeniable force of Barker's style draws us in anyway. All throughout the novel, she excels in conveying an underlying rumble of disquiet, a feeling that something is imperceptibly off-kilter. Like Ronny' missing big toes, there is a sense that something profoundly important lies just out of four sight. The cadence of the sentences resound at the level of a missed heartbeat: "He turned and cut into the sandwich. The yolk was cold, and the blade was much sharper than he'd anticipated." The resonances eventually swell to an emotionally intense climax, as Nathan and Jim's secret about their awful father is drawn to the fore.

Somehow in the midst of uneasiness and sadness, the novel sparkles with the humor of the surreal (in one exchange, Lily asks Ronny "What did you do to yourself?" and is met with "Oh. I caught fire.") and with unusual imagery (Lily is called "every inch a Sea Monkey... Pale and alien and underwater"). But while the bleak humor is generated by the peculiarities of the characters, there is a definite authorial love for the seemingly unlovable characters, a love which transfers to the reader.

"No one loved freaks," Lily learns early in her life when a sow gives birth to a deformed offspring, and certainly everyone in the novel seems hermetically sealed as protection against the lack of love. But as in Luke's last name, "Hamsun--like handsome but back to front," the aesthetics of beauty are reversed as we are engaged by the characters. Our judgmental instincts cast to one side, we become open. We love these freaks.

The engaging characters and the refreshing lines of description and dialogue of Wide Open have garnered high praise since its release in the United Kingdom about six months ago; this Stateside release is an excellent trans-Atlantic introduction to the ferocious originality of Nicola Barker's work. It is a novel into which, like Ronny listening to a story of Jim's we are "slowly, safely, surely, soundly" hooked.