Book review: I Am Sovereign, by Nicola Barker

Writing about the work of Nicola Barker in some ways resists adjectives. Her new novel, I Am Sovereign, is both manic and placid, farcical and profound, delirious, demented, serious and straight-speaking. It is also her most metatextual work to date, in that a character called THE AUTHOR appears towards the end, with various comments on proof-readers and the process of writing the novel, including characters who were unfortunately (or not) deleted from the original draft. It is downright exquisite.

Nicola Barker PIC: Steven Scott Taylor

The Author insists on calling it a novella rather than a novel; partly because, as she states, her last work, (H(A)PPY), “to all intents and purposes – destroyed the novel (as a form) for The Author”. What we break we can rebuild.

The ostensible plot of this free-form work of fiction involves Charles, a maker of bespoke teddy bears, trying to sell his house. He is doing so with the help of Avigail (not Abigail) an estate agent who is increasingly frustrated by the fact that Charles is a hoarder, wears pseudo-ironic T-shirts and constantly tells potential buyers about a burglary he thinks happened. Charles is also addicted, more or less, to self-help YouTube videos, with such insights as Silencing The Inner Critic or Toxic Super-Ego.

Avigail, we learn, is also a devotee of the online; in her case, a beauty product promotion which takes her away from her religious upbringing. Put into the mix the potential buyers – Wang Shu, who is never off her phone, and Ying Yue, her daughter and dark mirror – and let the chaos commence.

Although this is a very insightful novella, it is also a strange amalgam. It is set over the 20 minutes of the viewing, though the novelist’s prerogative is to insert flashbacks and flashforwards. As such it seems eerily reminiscent of a 1970s sitcom. There is a tight framework in which vastly different characters are thrown together, and no small amount of slapstick. This is not limited to a crack on the head from a falling oyster shell, a broom whacking various characters and a cat called Morpheus. There is a walk-on part, and Barker keeps nudging the reader that nobody knows who he is or even his name: each are locked into themselves. It is the duty of fiction to create empathy, and despite all the shenanigans, Barker accomplishes this with aplomb. The reader will laugh at, pity and be inspired by what follows.

If this were just a bagatelle, a whimsy, then I would not be saying it is serious. Who is Sovereign? In one sense, Nicola Barker herself, playing with her puppets and putting them into ludicrous situations. But “Sovereign” does mean something more and she abnegates the role of puppet-master. It is not so much about the nature of fiction as about the nature of story. We all tell ourselves stories about ourselves even if they are, if not fictions, then demonstrably false.

Storytelling is also a strange obligation and this comes across time and again. For example, “Avigail is living at least five different stories. And they are all running in her head, consecutively. And none of them fit perfectly or make absolute sense. But that’s okay.” Or “Is your truth simply a fiction? Is the story you are telling yourself – this flimsy, fragile, hashed-together fragment – all that you truly have?” Or “What is Ying Yue’s story? What story is she living now?” That is, I think, the reason why the storyteller intervenes and in some ways comes clean. Or becomes clean.

Although the novella has an epigraph from TS Eliot, it has a whiff of The Tempest about it in the way in which it is fundamentally a book about redemption.

One phrase which comes up several times in one character’s internal story is Ein Sof – the Hebrew for “without end”. Although this has a poignant point for the character in question, it is also a metaphor for the novel as a whole.

I don’t think that I have read as heartbreaking an ending as Barker provides here, where it is almost as if the pause button on a remote control has been pushed. “And The Author loves them all so much, so very dearly, that somehow she cannot bear to say goodbye to them, somehow.” The somehow is a perfect pivot at the end. The Author doesn’t know, the reader doesn’t know, the characters don’t know: it is a brilliant fermata. Let them be.

Very few novelists these days take religion seriously, and Barker has previously looked at the subject in works such as In The Approaches, The Cauliflower and even the daemonic Darkmans (which should have won the Booker Prize in 2007). There is a bravura cadenza about the story of how the letters of the Hebrew alphabet arrived in reverse order (or arse over tit and topsy turvy, as she puts it with a typical combination of irreverence and reverence). The first comes last and is “the brief inhale before anything might properly be uttered”.

Charles seeks to quieten the Inner Critic. As the outer critic, I can only say hurrah. The novel is not dead when we have writers as curious, daring and honest as Barker. - Stuart Kelly

I Am Sovereign, by Nicola Barker, William Heinemann, £12.99