Interview: Nicola Barker, author

NICOLA Barker alternates between writing dark books and light books. Her last, Darkmans, was darker than Marmite and just as much of an acquired taste. Darkmans cavorted over 838 pages, taking in everything from chiropody in modern-day Ashford to a 15th century jester. It took Barker five years to write this extraordinary and confounding Booker-nominated novel, "a book about what's not in the book" as she describes it to me. Afterwards she needed a release, which came in the form of

"Those big books are exhausting," she says. "You do think, why? Who cares? But you can't return to that place time and time again. Those are dark, big books. The reservoir has to be refilled. The last year of a book like that disappears. I never left the house. How much does one person have to give? I don't have that much to say, ultimately."

Many would argue that Barker has more to say in one page of pyrotechnic prose than most of her contemporaries do in an entire novel. It's just that readers don't always know what she's on about, whether she's inhabiting an abuser and his doppelganger on the isle of Sheppey (Wide Open) or a man who feeds his own hand to an owl (Behindlings). Barker knows this herself, and is both puzzled as to why people bother reading her and glad that she doesn't make it easy for them.

"What's disastrous about me as a writer is that my work doesn't say I am like you," she says. "I'm not writing books that reach out to people. My books make people feel like someone has thrown a porcupine fish at them, they've caught it, and gone arrrgggh! Then they go, 'look at his funny little face.'" She studies the imaginary porcupine fish in her hand then turns to me. "Is he still breathing?"

Barker is every bit as unconventional as her books. She says she "represents strangeness" and is a natural comic. We meet in the east London flat she shares with her partner, music critic Ben Thompson, and a Boston terrier and French bull terrier who snore like old men while we talk. Barker is an unpredictable talker, changing her mind, interrupting herself, and at one point laughing and crying at the same time when she relays the story of her last Boston terrier who died of a heart attack before Christmas. "This stiff body," she whispers. "We took him to the dog crematorium in Essex and they laid him out on a pillow." She laughs at the Barker-esque tragicomedy of the scene and then sighs and her eyes turn glassy. "It was so sad."

Her flat is like an old bric-a-brac shop. Tins of Colman's Mustard powder, which Barker eats every day, are stacked on top of the kitchen cabinets. A headless mannequin doubles as a lamp. In the hall hangs a painting of Susan Boyle, with Barker's Boston terrier balanced on her head, by Harry Hill. Back in the living room at a wooden desk that looks like a church altar, Barker writes her books in a pair of earmuffs. She doesn't really need to wear them as she's partially deaf, and I get the impression that it's inside Barker's crowded head where things get really raucous. This is where her bizarre band of no-hopers in dead-end jobs living in dead-end towns come from after all.

"These characters can be so destructive," she says. "As the author there's nothing you can do. You just see them careering off like tornadoes and have to follow. It fascinates me, seeing how people deal with tragedy or adversity. There's something beautiful about them."

We talk about Gordon Brown, who seems to me a classic Nicola Barker character: all dark inner struggle, the perennial underdog. "I do love him," she says. "I like the way he's got a funny eye. I look for that in people. It's something I admire. I don't seek perfection in people or life. Struggle makes everything more explosive and brilliant. That's why I write difficult books."

Yet Burley Cross Postbox Theft is Barker's least difficult book, a gently satirical series of verbose letters stolen from a postbox in a West Yorkshire village. It has a Pooterish feel to it with dispatches about dog-do, amateur dramatics, and an ugly duck, with the occasional sting from its damaged cast of villagers. The book came out of a practical joke Barker and her partner played on friends. "I'm not a practical joker," Barker says. "That's the problem with me. When I get involved in something I take it too far.

"They're the kind of people who are always writing letters," she continues. "Then I thought what a stupid idea for a book. How could you possibly? But within 24 hours I was writing it and it was done in five months. It was a piece of fun."

Barker was working on another novel, The Yips, about a golfer in Luton, when Burley Cross Postbox Theft tapped her on the shoulder. "I interrupted the lighter book for an even lighter book. It got to the point where I thought, 'am I having a kind of nervous breakdown where I just keep thinking, here's another good idea'. It was like a fiction pile-up."

Now she is back on The Yips, which is about "double acts, the psychology of sport, tattoos and other stuff". But I wouldn't be surprised if another, dark, difficult book started biting. "I like to think I put some people off with the big books," she says. "But I don't believe in writing things for no reason. Whatever I do, no matter how trite, I always have an agenda. There is always something I want to say. I'm like a maggot working my way into a corpse. That's how I see myself."

Burley Cross Postbox Theft is published by Fourth Estate, 18.99

This article was first published in the Scotland on Sunday, May 9, 2010