Barker, Nicola
Entry updated 1 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1966- ) UK author, active from around 1990; her tales are almost exclusively set in the South-East of England, featuring characters who fit all too well into suburban subtopias, except for their tendency to commit mild verbal and physical mayhem on their surroundings. The mundanity of this world normally, in her work, seems shaky but does not normally spill over into the fantastic, though In the Approaches (2014) is partly narrated by a parrot; The Cauliflower® (2016) fantasticates the life of a guru who is believed by some to possess supernatural powers; I Am Sovereign (2019) is a crisp metafiction with no overt fantastic content but coloured by some surreal moments; and the tangled lives in TonyInterruptor (2025) are so hyperbolically described that human beings, their selfhoods disintegrated by the noise of the world, seem to become excesses of language.
An exception of some sf interest is her seventh novel, Darkmans (2007), a large and ambitious Timeslip tale set in Ashford, Kent, "Gateway to Europe", whose inhabitants are increasingly oppressed by sinister and increasingly real apparitions of the eponymous lurker. Darkmans is the name taken by John Scoggins (circa 1470-1490), Edward IV's court jester, for his contemporary acts of intrusion and literal possession, his stirring of a world inherently unstable, subject to fits of accurate (but untimely) Prediction on those he infects. The tale is extremely funny, and exorbitant, but as a rendering of the Matter of Britain in the twenty-first century [for Matter and Talking Animals see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] it can be read as Satire with a grave burden. This linguistically-foregrounded tensile gap between surface and implication is perhaps even more strongly executed in H(a)ppy (2017), which begins as a distant Near Future Dystopia on familiar lines, with a population regulated by intense surveillance, clocked by monitory changes in the literal typography of the book (which is narrated by its protagonist) whenever she voices loaded or verboten words or topics, history itself being seen as toxic; Music, specifically the guitar compositions and performances of Augustín Barrios (1885-1944), opens doors into subversive emotional complexities. [JC]
Nicola Barker
born Ely, Cambridgeshire: 30 March 1966
works (highly selected)
- Darkmans (London: Fourth Estate, 2007) [hb/uncredited]
- In the Approaches (London: Fourth Estate, 2014) [hb/uncredited]
- The Cauliflower® (London: William Heinemann, 2016) [hb/Harry Hill]
- H(a)ppy (London: William Heinemann, 2017) [hb/Stefan Towler]
- I Am Sovereign (William Heinemann, 2019) [hb/]
- TonyInterruptor (London: Granta, 2025) [hb/]
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