Really enjoyed this hard to describe book. A lot seemd to be about History, not just the history of an area or country, but your personal history and how it can seep into and haunt your present. Another feature was an exploration of language , relationships and communications. ALl of which makes it sound boring or esoteric, which it definitely is not. Funny and quirky. ( )

Darkmans was shortlisted for the Booker in 2007, but I bet I’m not the only one who bought it and then left it unread on the shelf because of its intimidating size. It’s 838 pages long, and although it soon becomes unputdownable, the first hundred pages or so are rather confusing. I had to stop, start again, and keep notes to keep track of what was going on, until I had grasped who the characters were and had some inkling about the plot. What there is of it…

The most disconcerting character of all is the medieval past bleeding into the prosaic town of Ashford in Kent. If you’ve taken the Eurostar through the Chunnel to Paris, you may have glimpsed Ashford, but all that I remember of it is a vast, echoing, fully automated carpark to return the hire car. But Ashford has a medieval heart (which actually began with a Viking settlement in 893AD, see Wikipedia) and the character of John Beede in this novel is deeply hostile to modern developments i.e. boring suburbs, shopping malls, and freeways.

Beede is a model citizen, but he is deeply conservative about place and he has never recovered from the Chunnel’s access route ploughing through Newington where his maternal grandmother lived. Insult was added to injury when he campaigned to save an old mill mentioned in the Domesday Book, and slaved away at dismantling it brick-by-brick so that it could be re-erected, only to have it collapse because recent improvements had made it unstable. Worse still was that he became a suspect when some very special tiles went missing, a minor plot point which returns later on in the novel.

Beede’s son Kane, aged 26, is a dealer in prescription drugs, and while these two share a household, they have nothing else in common and lead entirely separate lives. Until, that is, something very odd happens when they both happen to be in a café called The French Connection. There is a fleeting image of a medieval horseman, and then another horseman turns up. This one – as real as the 21st century life around them – is ridden by Isidore (Dory), who appears to suffer from some kind of mental disturbance, possibly a fugue state. He doesn’t remember how he came to be riding this horse, which belongs on some nearby farmland. Beede rescues Dory from the awkwardness of this situation by taking the horse back and recovering Dory’s car. But the impression of a horseman out of time and place remains.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/08/19/darkmans-by-nicola-barker-bookreview/ ( )

En of dit een goed boek is! Achthonderd pagina’s lang bleef ik in het ongewisse – het kon goed worden, het kon beter worden, het kon als een thriller in elkaar stuiken – om dan uiteindelijk te beseffen (rond pagina 800 dus) dat het er niet meer toe doet – het boek is dan bijna uit, en heeft me verschillende keren bij de keel gegrepen. Dat de conversaties soms wat te veel aan geschiedenislesjes doen denken, dat de betrokkenheid van Kane wat geloofwaardigheid mist, … details die je vlug overboord gooit eens je beseft dat het allemaal samenkomt op een manier die je niet voor mogelijk had gehouden: niet, namelijk. Ha!

Er wordt gespeeld met taal, en met (je) voeten. Voortdurend krijg je kleine brokjes toegereikt, waar je je krampachtig aan vasthoudt, in de hoop om zo een coherent verhaaltje te kunnen (mee)construeren – maar de brokjes die je zelf bijeen scharrelt zijn telkens de verkeerde! En wat blijven er veel gaten hangen! En wat gaat er een beklemming uit van al die gaten! En humor! Gelachen dat ik heb!

Dat je er achteraf niks van begrijpt? Ach, wat zou dat … ( )

A really long review but i'm kind of angry that i spent good money on this... I came to this book after reading Raw Shark Texts which is awesome, and wanted something similar. fail.

Darkmans reads like "master's thesis on court jesters (yawn) meets Enid Blyton for adults sans plot"

Darkmans was horrible, clunky, and after 686 pages, the story never really started, never makes any sense. is there a plot? not sure. and there's barely an attempt to tie anything together at the end... there's a few hours of my life i'll never get back.

CRAPTASTIC PHRASES:
these were so awful that i marked them in the book as i read.... there were many more..
* "for all intents and purposes.."
* "..that the most ferocious curmudgeon would do well to take umbrage at"
* every thing was "quite...." or "so very ....." "awfully..." - channelling Enid Blyton
* there's stacks more but i forget

PLEASE NO MORE PARENTHESES??
Part1 is 126 pages and is almost unreadable. I felt like i had Attention Deficit Disorder. I could hardly read a sentence before it was split with parentheses containing some lame witticism or pun. i thought maybe the author was "narrating like a 16yr old". it would be a nice trick, but she wasnt.

GAFFAR TRANSLATIONS?
Gaffar is a kurdish character in the book.. he cant speak english all that well. i "think" that the sections in the book where he's talking in kurdish have been set bold. But somehow the characters in the book seem to understand kurdish perfectly... and reply...???

IT'S ALL COMPLETELY POINTLESS
about 2/3 of the way through the book i got a feeling that long, barely interesting, sections of the book were completely pointless, completely unrelated to the tiny thread of plot that was in this book. a few i remember:
* the Keeper of the Forest and his dog - quite a few pages spent on this and then...? what was that for?
* Beede's crazy moment in the house with the blood in the bathroom - never mentioned again..?
* Gaffar, his religious order and the fear of salad? (oh dear how many pages were wasted on this??)
* i know there's more but i forget

I'M RANDOMLY SPEAKING WEIRD LATIN STUFF
toward the end of the novel, most of the main characters eventually start mixing up their words with german or latin, or quoting whole sections of some incredibly dull text on court jesters. but they dont seem to think this is weird. they dont turn to other main character and ask "is the same happening to you?" seems a bit unlikely...

NO ATTEMPT TO TIE ANYTHING TOGETHER
well ok in the last few pages we get a couple of lame attempts
* we find out scooby-doo style who it was that nicked the tiles (it was old man johnson by the way)
* Darkmans gets mentioned for a couple of sentences - who? what? where?
* we get a few sentences about gaffar's sect but nothing meaningful ( )

Fantastical in a strangely grounded way--dirty but elegant--forgetful but memorable. This book screams BritLit to me, and often I enjoy it (but not too often--i see a Booker Prize winner and steer clear). But sometimes i just can't stretch my mind across the Pond and into that world. This book just didn't work for me. ( )