I generally find comparing wildly different novelists reprehensible, but somehow unfortunately inevitable. And in fairness, if an author truly stands out, the acid test is generally whether they can withstand this process and emerge with something further to offer. So forgive me a moment if I say, about a quarter of the way through Linda Barker’s Darkmans I caught myself thinking ‘Finally – a British Thomas Pynchon’. Halfway through the book, however, I conceded my own mistake.

For Pynchon, writing within a definitively American model, the premise underpinning his prose is that every distinguishable object is an interdependent body operating within a flux. This outlook is usually seen as a literary projection of paranoia with a psychoanalytic leaning, where structure is projected onto a world that may in actuality refuse all structural norms. All well and good for Pynchon, the American. Barker, however, is decidedly British, and the socio-cultural canvas onto which she scribbles is so infested with historical palimpsests that history inevitably shines through the superficial patterns of modernity, and makes its presence viscerally felt. Hence, when we find ourselves in Ashford, under the relentless onslaught of interchangeable chain cafeterias, bus stops, job centres and building sites, still medieval ports, castles and cathedrals keep elbowing their way into the topography and stubbornly destabilising progress. This is where the Pynchon comparison comes into play: Barker’s paranoia is revealed as history itself, and her fluid perspective is temporal, skittering up and down the centuries, making arbitrary connections between characters separated by aeons, and generating baffling laws of series to which the narrative continually cross refers.

Then she chucks in a handful of dysfunctional characters – a middle-aged obsessive who dotes on his friends but neglects his son; the son, an apathetic drug dealer with a debilitating grudge; a loopy (not quite) German security guard; a flirtatious chiropodist; a chav princess with weak bones; a Kurd with a fear of salad; and a young boy with sociopath tendencies who proves to be a genius at matchstick models. And a few others. This is where things start to go wrong. Granted, playing in such a destabilised setting requires a cast of miscreants, but operating within the rules of Ms Barker’s world there needs to be a sense of internal continuity, an organic development of the inhabitant life-forms with their environment. And there isn’t.

Sure, the inevitable argument cites the disjointedness of modern society and the cultural exile to which late capitalism subjects even its most parochial victims, but surely this works against the point that the novel sets out to make. Floating around the narrative is a facsimile of a biography of John Scogin, Edward IV’s jester and the Darkmans of the title, and each of the central characters is subjected to a verbatim re-enactment of one of his ‘pranks’. What is played once as a joke is repeated centuries later devoid of context, and becomes an act of increasing terror – it’s a neat inversion of the Aristophenian maxim ‘Comedy = Tragedy over time’. But rather than trust to the machinations of her admittedly impressive universe, Barker feels the need to throw in ‘wacky’ aspects, like the Kurd’s salad phobia and worship of peacocks. This, along with several other equally cringeworthy excesses, serves merely to undermine the surreal unease that Barker seems otherwise fully capable of creating.

The next problem with Darkmans is its size. The book, aside from everything else, is fucking huge. It has a large size font very generously spaced out, but reading it still feels like a labour of love. Particularly when the realisation hits that Darkmans is a much smaller book dressed up in its parents’ clothes. The size wouldn’t otherwise be a problem, but on completion I felt I had read a manuscript rather than a novel. Would that the publisher had, as an exercise, asked Barker to condense Darkmans by half, identify what was truly central to her novel, then if necessary build it up again from there, this would have been a far more satisfying read.

As it stands, the promise of the early chapters is not fulfilled, and an incredible opportunity seems wasted. Barker is clearly a highly talented writer, and her frenzied imagination is conveyed sometimes with a style close to brilliance, but she falls short because she loses focus. Not focus on the narrative (some of the unexplainable occurrences were wonderful, because they progressed fluidly from the absurdity of her temporal schisms) but focus on what, in the end, she really wants to say. So unfortunately, this novel fell short of literary comparison, and rather than achieving the enviable position of originality, fell into the secondary category, ‘not quite as good as… yet’.