What a waste of time! - Rated 
I wish I'd read these reviews before and not the 'official' ones. I too trudged through this dreadful book but only because I was stuck in a foreign hospital and had nothing else with me...otherwise I would have abandoned it. I have no idea what it was about. These days, the Booker short list seems to comprise unpleasant and tedious reading material that is best avoided. The only reason I've given it one star is because there's no option to give it no stars.
Am I missing something here... - Rated
I trudged through 838 pages waiting at every page turn to reach the "Brilliantly Comic, Hauntingly Sinister" or the "Fizzing, multi-layered narrative handled with finesse" that other reviewers refer to.
I found it trite, ill-conceived, lacking clarity and a downright boring read.
the rain it raineth every day, especially around Ashford - Rated 
Imagine ahuge novel of ideas like say, Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", splice it with an Alan Garnerish children's time-slip fantasy, add the pithy social commentary of someone like Will Self, set it all in ultra-suburban Kent and people it with a chiropodist, a Kurdish immigrant, a middle-class drug dealer, a schizoid German security guard, builders (lots of builders), a hospital laundry worker obsessed with medieval culture, a creepy savant child and an admirably savvy (and rather chavvy)teenager - and you'd still only be halfway to describing Darkmans.
Despite the fact that for most of its 800 pages, nothing much happens at all, Nicola Barker's precise depictions of the machinations of human psychology should keep you fascinated throughout. The book's length allows the unfurling of a mind-bogglingly complex web of inter-relations between the characters, chance encounters become loaded with paranoid significance, and seemingly climactic episodes dissipate into the randomness of everday life. It's also frequently hilarious.
Ironically, the one let down occurs when plot rears its ugly head towards the end of the book - it's as if Barker felt compelled to tie-up the book's myriad loose-ends on a whim and (without giving too much away) you're left with a clumsy fusion of detective fiction, Jane Austen Bulgakov. Whilst on paper, this might sound quite good - the fact that most of the book suggests that our lives are defined by random historical contingencies beyond our control means that it would be nigh on impossible to wrap the whole thing up neatly. This is probably why, despite its mammoth size, it feels short.
It's not very often that you come across something genuinely different in contemporary fiction, but Darkmans is the real thing. A big book with big ideas (time, history, memory, identity, jealousy, modernity and about three hundred other things) that doesn't have to wear its intelligence on its sleeve.
Ultimately a disappointment - Rated 
It seems pretty incredible that a book of such length and actually very well written can say so little that engages or excites the reader. A really good premise that never delivers. I made it all the way through but with an increasingly heavy heart.
baffled but i loved it - Rated 
this book is a page turner, i raced through it desperate to properly understand what was going on, every time something started to make sense something else went off on a baffling turn. However i reached the end still baffled but wanting more.
|
