Darkmans

About eighteen years ago, I got a copy of Nicola Barker’s “Darkmans” for Christmas. It’s a hefty novel, one of those small runs where the ‘hardback’ is actually a paperback. I have the first edition and it’s ginormous. I read it at home because I couldn’t really take it anywhere.

But I got through it with the help of the following hack.

Thanks to the languid pace at which I was writing my PhD thesis, I often found myself reading in the afternoons. I decided one day that I would ‘break the back’ of Darkmans by reading fifty pages in one sitting. Cover of Darkmans by Nicola Barker. This is the same as my first edition copy. It didn’t seem like that difficult a task at the outset. I put another bookmark in fifty pages ahead and set off on my quest.

I struggled. Darkmans is a dense book with lots of convoluted and interwoven story lines. Different characters have different fonts. One of them is the ghost of a medieval jester. Not everything really makes sense. The plot is tenuous at best. I can remember sprawling across the bed in my student digs, determined to get through those pages, but every few minutes I found I needed to prop myself up on my elbows in a slightly different way, or that I now really wanted that other cup of tea.

I felt a small bit of shame about how long that first fifty pages took me, but I got there. I don’t know if I got into the rhythm the very next day, or whether it took a bit longer than that, but I eventually enjoyed Darkmans a lot. More than that, I found typos in it, and recognised plot points from articles I’d read in The Guardian. I became a bit obsessed with it and ploughed on.

I’ve moved a lot over the years. It’s one of the books I loved enough to put in storage while I was in South America. Even now, I know exectly where it is on my shelves. Buried behind a pile of books that desperately want to be read in the same way. It’s glowing back there, I’m sure of it. I don’t know if I will read it again, although in 2025 I read two books that reminded me a lot of Darkmans, which is what motivated this post. I’ll write about the other two in the next couple of days as a way of getting back into writing here more often.

If I do re-read it, I’ll write a proper review. After all, you know how much I hate orphan posts!