Clear – Nicola Barker
I could just say this was fabulous and leave it at that–but, of course, that would leave you, Dear Reader, hanging. So before I start, let me just say again that it is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time. Funnily enough, the first five pages bugged the hell out of me, with their stream of consciousness rantings on some Western novel, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it through another 341 pages.
And then all of a sudden, I was finished.
The story hinges around the illusionist David Blaine, who enters a clear box next to the Thames. His goal is to starve himself for 44 days, completely in the public eye. Television cameras monitor him 24 hours a day, while passersby and other curious folks can ogle to their hearts’ content. But what is his purpose? Why is he doing this? And what, precisely, does it mean?
Adair Graham McKenny spends the course of the novel trying to find out. Adair, to me at least, represents Every Man. He works at a nameless job in a governor’s office. He shares a Georgian townhouse with a charismatic, famous overachiever. And suddenly, Blaine’s actions both obfuscate and illuminate his own existence. He becomes obsessed not only with Blaine, but also with a mysterious woman named Aphra who is similarly obsessed. She suffers from migraines, is a “sniffer,” collects shoes. She cooks fabulous meals that she takes somewhere in tupperware containers. There are other strange characters: the homeless man who tells fortunes; the woman who warns him away from Aphra; the roommate’s intellectual girlfriend who first proposes that perhaps Kafka’s The Hunger Artist has something to do with the stunt.
He dips into Blaine’s history and motivations–a man who has the same concentration camp numbers tattooed on his arm as Primo Levi even though he’s not Jewish, a man who has the same eyes as Houdini, one of his role models. And the more Adair tries to understand the point of the self-imposed 44-day starvation, the more confused he gets.
Barker confuses us, too. Her relatively unstructured prose belies her very structured intent. As one of her character says about Blaine, “That’s his trip. And maybe — bottom line — you just don’t get the joke. Or perhaps what he’s doing is more complicated than you think. Maybe it’s the very multi-layeredness of the whole thing which is putting your back up. He’s confusing you. He’s challenging your preconceptions. You don’t like that.
Highly, highly recommend.
Comments
I found this book heavy going, I must admit, largely because I am 75 years old and like to be able to understand what I read. I have enjoyed many of Nicola Barker’s short stories and on the basis of that enjoyment had a very determined crack at Clear. Am I doomed to find novels by young people in their 30s largely comprehensible ? Can someone recommend a modern writer who won’t try my patience quite so much ?
I finished “Clear” less than ten minutes ago. I must spend time thinking about it now, but off the bat just want to say that the frequent use of italics in both Adair’s narration and the dialogue distracted and irked me to no end.