There are few writers as resolutely committed to the avant garde novel as Nicola Barker. Her books are never only about their purported subject, but always ask the reader to consider the artificiality of art, the gulf between the real and its representation in literature. Barker is one of the great chroniclers of the information age, whether it be in Clear, her powerfully prescient 2004 novel about David Blaine and the cult of celebrity; the Booker-shortlisted Darkmans, which was at once a contemporary domestic drama and a sprawling consideration of the nature of language itself; or, more recently, the Goldsmiths prize-winning H(a)ppy, both a dystopian vision of the logical consequences of our addiction to social media and an interrogation of the science fiction genre itself.
Barker’s entire oeuvre feels like a response to Linda Hutcheon’s characterisation of postmodernism, which says that the postmodern work of art both asserts its authority and then subverts that authority through dark, parodic humour.
As David Foster Wallace tragically discovered, there is something debilitating about the kind of doublethink required by the committed postmodern novelist. At a certain point, the constant questioning of the form one has chosen to inhabit, the sense that every novel has to be written on two levels – one surface level and then a subversive undermining of that surface level – becomes unbearable. I Am Sovereign, Barker’s 13th novel – more properly a novella – feels like it comes out of this sense of exhaustion.
The book appears to tell the story of Charles, a self-improving teddy bear maker from Llandudno, who is selling his house, and is set over the course of a 20-minute viewing, in which Avigail, an estate agent with an interest in the Kabbalah, shows the property to a Chinese mother and daughter, Wang Shu and Ying Yue. Wang Shu is speaking on the telephone in Chinese throughout the viewing. No one breaks the shopworn rules of creative writing like Barker, and so we move in and out of each character’s consciousness at will, with an authorial voice making constant interjections that feel like deliberate inversions of the “show, don’t tell” maxim.
Charles is a gifted bear maker, and in high demand, but “he isn’t particularly interested in the bears… there is no profound emotional/spiritual connection to the bears”. This is despite the fact that he is often making bears that are deeply meaningful for others: “Heirloom bears. Post-bereavement bears. Totemic bears who represent something – or someone – tragically lost. Bears – for example – wearing a dress or suit fashioned out of a former loved-one’s favourite garment or with a tiny pocket containing the ashes (in a special, sparkly red vial placed in the approximate location of the heart area) of a lost parent or child or pet or lover.” Despite his avowed lack of interest in the bears, Charles finds himself obscurely attached to them, and often refuses to return them to the customers who commissioned them. It’s a powerful metaphor for the artist’s conflicted relationship to the work of art.
About three-quarters of the way through the novella, whose title sounds increasingly uncertain and then desperate as it is repeated as a kind of mantra, Barker steps into the pages of her own book. The end of I Am Sovereign doesn’t so much break the fourth wall as present the author, sobbing, seated among her audience. She argues with her own characters, rewrites earlier sections of the book, talks us through the writing of the novella as it is taking place. “It’s so wearying when everything is being perpetually challenged and contested like this, though, isn’t it?” Barker asks. “The Author,” she tells us, “has been prey to ‘mixed feelings’ about the novel, as a form, ever since completing her last work (H(a)ppy) which – to all intents and purposes – destroyed the novel (as a form) for The Author.”
I kept thinking of Wallace’s The Pale King (and its regal titular echo) as I was reading I Am Sovereign. Barker’s final lament could have been written by DFW himself: “How can you continue to live inside a thing that you no longer believe in? That would be like praying to a God who didn’t exist, surely?” And yet, unlike Wallace, Barker doesn’t despair. At the end, there’s still humour, still hope. “The Author just needs to hope. And she needs to love. And she needs to believe, in spite of.” Barker is a writer in a class of her own, and I Am Sovereign, forged in the fire of her “mixed feelings” about the form, is a work of coruscating intelligence, of deep humanity.
• I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker is published by William Heinemann (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
