Nicola Barker’s The Yips is darkly comic. Publicity photo.
The background
Booker shorlisted Nicola Barker’s new novel, The Yips, is set in Luton. Not a very preposessing start, perhaps, but the book displays her customary black comic humour, following Stuart Ransom, an old golf pro as he struggles with his life – he sacks his PA as she’s going into labor. An important golf tournament is about to happen. There is lots of dialog. Other characters include a seven-times cancer survivor, a female priest and a Muslim sex therapist. The plot, such as it is, kicks in about a third of the way through. Critics are admiring Barker’s strangeness and originality (mostly).
It’s Tolstoyan in heft
Stephen Abell in The Sunday Telegraph said that the book was “about the fractures and fissures of family life.” And it’s also “about golf and genital tattoing.” He called the book “Tolstoyan in its heft if not its tone.” The “cartoonish subjects are matched by colourful, overwritten metaphors.” Barker is a “novelist of both the epically large and trivially small.” At least the “result is more consistently surprising than War and Peace.”
It’s a realist novel, and should be read as such
Keith Miller in The Daily Telegraph explained what a yip was – a “twitch” that “affects your performance at a crucial moment.” He suggested that “every one of us has yipped or been yipped, has suffered yippage or yippery, at one time or another.” Luton is a suitable place for Barker – she has a “heady, haptic sense of place.” She’s also a “mining engineer of human souls … exposing seams of strangeness to the light.” Barker is actually a “realist”, and thinks intelligently about the tradition; her “mannerist prose” reflects a world of text messages and Google. And golf is the “perfect complement” to her lower-middle-class world – “the great arcadian fantasy of the petite bourgeoisie.” Read her “for pleasure” – and “she is very good on love.”
There’s nothing conventional about it
Barker’s interested in the people in the cracks, said Edmund Gordon in The Sunday Times. Though her writing is often called “comic”, her “characters, the situations, even the landscapes in her work are grim.” There’s “nothing conventional” about this book – the “opening scene … lasts 56 pages.” There are “enigmatic scenes” which “are never fully explained.” Still, it’s original, and has charm and “peculiar beauty.” Her imagination, in the end, is “unique.”
Actually, it’s a temporary loss of form (perhaps a yip itself)
In Barker’s best work, said Philip Hensher in The Independent on Sunday, there’s “something … that Jonson or Chaucer would have recognised immediately, and laughed at.” The Yips is “very challenging … and perhaps in the end a disappointment.” He said it lacked “refinement and polish,” and the tone was too narrow. In fact, he found it “difficult and wearing without much reward.” However, he put it down to “the sort of temporary loss of form which even the best novelists can be excused.”
