Nicola Barker’s​ latest novel, TonyInterruptor, is a reaction to, and reflection on, a moment of creative crisis. While writing H(A)PPY (2017), Barker has said, she stopped sleeping for nine or ten months. On completing the book she was convinced that her relationship with the novel form was over: ‘I felt everything falling away around me, the entire construct of my life, my relationship with words, my grasp of meaning. It all crashed.’ Barker is not one of the world’s great explainers – she believes in an elusive unconscious and a universe replete with mystery – and she has never provided a cogent account of what she thinks was going on, other than to point out that in the utopian future society H(A)PPY describes, ‘narrative’ is outlawed and so the story she was telling, via her narrator Mira A, was ‘the destructive element … the thing that’s not permitted’. More helpful clues can be found in the book itself, which shows Mira A’s illicit narrative breaking down in a riot of blank pages, typographic games and untranslated Latin. The novel ends with the word ‘silence’, a touch of Hamlet in a work otherwise closer to The Tempest.

Whatever the underlying causes, Barker appears to have experienced a kind of creative paralysis similar to what athletes call the yips – a neurological condition that also gave its name to one of her earlier novels. The Yips (2012) told the story of a has-been golfer called Stuart Ransom, but Barker’s own experience was more closely foreshadowed by a passage involving another character, Jen, who is asked by Gene, her colleague at the Thistle Hotel in Luton, about the role of ‘philosophy’ or ‘structure’ in her existence. She replies that for her there’s only ‘stuff’: ‘Here’s some stuff, here’s some other stuff, here’s some more stuff. Just stuff – more and more stuff, different kinds of stuff which is really only the same stuff but in different colours and with different names; stuff stacked up on top of itself in these huge, messy piles.’ When Gene remarks that this sounds unstable, Jen agrees. ‘That’s part of the fun. It’s constantly threatening to topple over – to crash.’ Then what? ‘It topples! It crashes!’

Barker’s silence was temporary – I Am Sovereign arrived in 2019 – but the moment of crisis left an impact. H(A)PPY marked the culmination of a quarter-century of activity, beginning with the short stories collected in Love Your Enemies (1993) and Heading Inland (1996), and a pair of novels concerned with working life in London, Reversed Forecast (1994), set in a Soho bookies, and Small Holdings (1995), about a privatised park in Palmers Green. After these came a succession of comedies marked by their energy, idiosyncrasy and eclecticism, featuring depressed, phobic or panicked characters. In the decade leading up to H(A)PPY, Barker published five substantial novels, including The Yips and Darkmans (2007), a Gothic mystery about drug dealing, the spectre of history and the construction of the Channel Tunnel. In the eight years since H(A)PPY, she has published two novels which, though extraordinarily rich and fertile, between them add up to about a third of the length of Darkmans.

More striking than this deceleration has been Barker’s refusal to present her crisis as an awakening, an opportunity to recant or repent, then proceed – and advance – accordingly. Though the afterword to The Cauliflower (2016), a portrait of the Bengali Hindu mystic Sri Ramakrishna, questions whether the book can be characterised as a novel, she has found novelistic narrative flexible enough for her needs. The problem, when it came, was not with the form but with her relationship to it, something she decided to reconstitute. As Jen puts it in The Yips, ‘the shit hits the fan for a while, then the fallen stuff just reconfigures itself and everything pretty much goes back to normal.’ That seems to have been Barker’s hope. The more common choice for novelists who find themselves at an impasse has been to point to the blatant – though belatedly recognised – inadequacy of the novel as a vehicle of expression, and to pursue modes free of encumbrances like fictional invention and a story arc. Such a path has been taken by a number of prominent writers over the past fifteen years, most fruitfully and intriguingly Rachel Cusk.

Barker and Cusk were born a year apart in the mid-1960s, published their first books in the same year and have both been praised for their distinctive comic tone. (Cusk wrote rave reviews of some of Barker’s early books.) Cusk’s crisis arrived slightly before Barker’s. In the early 2010s, she suffered what she called a ‘creative death’: ‘I was heading into total silence.’ Already fed up with what she saw as the indirectness of the traditional novel, she also concluded that she could no longer write memoir – at least not without ‘being misunderstood and making people angry’. Instead, she turned to the discursive mode deployed by an earlier novel-sceptic, W.G. Sebald, who once described his ‘prose fictions’ as a rebuke to books about ‘relationship problems in Kensington in the late 1990s’. The result was Outline, in which the Cusk-like writer Faye largely occupies the role of auditor and prompt.

This turn toward greater directness – often labelled ‘autofiction’ – was of little use to Barker. Recalling her first encounter with Henry James, she said that although she couldn’t ‘understand everything’, she felt she was being taken on ‘a profound emotional journey that went beyond mere comprehension’. Not that she’s entirely averse to comprehension. The position espoused by Jen in The Yips is too defeatist: the point is to tap narrative’s capacity as a navigating tool, though its limitations are also crucial. If a narrative explains everything, there’s no room for the uncanny or ineffable. If it explains nothing, it ceases to be narrative. In the final scene of H(A)PPY, Mira A asks ‘How might I describe this place?’ and then wonders how to describe seven other things, including ‘this confusion’ or ‘this mystery’. She is assured by a voice: ‘There is no need.’ Hence the embrace of ‘silence’. But there’s a lot to be said before we stop short of the final word.

Cusk has said that once ‘you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous’. An art closer to statement, or built on testimony, might be said to look pain in the face without distraction and obfuscation. But an aesthetic like Barker’s, which is invested in the novel as a vehicle of sense-making, a site of irreducible specificity and an opportunity for joyful mischief, can never forsake the John-and-Jane route. The change in Cusk’s work pushed her towards literary experimentation: all three books in the Outline trilogy were nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize, given for fiction ‘at its most novel’, and she won in 2024 with Parade. Barker hit the buffers with a book that received the same award, and the pair of novels she has produced since H(A)PPY, while hardly hidebound, describe, among other things, relationship problems in late 2010s Llandudno and early 2020s Canterbury.

I Am Sovereign concerns a twenty-minute house viewing in North Wales. Like Outline, it is about a writer at a crossroads. As with Faye’s interlocutors, members of Barker’s cast are grappling with existential problems, and there’s an author figure listening, in this case Barker herself. But the devices serve opposite ends. Charles, the main character in I Am Sovereign, who is trying to sell a cottage inherited from his mother, wants to ‘calmly and systematically re-pattern’ the way he thinks – to silence his ‘Toxic Inner Critic’ and become more assertive. Cusk adopted a mode of self-erasure; she has talked about an ‘annihilated perspective’ – what Faye calls a more passive ‘way of living in the world’. Key to the project was the fact that Cusk was looking for an alternative not just to the novel but to confessional writing. Barker, by contrast, forged ahead with a book full of invention and full of herself.

In I Am Sovereign Barker is seeking a balance between clarity and ineffability. Charles ‘honestly doesn’t know why’ he can’t get started in life. Then we’re given a possible explanation. His ‘dad always used to say that he was a pathetic piece of crap who would never amount to anything’; Charles has concluded that his father has manifested as a ‘Toxic Super-Ego’, a concept he has learned from the charismatic YouTube psychologist Richard Grannon. But Charles reckons there’s something about Grannon himself that ‘doesn’t entirely add up’. If he’s really a lost soul like Charles, how can he also be ‘a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other remarkably cool and interesting things like becoming an NLP Master Practitioner and living in the Far East and having an encyclopedic knowledge of Important Cultural Moments in both fiction and film while owning a giant, blonde dog which lollops about shedding hair and stealing socks’? To complicate matters, we learn that Charles’s dad ‘never called him a “pathetic piece of crap”’ (even if ‘the message was there’). Charles is determined to muster a sense of ‘order, of connectedness, of coherence’, and though Barker doesn’t ridicule the goal there’s no attempt to minimise the obstacles to achieving it.

The prospective buyer of Charles’s cottage is a Chinese woman who brings her unhappy grown-up daughter to the viewing. The estate agent has left the Hasidic community she grew up in. Meanwhile the Author, who emerges at the midway point, has lost her faith in the novel ‘since completing her last work (H(A)PPY)’. All are trying to forge a sense of identity and find reserves of spiritual resilience. I Am Sovereign is highly lucid, almost a roman à thèse. The epigraph, taken from T.S. Eliot, is ‘Where is the life we have lost in living?’ and by the end of the first paragraph Charles is seized by an urge to buy an audiobook called ‘something like: Living Your Unlived Life’. But the novel also contains plenty of digressions and bizarre turns, moments that defy Barker’s scheme.

TonyInterruptor​ is another discursive work with a chaotic streak. An early passage informs the reader that an incident of heckling at a jazz concert, known as the First Interruption, has gone down in performance lore and become a source of ‘ferocious’ academic debate and inspiration for ‘countless memes’. We are also told that the book we are reading is the third of four published on the subject. Barker’s dual impulses – towards legibility and obscurity – are reflected in the novel’s epigraphs, a pair of quotations from Mark E. Smith, the Fall frontman. One is about his urge as a teenager to ‘make music that didn’t exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory’; the other is Dadaist or daft: ‘Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?’ (On the title page Barker gives the novel the alternative title Blue Cheese Amphetamines.) Here the critic comes from the outside. He’s called John Lincoln Braithwaite: in accordance with Barker’s procedures, the first two names call to mind John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln, figures in the most famous interruption of a performance; the surname calls to mind nothing.

In the opening scene Braithwaite, sitting in the third row, stands up during a trumpet solo and asks whether the people gathered there are being ‘honest’. He points at the trumpeter, Sasha Keyes, and adds: ‘You, especially.’ Most of the audience is oblivious to the interruption. But in the dressing room afterwards Sasha lets rip about this ‘random, fucking nobody … some dickweed, small-town TonyInterruptor’. Larry Frome, who plays the synth, and for some (no) reason uses the word ‘worm’ for ‘word’, asks ‘one worm?’ His girlfriend – and Sasha’s ex-wife – Fi Kinebuchi, who plays the autoharp, lyre and guitar, quotes Krishnamurti on the danger of naming things: ‘When you teach a child that a bird is named “bird” that child will never see a bird again.’ Then the pianist, Simo Treen, adds #TonyInterruptor to footage taken by a ‘disgruntled Zoomer’, India, who has been forced to attend the concert by her father, Lambert Shore, a professor of architecture at Christ Church University, where Fi teaches music.

Barker’s intentions are reflected in the structure. Most of the novel – the opening ten chapters – traces the impact of the First Interruption on those involved: the jazz troupe, the interruptor, some key members of the audience. Lambert attended the concert in order to watch Fi perform, and the First Interruption enables further contact (he later corners her in the university staffroom, ‘clutching his phone’). Lambert’s wife, Mallory Shore, a former barrister who works as a legal copywriter, comes into contact with Sasha. There’s recognisable causality, a tour around the personal conflicts and intellectual conceits generated by a dramatic opening incident. There are articulate – if often exasperated and circular – conversations and reflections about what one character calls ‘ART and IDEAS and MEANING’. At one point, India asks: ‘Is this seriously how normal people talk to each other in their kitchens?’ But the penultimate chapter takes things in another direction. At an art gallery in Paris, a former nun from Kenya helps Braithwaite prepare for an art installation based on the First Interruption. ‘This thing we watch is an intimate act,’ she says. ‘We have to gift our … uh … l’immobilité … our stillness to the performance. In payment. In respect. En hommage.’

I Am Sovereign reckons with the question Barker asked herself following H(A)PPY: what’s left? Along the way, she introduces a certain amount of ambivalence about her title-mantra. The assertion ‘Say anything enough times and it becomes true’ is followed by: ‘Doesn’t it?’ TonyInterruptor might be taken as a less hesitant exhibition of Barker’s sovereignty. Interruption – of a routine, a way of life – was the source of the problems in H(A)PPY, but here it is used to generate narrative momentum. The novel is to some degree a parable about the power of naming things – the one-word nickname is what seals the fame of the First Interruption. But Barker is preoccupied by many forms of verbal reference. Something ‘apocryphal’ also ‘rings true’. India has never heard the word ‘heckle’: ‘“Like cackle, but with an h,”’ her father explains, ‘“and an e,” he adds, as an afterthought.’ Barker is an incessant self-interruptor. She explains that Simo was interested in the sonic properties of birdsong ‘long before anyone else’, then adds in parenthesis that ‘to be frank’ everyone has ‘always’ been interested in the subject.

Honesty in this novel is associated with impulsive action and plain speech, and freedom from calculation, obfuscation and coldness. After the interruption Braithwaite explains that he wasn’t calling Sasha ‘dishonest’, but asking a question, ‘a completely spontaneous inquiry about the true nature of improvisational performance’, which then became part of the performance and was, in a sense, ‘the most authentic thing about it’. Later, Lambert introduces India – the latest in Barker’s long line of perceptive teenage girls – to the concept of sprezzatura, described as ‘a pretence of studied indifference, a cynical, surreptitious, passive-aggressive projection of simplicity and ease, secretly underpinned by jaw-dropping levels of exertion and expertise’. Barker is herself trying to walk this tightrope, offering her more obscure flourishes as sincere while neither exaggerating nor hiding the effort involved.

Barker’s Clear: A Transparent Novel (2004) touches on similar questions. It’s about another public performance, David Blaine’s 44 days living without food in a Perspex box suspended over the Thames. One girl is convinced that the box is made of glucose: ‘When he thinks nobody’s looking, can’t you see the bastard licking?’ Other onlookers call him ‘a fake, a cheat, a freak, a liar’ and are afraid of ‘being “caught in a lie”. Or of being duped. Or diddled. Or bamboozled … Seems like the need for real “truth” … has – at some weird level – become almost a kind of modern mania.’ In the opening lines, the narrator, Adair Graham MacKenny, reflects on a less ostentatious work of art, Jack Schaefer’s Western novel Shane. Quoting the first line, ‘He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89,’ Adair marvels: ‘a single, short breath into the narrative, and already he’s here.’ The irony, of course, is that Barker invokes Schaefer’s book as a kind of throat-clearing exercise before beginning her own story. TonyInterruptor, by contrast, opens more like Shane itself: ‘One day, he just stood up …’ For Barker honesty takes many forms. It’s fine to be direct when directness is what’s called for.

Driving Barker’s occasionally topical concerns – the Channel Tunnel, Blaine’s stunt, social media – is a potent spiritual vision. She grew up in a Catholic household and is interested in ideas from other religions, particularly Hinduism. If we accept the account given by Clifford Bickerton, an author-loathing character in Barker’s occasionally fourth-wall-breaking In the Approaches (2014), her first stab at fiction was inspired by three paintings of Christ she saw in a shop window in Windsor. In most of the work, however, she hasn’t been an obviously religious writer. The surface of her prose is less pensive than in-your-face: her books teem with puns and italics. It’s a different way of going about things from that of, say, Marilynne Robinson. But Barker’s worldliness or seeming extroversion reflects a sense of openness, a belief in the banal and even silly as sites of pattern and meaning. Reversed Forecast ends with an epiphany about human happiness on the bus. In this, her work occasionally recalls Salinger’s later stories and, among practising writers, George Saunders and Thomas Pynchon.

Barker’s explorations have taken her to 19th-century India and a post-metaphysical future. Yet British banality has retained its allure, and its uses. Her work is full of people called things like Bill and Jim. Martin Amis, the subject of Barker’s undergraduate thesis, once wrote that the ‘way a writer names his characters provides a good index to the way he sees the world’. He wondered how people like Tom Metfield and Jane Framsby (from the novels of John Braine) could ‘really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names’. But to Barker, daughter of a Derek, the humdrum possesses an archetypal status, and at times an incantatory power. Sasha’s plucking of ‘Tony’ when venting his spleen about the First Interruption has its roots not just in the novel’s concern with the power and danger of coinages, but in Barker’s long-held conviction that a spiritual vision can be achieved through chronicling the sort of local detail that might risk being taken as social comment or satire. (She has repeatedly stressed that she has ‘no interest in class’.)

What is the particular import of ‘TonyInterruptor’? It has the ring of a standard playground taunt, like ‘Billy no mates’. Various characters are convinced that it has something to do with an early song by the Fall (we don’t learn why). But then one of those people, Mallory, bumps into Sasha in A&E and has a sudden realisation that neither Sasha nor Mark E. Smith came up with it: ‘It’s Martin’s. Can’t you hear it? Lionel Asbo. TonyInterruptor? The rhythm? The symmetry? The implicit snideness? You simply improvised on Martin’s original. You adapted his phrase. You unconsciously adapted Martin’s phrase.’ This isn’t a terrible theory, and Barker herself may believe it. In any case, Mallory, who has taken a shine to Sasha, hopes it will put the whole debacle into perspective, rendering him not, as he’d earlier feared, ‘the tragic fucking hero in a world – a landscape – composed entirely out of lies’, the victim of ‘an authentically Shakespearian set-up in a world where nobody reads sodding Shakespeare any more’, but a figure in ‘a comedy of errors … just much ado about …’ Mallory takes to the idea that Sasha’s predicament is comic, then recasts it in Buddhist language, invoking the ‘lineage of missteps’ and the hopeful notion that enlightenment is achieved through failure and setbacks.

But there’s another possibility. ‘TonyInterruptor’ recalls the Latin names of saints such as Beda Venerabilis, Iōannēs Baptista and Eadmundus Rex et Martyr (to whom the Benedictine Abbey in In the Approaches is dedicated). Sasha studied classics, so he would be familiar with this formulation – and he should also know that he could scarcely be the tragic figure of a tale in which the decisive name belongs to someone else. Whatever genre he finds himself in, there’s no doubt that he’s a secondary character, a victim turned beneficiary in the story of someone who questions assumptions and effects change – along the lines used at one point to describe the Buddha himself, who breaks the spell of rules and ‘ego (passion, greed, ambition, anger)’ by laughing at them.

It’s typical of Barker’s version of transcendence that the saint-figure here is just an ordinary and slightly annoying man. But it would be wrong to view this as an irony. The dialectic in her work is not between high and low, or naivety and knowingness, but what a character from In the Approaches calls ‘finding significance through insignificance’. In this light, TonyInterruptor resembles not just Clear or Five Miles from Outer Hope (2000), about interlopers who disrupt island communities, but the two religion-themed novels Barker published immediately before H(A)PPY: The Cauliflower and In the Approaches, which explores the lives affected by the thalidomide victim Orla Nor Cleary, who as a 12-year-old girl during the ‘infamous late summer of 1972’ was hailed by many in the Sussex village of Toot Rock as a saint.

In an interview about H(A)PPY, Barker described paradox as ‘my thing’ and referred to the Hindu practice of worshipping Kali, the goddess who represents the ‘pair of opposites’, creation and destruction. At one point in TonyInterruptor, Sasha contemplates the idea that the ‘world makes no sense and the opposing notion that the world makes perfect sense’, then adds ‘Might it even be both?’ The notion that it could be ‘both’ favours the perfect-sense model, since this would accommodate the no-sense position. But then even a scintilla of no-sense undermines the prospect of perfect sense. In the two books Barker has written since H(A)PPY, she is aspiring to perfect sense, knowing she is bound to fall short. She prefers erecting a scaffold to shrugging a shoulder, trying and failing to do something to waving a white flag.