Book review: Running wild on the beach

Wide Open by Nicola Barker Faber & Faber, pounds 12.99

The escaped wild boar works; the masturbating Jesus doesn't. The women are strange and convincing; the men are just strange. Nicola Barker's new novel is all over the place; at once sparkly and funny, irritating and very, very weird.

To summarise the plot would be futile. Plotting has never been Barker's strength. Like her previous novel Small Holdings, Wide Open assembles a group of assorted oddballs and dumps them in the reader's lap.

Two are called Ronnie, although one changes his name to Jim. Ronnie and Jim are almost each other: one has alopecia, the other burns off his hair. Other characters swirl around them. Sara farms wild boar on the Island of Sheppey, where Ronnie and Jim fetch up in neighbouring prefabricated huts next to a nudist beach. Taking advantage of the beach's facilities is Luke, a fat ex-pornographer who stinks of fish. Between them all bounces Lily, Sara's teenaged daughter, a truly terrifying psychotic.

Lily believes in a deity she calls The Head, a foetal boar miscarried one night on the farm. By the end of the novel, we almost believe in it ourselves, for something malign stalks these pages. Everybody has a secret. When a rogue boar escapes on a bleak rainy night it is as though the truth has blundered out and might attack any character on sight.

This climactic episode is well handled; Barker's sense of atmosphere is faultless. The Island of Sheppey is stunningly evoked as a bleak landscape which offers little shelter to those hiding from reality. Barker is strong on physical description and quirky observations: "Without his hat, Ronnie resembled a king prawn." Mad Lily wishes she had been raised a Catholic, "then she wouldn't have needed to improvise so much".

Elsewhere, this quirkiness becomes fey, too much about the author having fun with language at the expense of clarity. Her alliteration sometimes feels self-indulgent. Broken sentences abound. And the halting prose is mirrored in the short chapters and the fractured nature of each character's life.

You can see why the author has done it, but the style makes few concessions to the reader. Barker's story collections routinely win awards but her novels suffer from the qualities that make the stories so good. In a novel, we need more than evocative glimpses of characters; we need a complete picture.