Nicola Barker and the art of interruption

In a brilliant review of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo for this paper back in 2012, Nicola Barker wrong-footingly devoted the first half of her piece not to the novel itself but instead to the moody author photo printed on the inside back cover, trying to decipher Amis’s gaze (“Perhaps he is thinking about becoming or not becoming his father”) with the daring eccentricity that characterises her own fiction. Anyone tempted to try the same trick with the author photo on the back flap of Barker’s new novel, TonyInterruptor, need not bother: her eyes are closed, the camera catching her joyfully mid-laugh for an image rare among the usually sober genre of author headshots. The message is obvious: this is an out-of-the-ordinary author doing what others don’t.

A metafictional prankster less likely to break the fourth wall so much as bulldoze it, she is probably still best known for Darkmans, a riotous 830-page epic about the impact of the Channel Tunnel, among many other things. It made the Booker prize shortlist in 2007, and 10 years later, H(a)ppy, a surveillance-state dystopia printed in a variety of fonts and inks, won the Goldsmiths prize – an award for boundary-pushing fiction that might have been created expressly for Barker, whose conceptual ambition, linguistic fertility and zany humour have long been at odds with the prevailing fashion for plain-spoken realism.

The power of nonconformity is central to TonyInterruptor, an etiquette comedy that takes place in Canterbury among a large cast of academics and musicians (and which just happens to namecheck Lionel Asbo, clearly still on Barker’s mind). It opens during an experimental jazz concert, in the middle of a trumpet solo considered “particularly devastating” by its performer, Sasha, only for an audience member to suddenly stand up and yell: “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” When Sasha is later filmed backstage ranting about a “random fucking nobody... some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor”, his rivalrously tickled bandmate adds the tag #TonyInterruptor to an already-uploaded clip of the heckle – and a viral sensation is born.

What follows is a 224-page cacophony of argument over art, authenticity and selfhood, as Barker juxtaposes the bickering among the jazz ensemble – each of whom have good cause to welcome any puncturing of Sasha’s pomposity – with a more tightly focused portrait of parent-and-child strife between India, the teenage girl who first uploaded the footage, and her father, Lambert, an architecture professor, who only dragged her to the show in the first place because he’s smitten with the band’s harpist, Fi, a campus colleague.

As the two threads intertwine, Barker has a blast sending up all and sundry, while retaining a sense of nuance. Sasha, facing an internet pile-on for his snobbish response to the heckle, rants apoplectically about cancel-happy millennials “marching under the banner of ‘inclusion’”; yet he also demurs when someone tries to console him with the thought that he is being castigated for his “whiteness”. And when India complains that her dad doesn’t value her skills as a content curator after her smartphone footage amasses 1.6m likes, it’s a mark of Barker’s artistry that we’re actually made to care about the ensuing emotions, rather than viewing the characters merely as puppets for satire.

Faced with a sprawling cast of bandmates, academics and family members, the reader might lose track were it not for the novel’s seemingly inexhaustible knack for arrestingly pithy introductions: “Saul Timpson always acts with a measure of grandiosity – as if he were the rightful heir to the key-cutting, shoe-mending business Timpson’s. But he isn’t. He’s just a 63-year-old geography professor from Reading with a talent for the cello...” That yo-yoing rhythm of build-up and deflation – coupled with the familiarly Barkeresque blizzard of block capitals, italics, brackets, ellipses and caveats – makes interruption part of the book’s fabric. At times, however, the self-deprecation cuts too close for comfort: when your attention flags during a reverie about how the heckler resembles the Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie, Barker is already there: “This is a dreadful waste of time. It’s silly.”

While such moments are a reminder not to take anything here too seriously, a coda showing the characters each making fresh starts is a clear nudge to view the disruption that opens the novel as a path-clearing exercise, a catalyst for regeneration. If it’s tempting to draw an analogy with Barker’s oeuvre as a career-long heckle in the face of pious, well-mannered literary fiction, TonyInterruptor unsurprisingly works overtime to fend off any such grand interpretation. “This whole thing... is just a comedy of errors,” says one character to another as they separately wind up in A&E. “It’s just much ado about...” And then a nurse comes in saying she’s sorry to – but what else? – interrupt.

TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker is published by Granta (£16.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £15.29. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Tom Parsons