If the performer’s dream is a captive audience, then the opening scenario of Nicola Barker’s latest novel may well be his nightmare. During an “improvised trumpet solo”, Sasha Keyes is interrupted. John Lincoln Braithwaite stands up and asks a woundingly rhetorical question: “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?” A video of the event tagged #TonyInterruptor, filmed by India Shore, a girl cajoled by her father into attending the performance, goes viral. What begins as a violation of musical etiquette quickly spirals into the violent upheaval of various characters’ lives.
It may take a particularly obtuse spectator to disrupt an “improvisational jazz show in a moderately affluent southern English cathedral town”, but in this novel the instinct to interrupt is seemingly universal. TonyInterruptor suggests that the parameters of any performance – whether an artistic display or a more fundamental social interaction – are more porous and permeable than we perhaps care to admit. “Because love,” Keyes insists at one point, “(like laughter, and like improvised jazz) is also utterly unpredictable, impossible to wrangle ... maddeningly spontaneous”.
In scenes that are cleverly crafted and almost amorous, Barker’s characters compulsively correct their interlocutors. In a charged interaction with Hawi, a gallery registrar and one-time nun, Lincoln Braithwaite feels moved to “complet[e] her sentence”. In another scene, in a hospital reception area, Mallory, Shore’s stepmother, tells Keyes with impassioned repetitiveness that “I must say it. I have to say it. It’s like a compulsion. I must say it.”
Even in the characters’ inner monologues there is a doubling back, a habit of self-revision. Mallory, agitated by her husband’s crush on another woman, is elliptical in her thoughts and evasive to even herself: “Just stop it with the obsessing. This isn’t helping. Okay. Back to ...”
TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker: A comic tour de force
Who Will Remain by Kasim Ali: A sociological message delivered through truly propulsive writing
Remember When by Fiona Phillips: An unflinching first-person account of the slide into Alzheimer’s
Everything and the Kitchen Sink by Simon Matthews: A survey of entertainment in pre-Beatles Britain
Barker’s ability to swerve between subjects is put to the test in a novel that navigates a complex network of relationships: father and daughter, husband and wife, artist and audience, talent and publicist. TonyInterruptor, however, showcases her skill as a comic writer. An eccentricity of expression and a winningly agile approach to plot proves that Barker has a virtuosic command of the haphazard and the apparently arbitrary.
