Burley Cross Postbox Theft

Back in December I got all excited about a new book from Nicola Barker, and yesterday I read it. It should be clear from the earlier post that it would have to be a very bad book for me not to love it. In fact it's brilliant, and really funny.

Here's the set-up. A post-box in a West Yorkshire village has been broken into, and the letters have been found in a binbag a few miles away. The letters are sent to a village policeman, who has the task of reading through them and trying to work out what's happened, and who's broken into the box. At the end of the book he gives his findings.

The whole book consists of the letters that were found, topped & tailed with letters giving the policeman his instructions and giving his findings.

The overall whodunit plot is quite slight, and really rather unimportant. What matters is the letters themselves, in which Nicola Barker brilliantly creates a variety of personalities and their intermeshing stories.

It's probably a book well-suited for me and my former colleagues. Reading through the letters is quite like reading a file of documents, and at times I was tempted to start a chronology and use post-it notes.
Even closer, one of the first letters is written to a council official by an aggrieved but chatty citizen. A long rambling letter, it contains 100 footnotes, one of which (64) reads "I will return to this important detail a little later!" How familiar is that?

Fair warning, though, that opinion on Amazon is evenly spread; clearly some people hate this book as much as I love it.

(If you want a proper review, there's a really good one in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7686236/Burley-Cross-Postbox-Theft-by-Nicola-Barker-review.html)

Nicola Barker

I'm going to alienate some of my few readers again, by letting literature creep into this blog, diluting the normal diet of football and anticatholicism (which sounds like I must be a Rangers supporter, which is unfortunate.) But once again I'm girlishly excited at the prospect of a new book by one of my favourite novelists. This time, it's one of my favourite living English novelists, Nicola Barker.

Among the forgettable predictions in the Observer's Hot List 2010 (it puts the trite into detritus), there's notice of her new novel, Burley Cross Postbox Theft, and the publisher's website says it's coming out in April.

It's an epistolary novel, which I don't think she's ever done before, and I wonder if that will mean some loss to the quirky (I say quirky, you say irritating) style that she has been using with increasing intensity. The last novel, Darkmans, was a baffling, entrancing work. I still don't really know what happened at the end, but the sheer brilliance of the writing kept me hooked for the 800+ pages. It's the opposite of transparency, of course: writing that refuses to be ignored.

Here's a partial summary from the publisher:

From complaints about dog shit to horse-trodden turkeys, from Biblical amateur dramatics and a failing novelist's fan mail, a chicken that turns out to be a duck and an Auction of Promises that goes staggeringly, horribly wrong a dozen times and more, Nicola Barker's epistolary novel is one of immense comic range, her characteristic ambition, her shrewd humanity but, above all, about how we laugh at ourselves and fail to see the funny side.

If that was about a more mainstream novelist, I'd be worried. But I trust Nicola Barker, and so will be pre-ordering the book as soon as Amazon feature it.