needs more demons?

Somewhere deep in Darkman’s 800-page-plus bulk, there’s a scene in which Isodore, a character who vacillates between quixotic haplessness and menace, climbs a lighthouse where he is menaced by a small black bird that may or may not exist. He descends from the lighthouse and wanders off, in search, according to his young son (who may not be his son) of “the forrest.” He starts rolling about in the muddy sand at the waters edge, and (possibly, it’s unclear) subsequently starts humping what wood he’s able to find.

It was this sequence that sent me wandering around the ‘net to see what other folks have been making of the novel (since it’s far too new for Cliff’s Notes to have tackled). It seemed likely that this text was supposed to function on a symbolic level at least as much as literal, but I couldn’t quite grasp the key. I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that Darkmans deliberately evokes several old British Isles myths and archetypes, like Arthur and the Wild Hunt, but that didn’t seem quite sufficient.

Darkmans repeatedly feints toward several more-or-less conventional narratives: at various times it seems like it might be a magical realist novel in which the sadistic spirit of John Scoggins, jester to Edward IV, infests modern British citizens; or the story of absurd and drawn-out revenge schemes between embittered Chunnel contractors; or about reconciliation among estranged families; or the tale of a love quadrilateral in which father and son vie for the affection of the same married woman. It’s all of these and none of these. The connections between characters are so tightly interwoven, and the grounding physical detail of Barker’s prose is so precise, that it’s easy to miss (for a while) that the fragments of this book are very precisely machined to fail to mesh with one another.

needs more demons? Nah.