i am sovereign by Nicola BArker

evening standard 19 july 2019

What an audacious writer Nicola Barker is. Equally, how bold of her publishers to put this oddity of a novella out into the world. In an era when plot is king, Barker has typically, joyously, dispensed with one. She has also chucked out nearly everything you might expect from fiction. At almost the end of the book, she declares “The overriding concept for I Am Sovereign is that it should take place, in its entirety, during a twenty-minute house viewing in Llandudno”.

Charles is a 40-year-old Welshman of Bulgarian descent who is a boutique teddy bear maker and is trying unsuccessfully to sell his house, not least because he keeps telling prospective buyers about an attempted burglary 12 years previously. This is all slightly beyond meta-fiction: the characters fight with the author to be represented differently, to not have their names corrected by spellcheck or the copy-editor, and some of this is amusing.

Barker even takes on Amazon Prime and Amazon reviewers. Charles considers downloading free copies of self-help texts on Kindle, if only he was “able to work out what the hell signing up to it actually means for your long-term fiscal and psychological well-being (which Charles isn’t, so he has purchased both, at inordinate expense, in paperback).” This is punchy stuff, given that anyone holding Barker’s book will be aware that it costs £12.99 for 209 pages of generously spaced text and might be viewed as expensive by many people. But then it’s hard to know if Barker’s books are intended for people who don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. Either way, I hope they read them.

Barker even jokes that if she doesn’t end the book quickly enough, it will no longer be a novella but a novel, a form ruined for her when she wrote her last one, H(A)PPY, in 2017. She is often very funny: not least when Charles’s experiments with self-help lead him to fantasise about the perfect parents for himself: Barack and Michelle Obama. “The two-year-old Charles sits happily on Michelle Obama’s warm lap as she gently plaits his hair (although anyone who plaits knows that this process is never gentle) into fastidiously neat lines of corn-rows. Hmm. That’s a slightly odd and unsettling fantasy. For a 40 y/o man.” There is so much jouissance in Barker’s writing, which is the point, surely, otherwise why else would she print this word alone, mid-text?

The cumulative effect of all of this feels political: Barker admits deleting a 23-year-old Ethiopian professional carer called Gyasi “Chance” Ebo from the text as she passes Calais where, her friend tells her, “the entire area had been inhabited by young (for the most part) African men trying to find any means possible of crossing the Channel to Britain.”

And Barker’s pleasure in the novella feels defiant, not least when she reports, during the writing of the book, that “the Author then exfoliated her private parts, vigorously, in the shower.”

This review first appeared in the Evening Standard