re:mote voices

Title: Clear
Author: Nicola Barker
Publisher: Harper Perennial

Every 10 years the Granta association select a group of writers who they consider to be the best young British writers. In 2003 Nicola Barker was selected as one of those writers. Her novel at the time was The Behindlings, a novel about a curious kind of anti-hero-celebrity and his fans who fall him, the "behindlings". Barker's pseudo celebrity was a fictional character, but then the same year she had a real life pseudo celebrity land on her door step, exactly the kind of person she had been writing about.

In 2003 David Blaine arrived in London. Shut himself in a clear perspex box, and suspended himself from a crane while he fasted for 44 days. The "stunt" pretty much taking place in the area of London where Barker lives. During that time she found herself fascinated by the extremes of reaction to Blaine, the adulation and assault - people throwing flowers versus people throwing eggs. The novel Clear was the result.

Adair Graham MacKenney is our narrator, and I do mean narrator, Clear is not a quiet first person novel, rather it is an out loud verbal stream of conscious kind of flow. At one point another character describes him as a "fop", and to some degree that seems to be fair comment. MacKenny works alongside Tower Bridge, he can see Blaine and his box from work. He spends his lunch breaks sitting in the crowd, using it as a way of pulling girls. Until he meets the curious Aphra, a girl who accuses him of using Blaine as a pimp, before practically blacking out at his feet with a migraine.

As the novel unfolds MacKenny who had assigned himself the role of observer gets sucked in, becoming obsessed with mystery. The mystery of this girl Aphra and of David Blaine himself. By varying degree Clear covers relationships, celebrity, art and the roles of those who instigate and those who observe. The narrative wanders with MacKenny's thoughts, from his fascination with Jack Schaeffer's novel Shane, to Blaine's inspiration from Kafka's Hunger Artist, and really needs to be read in a rush that matches the way the text reads.

Clear is a contemporary pop novel, with an indie undercurrent that is at times laugh out loud funny - though certainly I suspect the particular points that amused me only serve to confirm my deviance.