I Am Sovereign by Nicola Barker, book review: A piece of arch mischief-making that blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality

This restlessly inventive, postmodern take on fictional narrative has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s attempts to capture individual consciousness

Barker's novella is a curious but rewarding read (Tony Davis)

Are any of us sovereign over our own lives? How much control do we really have over our story, our narrative? Is the idea that we can shape or rewrite ourselves itself merely a fiction?

And what happens when an author asking these sorts of questions loses – or deliberately gives away – control of her own characters, her own invented fictions?

Nicola Barker’s writing is always restlessly inventive, and this novella (plumped up to look like the full-scale novel she jokes it threatened to become) is a piece of arch mischief-making. “The Author suspects that this novella … is either extremely deep or unbelievably trite. It’s impossible to tell.”

It’s set over just 20 minutes, at an awkward house-viewing in Llandudno. The seller is Charles, a sarcastic, ungainly hoarder who makes bespoke teddies but wears ironic T-shirts (which provide the brilliantly awful chapter titles: “Cat hair is lonely people glitter”; “If you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand”). At 40, he’s become obsessed with life coach Richard Grannon, whose (real-life) online videos offer guidance on overcoming the “Toxic Super-Ego” and “silencing the inner critic”. But this is a book that hands a megaphone to its character’s inner critics.

Avigail is his estate agent. From the outside, she’s a picture of steely poise but, mid-sale, she’s gripped by a transcendental, mystical vision. She’s attempting to sell the tiny house to Wang Shu, a Chinese businesswoman endlessly shouting into her mobile, and her daughter, the people-pleasing 27-year-old Ying Yue who believes “she may actually become altogether invisible whenever she holds her breath.”

Although tightly constrained – by time, by location – Barker dives deep into the inner lives of Charles, Avigail and Ying Yue. She reminds us how peculiar being alive, and interacting with essentially unknowable others, really is. These characters all yearn for normality, and totally miss it. All three feel they are not seen, not heard, not understood – and in this they have more in common than they realise.

Although her impish, springy prose is a world away from the lyricism of Virginia Woolf, I Am Sovereign reminded me of Woolf’s attempts to capture individual consciousness from the inside. Here are all the spiralling anxieties, intruding memories, flashing irritations and endless second-guessing of how we come across to others.

Barker’s writing is very, very funny, both ha ha and strange. She acerbically captures the constructed vacuity of Instagram influencers and online gurus, for instance; fans of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet will enjoy a similarly arch, detached view on the banality of contemporary Britain. There’s even excruciating slapstick in there: a virtuoso scene of upset tea trays, falling brooms and backflipping cats. But it’s the mystical moments that feel the boldest. Letting an estate agent “be consumed by Ein Sof… Immanence. All God”, and also be cross about it because she has a house to sell, is a gloriously audacious blend of, well, the deep and the trite.

And then the book eats itself. Just as a new character – Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo – is about to enter, the narrative is interrupted: he, The Subject, conducts an argument in formal, semi-legalese with The Author complaining about how she’s depicted him. So she replaces him with a different character. Swinging into fully postmodern mode, Barker discusses her characters as if they were real people, alternately obliging or obstructive; she discourses on what isn’t working in the text, what rewrites she’d like to do, and asks “is the author truly Sovereign?”

The heart sinks a bit, to be honest. It’s slightly annoying, even if Barker mischievously anticipates such complaints: “It’s so wearying when everything is being perpetually challenged and contested like this, though, isn’t it?”

But the decision to pull apart the form seems to come from a really-real place. Barker fears in I Am Sovereign that she can’t write a normal novel anymore. Her last, the Goldsmith’s prize-winning H(A)PPY destroyed the novel (as a form) for The Author. How can you continue to live inside a thing that you no longer believe in? That would be like praying to a god who didn’t exist, surely?”

No, she decides, rejecting this idea and finding a new way through. “The Author just needs to hope. And she needs to love. And she needs to believe, in spite of.” Which, after all – is it trite to say? – is what the reader of any fiction does: chooses to believe, in spite of.

‘I Am Sovereign’ by Nicola Barker is published by William Heinemann, £12.99