Product Description

As winner of the highly prestigious IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award, Wide Open beat out books by such masters as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Michael Cunningham. It is truly extraordinary work of fiction, taking readers into a small English seaside town, and into the minds and hearts of its remarkable inhabitants --  a man named Ronny, weed killer by trade, who has some strange things in common with a man he finds dangling from a bridge; Nathan, the son of a pedophile, who toils in the Underground's Lost Property department, endlessly logging missing items; Sara, purveyor of her family boar farm, and Lily, her teenage daughter, tragically born with unformed organs and blood that refuses to clot.  Starkly original and at turns hilarious, sad, and hopeful, Wide Open brilliantly displays Nicola Barker's delightfully singular literary talent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #917992 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-01
• Released on: 2001-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
Reading a Nicola Barker novel is like taking a very odd drug. Her characters are unlike anyone you've ever met--and for that, perhaps, there's reason to be grateful. Take the cast of Wide Open, which includes Ronny, a homeless man we first meet waving at passing cars from a bridge. Only it turns out his name is not Ronny after all, but James, a name he subsequently bestows on the real Ronny, who is thereafter called Jim. Even though James/Ronny is right-handed, he insists on using only his left hand, because it helps him "concentrate." Then there's the real Ronny, a.k.a. Jim, who is utterly hairless. Not to mention Nathan, Ronny/Jim's brother, who works in the Lost Property department of the London Underground; Sara, proprietor of a boar farm in the beach town of Sheppey; and Sara's daughter, Lily, an angry, dirty 17-year-old who worships a boar birth defect she calls the Head. There's also Luke, a fat, handsome pornographer who smells like fish; Constance, an elfish optician in search of her father's past; and above all, the ghost of Big Ronny, Nathan and Ronny/Jim's father, who liked little boys.

Basically, these are all really, really creepy people, who do creepy and frequently nonsensical things. But the story Barker weaves out of their interactions is as compelling as anything in recent fiction, even if it operates by a narrative logic known only to the author. The reason is Barker's prose: vivid, urgent, wholly original. "He felt very strange, all of a sudden," one of her characters muses, "like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn't like the feel of it. Not one bit." Wide Open may on occasion feel like a bad dream of one sort or another, but the overall effect is more than absorbing: it's positively hallucinatory. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly
Barker is a young, award-winning English writer barely known here (her Love Your Enemies is nominally available from Faber), who has now been taken on by enterprising Ecco. She is a highly offbeat writer, weaving a strange tale of abandonment and redemption around a set of eccentric characters brought together on a bleak stretch of the Thames estuary called the Isle of Sheppey. There is Ronny (later to change his name to Jim), who comes across another Ronny dangling from a bridge over a highway while he is driving to his work spraying weed killer. Ronny 1 (Jim) finds this stranger knows his brother Nathan, who works in the Underground Lost Property Office. Out at Sheppey is Ronny 1's neighbor Sara, who runs a boar farm; Luke, a pornographic photographer who is trying to stop smoking and drinking in this remote seaside place; Sara's noisy, strung-out daughter Lily; and Sara's niece, optician Connie, who comes to visit. These odd, damaged people are presented with tenderness and humor, their baffling and often outrageous interactions chronicled with benign acceptance; and eventually they achieve a sort of uneasy, hard-won peace in the death of Ronny 2 and the unraveling of an old family secret. What keeps the reader engaged among the murky goings-on is the ever alert and highly original style Barker employs, full of vivid images and little explosions of recognition; there is a poetic sensibility at work among these extremely prosy characters.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A wayward, often puzzling, but ultimately rather haunting story about a group of outcasts, all in flight from a variety of real or imagined horrors, who collide on a desolate patch of British seacoast. British writer Barker (Love Your Enemy, stories, 1994, not reviewed; etc.) is exceptionally audacious; for much of the novel, the forces that have set her characters in motion and the odd ways in which several are related are only vaguely suggested. She depends on the sheer strangeness of them, their skewed mental states, and on her precise descriptions of their fractured interpretations of the world to propel the reader on. There are, to begin with, two men who meet in London - one is homeless, absorbed by weird rituals, perhaps suicidal; the other makes a living applying toxic sprays to urban weeds. Alarmed and fascinated by the homeless man, the latter takes him along to his small, featureless house by the sea. Both, it seems, are named Ronny. Their neighbors include Lily, a young woman who is ``unpredictable, stunted . . . and raging,'' and Luke, a diffident pornographer. Soon they - re joined by Connie, who - s in search of a mysterious figure named as a beneficiary in her father's will, and Nathan, the older brother of one of the Ronnys, a man crippled by his failure to save his brother, years ago, from the appetites of their violent pedophile father. These figures are alike only in their baffled inability to communicate with the world and in their increasingly violent hopes of escape - from their odd dreams, from each other, and from life. A climax of sorts begins with the escape of a massive boar from a nearby farm. One character dies, another suffers a breakdown, several others achieve weird kinds of liberation. Theme resolutions, however, appear incidental. Barker seems determined both to defy most narrative expectations and to create a group of figures so isolated and so strange that they both fascinate and move us. It - s some testament to her skill that she succeeds in both goals. Not an easy book, but an oddly (even unpleasantly) affecting one. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A work of "cornball perversion," staggering originality!
Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.

Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."

Save me from important books from important authors
The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed.

Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.

I basically agree with 'a reader' below.
It might have won the Impac, but it never made an impact.