Characters in novels don’t have to be happy, healthy, or even likable. They can kill, poke around where they’re not wanted, commit all sorts of egregious acts, and still pull our eyes across the pages. A kernel of redemption is all we require. In her novel Wide Open, Londoner Nicola Barker infuses life into no fewer than seven major characters, all of whom share the stage like an unruly ensemble cast, and, for better or (usually) worse, get all tangled up in each other’s lives. But this is no ordinary group dynamic. All seven proceed along separate trajectories and are pulled together by some super-human magnetic force, a force that brings on inane writhings and manic depressive ruminations. There isn’t a single savior among them.

Wide Open

by Nicola Barker (Ecco Press, $23.95)

The convergence of characters takes place in the drab English seaside village of Sheppey, from where Ronny commutes to work as a weed killer. Every day he sees a man waving from a highway overpass, until he passes one morning and it looks as though the man might jump. He pulls over and meets another Ronny. Besides their names, the two Ronnies have Nathan, Ronny I’s brother who works in the Underground’s lost property office, in common. Ronny I convinces Ronny II to return with him to Sheppey, but Ronny II does so on the condition that Ronny I change his name to Jim (Ronny II’s real name). Back in Sheppey, Ronny II and “Jim” meet their neighbor Luke, a semi-retired former pornographer; the foul-mouthed teenage pagan Lily; Lily’s mother, Sara, the wild boar farmer; and Connie, Sara’s niece.

There is absolutely nothing redeeming about any of these people. Jim (Ronny I), is a bald, passive man with a shadowy past involving prison and a father who was a pedophile. Ronny II arranges shells on the sand, starves himself till his ribs show, and has a network of scars on his wrists. Lily, born with unformed organs, worships a dead hybrid pig she names the Head, which dictates how often she should bathe. Sara discovers that she and Luke share an interest in photographing naked body parts. To complicate matters, a menagerie of wild boars, black rabbits, hens, hybrid hogs, and toeless apes lurks in the background. Amid the salt marshes and the strip of nude beach upon which several of the characters frolic, there is a confluence of madness, impending doom, and, oddly, of absolute calm.

Barker is an astounding writer. In her lilting, original wordplay, she projects an exuberance onto this motley crew and pinpoints aspects of their individual, bone-crushing despair: “Jim sensed something contract. His face. His mouth. His chest. He felt a dart of panic. Was it a sickness? Then he realized that he was not in pain. It was not uncomfortable. It was simply a smile. A smile. He was smiling. . . . It was a real smile, and it had started off from somewhere deep inside him, somewhere numb next to his breastbone. He tentatively touched the spot where the smile came from with his index finger. . . . It was all very sudden and rather peculiar. He looked around him, squinting, like he was all at sea in familiar territory.”

Herein lies the paradox of these obtuse and silly folks, their passionate insolence, their casual indifference: In comic dialogue and run-ins with newfound companions, their souls are still very much lost. Barker persists in carrying this darker agenda to its farthest point and shows just how inescapable and unavoidable the seeds of self-destruction really are. In doing so she catapults each character into a private and torturous existence. “Hell wasn’t black after all,” Nathan thinks when he arrives in Sheppey. “It was an endless, hollow, grey colour and it felt slippery.” “The fact that I exist doesn’t mean anything,” Jim’s friend Monica writes to him, as though reading his mind. “My existence is a question, not an answer. It’s a joke, a mystery, a shot in the dark.”

All this negative energy has to drain into something, find some relief. Barker steers this ensemble through the scabby beachscape until they simply can’t survive together any longer. And in doing so, she has written a story of togetherness and isolation, and of the demons that persist as long as they are reinforced by such a group as this. “I should have been cautious,” Connie realizes. “I should have been canny. But I was spoiled and dumb. I left myself wide open.”