Five Miles From Outer Hope (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
[3.5] I’ve started to associate Nicola Barker’s books with summer. It’s just that’s when I’ve read all of them so far, but there’s good reason with this one: it’s set in June 1981. (I didn’t consciously pick it up for that reason, but in that way that recently-read books often unexpectedly connect with each other, the last one I finished [Dorian by Will Self] also opened in 1981 and mentioned ‘Tainted Love’ early on.) Five Miles from Outer Hope should be set in late July or August though as there's no mention of school.It was a nice breather to read something which had no deafening personal resonance or overwhelming beauty, yet which I nevertheless quite liked, and which doesn’t raise any Important Issues I feel the need to pontificate about. "Funny, sordid and silly", says MJ's review, and that's as good a description as any. Six foot three, sixteen year-old Medve, her family and their dodgy lodger are typically bizarre early Nicola Barker characters. No sense of oxymoron in saying “typically bizarre”: it’s been about a year since I read any Barker, making the contrast with all the other characters in all the other books obvious. Would I rather be reading this than some more sedate, realist domestic saga with lots of earnest cookery scenes and predictable litfic accounts of what wife and husband think of one another? Absofuckinglutely. Medve turns out to have the temperament of a mythological trickster goddess or a character in one of Angela Carter's debowdlerised fairytales. And her big weird family living in a run-down hotel are uglier, grubbier, and not as posh or clever as the Tenenbaums or the Bagthorpes or the people in I Capture the Castle, whatever they were called. They're more real and more surreal.The voice here is one which developed into the third-person style in many of Barker’s more recent books, a clause-packed extravaganza more hyper than her first short stories. Medve’s narrative is forever trying to breathlessly pre-empt a reader’s imagined reaction to the last thing she said. It's typically Barker but its register is not so startling here; it's easier to place, in this slightly modified form, as first-person teenager: very strong personality and very much herself yet kind of defensive at times; smart-alec, exuberant, eccentric but not intellectual, definitely not girly but not a conventional tomboy. It’s a voice utterly recognisable from the internet (although this was first published in 2000).Agreed with MJ again: the final chapter is unnecessary and jarring - though a handful of the more flippant details about the characters' futures were fun.
What do You think about Five Miles From Outer Hope (2001)?
After reading this passage, on the first page, no less, I was hooked: “And it was that self-same summer—June 5th, if precision is your watchword—that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).”I must have read it again and again, trying it aloud, as fast as I could. The cadence is amazing. Just the way the words flow together makes me happy. It doesn't hurt that the fellow described reminds me of an idiot I'm still trying to get over. A great coming-of-age story with such an unique personal voice and, again, a great way with words. I stumbled upon this while searching the pitiful English language selection at my local library and I'm really happy I did so.
—Kristin
