In the Approaches
Nicola Barker’s readers are primed to expect surprises, but her tenth novel delivers mind-meld on a metaphysical scale. From quiet beginnings in the picturesque English seaside enclave of Pett Level, ‘In The Approaches’ ultimately constructs its own anarchic city-state on the previously undiscovered common ground between G.K. Chesterton and Philip K. Dick. On the one hand, this is an old-fashioned romantic comedy of fused buttocks, shrunken heads and Irish-Aboriginal saints; on the other it’s Barker’s wildest and most haunting book since 2007’s Booker Prize-shortlisted ‘Darkmans’.Following previous celebrations of the enduring allure of the posted letter (’Burley Cross Postbox Theft’) and the pre-lapsarian innocence of pre-Twitter celebrity (Booker-longlisted ‘The Yips’), this concluding instalment of Barker’s subliminally affiliated ‘digital trilogy’ imagines a basis for the internet in Catholic theology. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwell’s was in the future, ‘In the Approaches’ offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia – the possibility of faith.
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Copyright © Nicola Barker 2014
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Source ISBN: 9780007583706
Ebook Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9780007583713
Version 2015-03-31
Contents
23 Mr Franklin D. Huff
24 Miss Carla Hahn
25 Mr Franklin D. Huff
‘Well I suppose as we must all seem very dull and pedestrian to such a bold and cosmopolitan gentleman as the likes of our Mr Franklin B. Huff!’ Mrs Barrow ruminates, borderline resentful, as I hand over a crisp, ten pound note and she shoves it – unacknowledged – into the pocket of her pristine housecoat. ‘What with all his escapades amongst them hordes of filthy banditos and drug-smugglers and what-not in the dusty prairies of Mexicano.’
‘Mr Franklin D. Huff,’ I correct her.
‘He was only telling me the other day as how he keeps a collection of shrunken heads,’ she continues, eyes widening. ‘Stores ’em in an old suitcase, he does. No word of a lie, Carla! Thinks as they’re historical artlifacts!’ she snorts. ‘I says, “Wouldn’t those be the actual heads of real-life dead folk, Mr Huff? Isn’t that a sort of sacrelig?” But he just lowers his book and peers at me over his spectacles, all lofty-like. “It’s the culture there, Mrs Barrow. They have a different way of going about things. Everything’s fast and loose. Life is cheap.”
‘“The men are men and the women are glad of it!” I jokes, but he just returns to his reading, face sour as a slapped arse. So I says, “It must all seem very dull and pedestrian here in Pett Level to a chap such as yourself, Mr Huff, what with all your adventurings amongst them buckaroos and rancheros and the shrunken heads and what-not …” and he says, “I can’t pretend I’m not finding it a little flat, Mrs Barrow, a tad wispy and windswept and prarochial for my tastes, perhaps.”’
As Mrs Barrow finishes speaking we both gaze up from the bus-stop, in unison, towards the large, concrete block of the old Look Out which crowns the top end of Toot Rock. It is here that Mr Franklin D. Huff is currently sitting, in glorious isolation, fully suited and booted, intermittently gusted by the sea wind, partaking of a picnic lunch.
‘They say as he “went native” out amongst all them strumpets and gunsels,’ Mrs Barrow murmurs, squinting, ominously, into the eternally drab yet still pitifully hopeful early autumn light, ‘but I find that hard to believe, Carla, when I sees him of a morning, sitting on the balcony in his socks and his braces, smoking his pipe like one of those right and proper gentlemen straight off the cover of an old sewing pattern.’
‘Who says that, exactly?’ I ask, frowning.
‘I beg yours?’
‘Who says he—?’
‘Them Sullivan boys down at the New Beach Club for one,’ Mrs Barrow interrupts. ‘Seems as he’s got his-self temporary membership,’ she snorts, ‘by hook or by crook …’
She gives me a significant look. ‘Glory O’Dowd says as how he drank up their whole stock of gin in the first week after Mrs Huff left. On the second week he comes out in hives. Both cheeks was covered!’ She chuckles. ‘I thought, That’s the gin, that is! Mother’s Ruin! But I kept it
