This was my third Barker Books read of the summer. Originally, I’d planned to read Darkmans, but that is a doorstopper and time was running away so I picked H(A)PPY instead – I might as well have tackled the more straight-forward narrative of Darkmans though, given that H(A)PPY took me longer than anticipated to read!
Its place in the Barker canon comes in 2017, a year after The Cauliflower®, which was an experimental fictional biography. H(A)PPY is even more experimental – in fact it’s one of the most experimental novels I’ve read, and it’s going to be a hard one to give you a flavour of too!
The basic premise is that in the near post-apocalyptic future, everything is known – everyone lives in harmony and openess, nurtured by the System – which protects all from negativity. All live ln the present – dabbling in the past is discouraged, as is thinking about the future. ‘The Young’ thus live their lives perfectly, clean and uncumbered. (Reminds me of the Supergrass lyric: “We are young, we run free, keep our teeth nice and clean…”).
Because you can’t highlight individual words in colour in HTML, only blocks (as far as I know), I’ve photographed the first page to show you what you’re up against: red/(pink), blue, purple, and later green words highlighted; lots of extra capitals. The coloured words show emotions or states of mind – the red – actually described as pink in the text highlighting an emotive word that the thinker/sayer’s personal ‘Graph’ thinks are unbalanced; purple is more emotive still; Barker’s narrator uses words like ‘pinken’ and ‘purpled’ for this change in colour.
Into this perfect but monitored world comes our narrator Mira, who has a sensitive and creative mind. One day she finds a melody, a ‘jangling waltz’ played on the guitar and a vision of a small girl stealing into her head. It makes her question whether she is ‘H(A)PPY; with the (A) in red/pink. She questions where the parentheses come from, and why many of her words are capitalising.
She follows a link in the Information Stream to read of a (real) early 20C luthier from Paraguay who owned a ‘precious guitar’. The guitar was tuned to a just scale rather than equal temperament (the latter, where all semitones are equally far apart, leads to some intervals between notes giving interfering beats, so introducing slight variations in tuning gets rid of the beats. It’s technical, and Barker doesn’t explain it, other than that the tuning is ‘imperfect’.
Of course the Graph can’t abide any imperfections, and Mira’s display starts pinkening and purpling even more, until she is taken away to get help from a ‘Full Neuter’ called Kite – who only succeeds in winding her up further ultimately, especially as she can’t stop thinking about him.
One of the balancing mechanisms she is given is to abandon her own guitar, and join a group playing the kora (right), an African instrument. The group has a mantra:
The tuning fork is in your heart
However, these koras have fixed tuning pegs, rather than the adjustable rings on old instruments and when Mira refashions her kora, the rest of the group are aghast!
From then on in, it’s obvious that the coping strategies given to Mira aren’t going to work, and she gets progressively more unbalanced. Text sizes start to vary, gaps between words and/or lines expand or compress, words get fuzzy or fizz, blocks and phrases of text get repeated, runic symbols appear over text, and so on. She continues to obsess over the melody, and **** (Kite) – just saying his name pinkens her Graph, but she also begins to think she has a double Mira B, just like a double star, or double helix, after all **** calls her Mira A, is there a Mira B?
Also her mind returns to Augustin Barrios, the aforementioned luthier and composer, and also the politics and position of women in society in South America at that time. At the beginning of the book, Barker explains she was inspired by listening to his music. La catedral, (The Cathedral) is his most famous piece for guitar, and in her sessions with Kite, they talk of building such a building. As in The Cauliflower®, Barker is obviously building her personal obsessions into the novel, and building parallels with this imperfect perfect world, even if they do feel oddly intrusive into the futuristic story.
‘Enough!’ I hear you cry. I shall stop talking about this book now. I’m glad I read it, but I can’t say it was enjoyable exactly and the first half dragged a bit. It was undoubtledly clever, and kudos to the typesetter! Did I understand it? At least in part! This is a book for die-hard Barker and Goldsmiths Prize fans (It won!). I did love the mantra ‘The tuning fork is in your heart’ though, and I shall leave you with Supergrass below…
Source: Own copy. William Heinemann hardback (2017), 282 pages. BUY at Amazon UK or Waterstones via my affiliate links.
