The first thing Nicola Barker did when she heard she had won the IMPAC award was to send a bunch of flowers to the staff of the Norwegian library who had nominated her. While all the other shortlisted authors had been nominated by several libraries, Barker only had the one, from Norway.
Barker knows she will always be an acquired taste and has no illusions that the IMPAC award will somehow change this. She describes most of her work as "weird", a word she uses frequently. Wide Open is reasonably representative, she says, although definitely her darkest. "When I finished it, I thought: `I'm not going to go here again'." "When Wide Open came out, I got a lot of people saying: `This book scares me, and I'm not sure I understand it or want to'. It was a real Luddite response: `Don't challenge us, don't ask us to think. Here she is again, page after page of perfect prose'. It was hate. As if I didn't want to write perfect prose, as if I didn't kill myself to write good prose. It had been such an explosion for me as a book, I didn't know if I was going to write anything else after it." Nor is it only the subject matter that challenges, but the narrative itself. Central to the plot are two characters with the same name, made even more complicated when their identities are swapped and other names substituted. It takes a brave writer to take that on, not to mention a brave reader. Barker is unrepentant. "I hate reading fiction which is a kind of comforting thing, where the author wants everyone to love the main character and feel comforted by them. Why should I want to empathise with someone who seems to exemplify a kind of mediocrity? I think there needs to be a certain challenge to the reader; that it should be a journey in which their prejudices are confronted and where things are stripped away."
Wide Open is set on a near-island, curtained by the sea, a bump on the coast of Kent protruding into the Thames estuary where Barker's characters come together in a tightly plotted narrative of life on the margin. Wide Open was her third novel. She has since written two more, one published, one soon to be published, plus one on the go. Before that, were two volumes of short stories. When Barker began writing, anything longer was too difficult to hold in her head, she explains, as she was working full time - "menial jobs": a bakery, a bookmaker, preparing babyfood in a children's hospital. She wrote for two hours every morning, getting up at five. Although Barker is unwilling to analyse her work, she's aware of her preoccupation with islands, or part-islands. Wide Open is set on Sheppey, in the Thames estuary. Her last book is set off the coast of Devon, also on a peninsula.
Her work in progress is set on Canvey island, off England's south coast - yet another part-island. She was born in 1966 on fenland near Cambridge known as the Isle of Ely, where her father was in the Royal Air Force and her mother was a teacher. When she was nine, her family emigrated to South Africa where they lived in a whites-only enclave in Johannesburg. "It was a very scary place. Murder capital of the world. When we were there it was the heart of apartheid. You're in a sort of white bubble and the newspapers don't tell you about what's going on, so you don't really know. There was a whole series of moral dilemmas that become part of your daily life. My mother was actively involved in good things. But we were still white, and you can't leave that behind. So you were never really protected, it was a kind of artificial island. We were in a kind of strange vacuum."
Her mother worked for an educational newspaper; when that was closed down, she taught black children in Soweto. It was a time of unimaginable violence, Barker remembers, in which she was personally involved.
"The weird thing about that time, while it was contained, terrible things happened. Bad things happened. It was a violent society and I was involved in some violent situations. It was a very dark time in my life." When her parents' marriage broke up, Nicola's elder sister stayed with her father in South Africa while her mother and she went to live with her grandparents in Manchester.
"When I returned to Britain, we were involved in the anti-apartheid movement but I was still this strange white girl with a weird South African accent, so that was always a conflict in me, this feeling of where did I belong? When I was in South Africa I longed for this peaceful island that was Britain but when I returned here everything seemed so enclosed. So that's kind of the conflict in my work generally and one of the conflicts that preoccupies me to a large extent."
But there are others: in Wide Open she looks at the repercussions of violence, having an abhorrence of the pornography of violence current in film and literature. In South Africa her subject had been maths, but because the syllabus in the UK was so different she switched to English. She also switched schools again when she and her mother moved to north London. She got into King's College, Cambridge (the first person in her family ever to go to university) to read Philosophy and Law, but then changed to English, and she wrote a dissertation on teen fiction, which she then decided to try her hand at.
Then she interviewed Martin Amis for a college magazine. "He made such a positive impression. So it's people like him and Angela Carter - they gave me a taste of writing a more modern kind of fiction which hadn't been around really. There was Absolute Beginners, Colin McInnes, then there was no modern fiction until I read Martin Amis, and that was it." Barker shares with Amis a tautness of style that, in her case, is the result of continual close editing. During her teens and 20s, she says, she was extremely depressed and she's convinced she owes her success to the hyper self-criticism that is typical of the depressive. She has never written about her illness directly, largely, she says, because depressives are inherently boring.
"When my characters are hurt physically, or they express an internal pain in a physical sense - they lose a limb or do something violently to themselves - that's my way of making other people understand, because that is the pain that you feel. These internal psychological pains are like a kind of violence. It is an illness and I'm just trying to make that more explicable to people who don't understand it. "People seem to imagine me thinking about characters that are weird and following them as if they are different to me. But to me they are friends; it's a world that I create that I am centre of. I don't like that sense of me sitting thinking, `can I create a freak?' When I'm writing, I create a world that I live in and that's the place that I fit in."
Wide Open by Nicola Barker is published by Faber & Faber, price £6.99 in UK
Nicola Barker will take part in the closing event of the Dublin Writers' Festival 2000 at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, at 8 p.m. on Sunday, June 18th. Also taking part will be Eavan Boland, A. S. Byatt and Joseph O'Connor, with music by John Feeley. The festival, a celebration of Irish and international writing, organised by Dublin Corporation, starts on June 15th. Other writers featuring over the four-day festival include Doris Lessing, Pat Barker, Paul Durcan, Dermot Bolger, Colm Toibin, Seamus McAnnaidh and Inger Christensen. The IMPAC prizegiving also takes place that weekend, with a ceremony in Dublin on June 17th