H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker

I CAN'T BEAR IT! I MUST
TELL THE STORY OF MYSELF!

Hmm. Do you ever find yourself not knowing what to think, reading something and being bemused and affected but totally unsure? Now, this sounds like the majority of what I remember of my life to date – ask me a specific question about what I felt or why I did something and an opaque veil drops quickly across my mind’s eye – but it is exactly what I felt about this book by Nicola Barker, her 13th novel if I’m not mistaken, and the one she said in which, “I effectively felt as if I’d destroyed the novel for myself.”*

That’s partially because, in this novel:

...the story itself is the destructive element. The thing you’re reading is the thing that’s not permitted. So, the words themselves are a breach of something, the telling of the story is what’s wrong, and the urge to tell it is what continues.**

So, you might assume, quite correctly, that I’ve been reading around the subject, mostly in the Guardian (because they love her, a LOT), to find a bit of context for how I feel about this book.

And I’m none the wiser.

There is a point somewhere in there, maybe half-way to two-thirds of the way through, perhaps the point where Barker herself admits it goes a bit batshit, where I genuinely thought I would give up. It might be where the text itself just explodes, disintegrates, and I wonder just how much of it I would have to skip to get back to something I could follow. But then is that just me being very prosaic and old-fashioned? Needing a solid followable narrative for any sense of enjoyment? I don’t think so, but you might.

Plotwise, we’re in a future where the world is no longer beset by floods and disasters caused by the heedless exploitation of finite resources, and where it seems most people exist in a virtual reality – I wasn’t sure on this point, but there is very little description of physicality outside a brief description of how smooth everyone is now – where their thoughts and feelings, how few of which they are permitted to have, are tracked and displayed on The Graph, which itself is a reassuring monotone unless “dangerous” emotional words arise which cause a “pinkening” of the flow. The text of the book also changes colour, but it takes some time for the reader (me) to figure out how this works as there isn’t just pink – there is purple and blue and possibly another colour which I can’t remember. This in turn leads to more drugs being administered – Marx’s das Opium des Volkes perhaps? Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk (I know this particular Keats quote doesn’t fit here but fuck you, I just quoted Keats) – or worse, an adjustment of Ocular Devices which certainly sound like some sort of punitive spectacles (the future of Meta’s Oculus Quest goggles perhaps?). And guess who is fucking up the equilibrium? That’s right, it’s narrator Mira A, a typical naif character in socio-political fantasy novels, one whose burgeoning awareness of the cage of her existence informs the (exploded) narrative of the book. Mira A’s contribution to The Graph causes what she describes as a bruise, and of course corrective action must be taken!

Okie-dokie, I think you’re up to speed with where this is all going. Ah, but here’s the curveball – Paraguayan guitar music! You would not have guessed that, would you? It is the works of Agustín Barrios, who when dressed in traditional Guarani garb performed under the name Nitsuga, which provides the soundtrack to this book. Barker suggests listening to his collected works in her foreword, but I didn’t, and I suspect you won’t either. When last I looked (and it must be nearly two years ago now, as of Feb 2025) he didn’t have much uploaded to Spotify in any case. Mira’s investigation into his history is one of the catalysts of the story, and the history of oppression of the Guarani people through the suppression of their native language is a complement to the general theme of the novel, which as I had no true sense of what it was given I was a mite confused, I asked Co-Pilot to identify and its answer was as follows:

H(a)ppy by Nicola Barker is a fascinating novel that explores themes of control, surveillance, and the quest for perfection in a dystopian future.

It’s not wrong, in so far as the novel is fascinating, and I might add challenging. Barker admits she didn’t know where to go next after finishing this, and I didn’t either, but for some reason my next stop on meandering bimble through her backlist was The Yips, partly because it rang a bell and partly because I could get a hardback for next to nothing as an ex-libris Llyfrgell Rhondda Cynon Taf copy. More on that later (probably much later, and don’t hold your breath for a significant up-tick in my general comprehension – or perhaps appreciation – of that one), but back to H(a)ppy, and I don’t have much more to add except perhaps a quick note on the parenthesised title: brackets, as I would have called them back when I lived in West Wales as a teenager, indicate an argument in coding and override algebraic order in mathematics, so serve here as an indication that there is a glitch in happiness.

And maybe it’s that simple.

*https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/11/nicola-barker-if-i-have-a-life-philosophy-its-ferocious-innocence

**https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/22/nicola-barker-books-interview-love-island-happy

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