ANGELS AND DEMONS; or, NOT ON DAN BROWN

in the fall of 2007, after the announcement of that year's booker prize winner, i went on a daily campaign of visiting powells.com to find a used copy nicola barker's darkmans, which had been shortlisted for the prize and about which i had read in numerous intriguing reviews (though, apparently, and even accounting for my strained economic means at the time, not intriguing enough to make me want to purchase a new copy). that year's winner, anne enright's the gathering, hadn't been difficult to find secondhand -- probably because of the wider american readership it won as a result of garnering the prize -- so i held out hope for a cheap read of darkmans until time and the weight of my reading pile diluted my thrill for the hunt. i had appreciated the gathering, and newly shelved, dusty (and discounted) copies of older enright books were plenty available after her profile had been raised by the booker.

so i gave up on darkmans and, by extension, on barker, whose career i had only known as a result of her appearance on the 2007 shortlist. there's just too much to read and no use crying over it. it happened, however, that on this recently past new year's day i visited a small independent bookstore in hood river, oregon that was open despite the holiday -- probably in large part to entertain the business of tourists like my friend and i -- and came across a used copy of another of barker's books, her 1998 novel wide open. it was crammed spine up on a sale table outside the bookstore's door, and although having singled out the name of an author of interest i did briefly take it in hand before entering the store, i quickly passed on the book to explore inside. the morning was brutally cold.

my friend, i think, bought some vintage postcards. as for me, the store, which advertised "good books and bad art," didn't seem to offer much that wasn't available at the same publisher's list price in portland, and i was feeling the torpor of too much breakfast more than i felt like any concerted digging. i was satisfied to leave the bad art to vie with the shelves for other tourist dollars unmolested until i passed the sale table again on my way out. the dust jacket was grimy, but the author was of interest, and the book was only a dollar. and signed. even if it would just sit in a pile among other grimy dust jackets in portland rather than in hood river, it was worth the trip back to the register.

and so i was redeemed. don't get me wrong: i'd not once felt any pang of lingering guilt over never reading darkmans. i'd let that go. i was, nonetheless, by chance encounter afforded the opportunity to engage barker (and on my own terms of thrift and dumb luck foible), which was no bad introduction to wide open, a novel very much about the strange bittersweetness of redemption.

describing in detail the characters or the scenario of wide open is difficult without disclosing the developments of those characters' relationships and the unfolding of their interwoven stories, the very things that enforce the powerful impact of reading the novel. so in as short as possible: the action converges on shippey, an island in the english channel where ronny, one of a set of two brothers, lives in a "prefab" on the beach. nathan, the other brother, who works at the lost and found at a tube station in london, has had seemingly unrelated interactions with two of the other characters that end up on the island, one of whom, the other ronny, meets ronny the first early in the book and gradually assumes his identity at shippey while ronny becomes "jim."

nathan arrives at the island last and on the heels of connie, the other of the two principal characters that nathan meets at the lost and found, a woman whose family past intersects with his brother's and who lodges at shippey with her distant relations sara and lily, a mother and her fragile (let's call her) hemophiliac daughter. sara and lily raise boar. luke, a photographer trying to escape his vices (women, cigarettes, food and booze, in that order), is staying at the prefab next to nathan's brother's. connie's father is dead. lily's father is gone. and ronny and nathan's father was a pedophile. seemingly more for the worse than the better, it's a riotous group to get together.

the emergence of ties and revelations of interconnectedness between barker's characters is evoked in the composition of her chapters, the earliest of which are limited to the thoughts and movements of a single character and his or her direct interactions. as the action builds, however, and despite a fixed third person perspective, the characters come together in chorus, their spaces and voices brought closer on the page, increasingly juxtaposed in counterpoint with each others'. although two of the secondary characters in wide open, nathan's girlfriend margery and his coworker laura, seem to hover somewhere between aspiring leads and necessary but forgettable devices of plot, the structure of the book is otherwise tight and kinetic. the result is something like a modern combination of shakespeare's "twelfth night" and gide's lafcadio's adventures with ronny and jim doing double duty as both viola and sebastian and lafcadio and fleurissoire. in wide open, mistaken identity and gratuitous violence meet at the nexus of late twentieth century social dysfunction for a synod on the reappraisal of conventional morality, during the course of which barker's characters are laid as completely bare as her title would suggest.

the book is unarguably intense, but it's not all as dark as you might think. or it is. or so barker would have you resign yourself at least, because her only prescription for her characters' salvation is to simply keep moving on, be that by forgetting or letting go, by sacrifice or unto death. there are, in other words, no demons to be exorcised; or, rather, as one character offhandedly remarks to another early in the story, demons were just invented by humanity to explain away the bad. similarly, it's also left to barker's characters to assume responsibility for the angelic. as much as barker forces her characters to confront the evils that plague them, she insists that they find forgiveness and salvation within themselves as well.

at one point, nathan becomes fixated on a reproduction of a pietà by antonello da messina painting that he sees in an italian art book left at the lost and found. in it, a wounded jesus is supported from behind by a desperate angel. jesus' left hand is curled on his thigh as if he'd just finished masturbating. "'it's about forgiveness,' connie said, putting the book down, 'and it's about sex,'" an apt summary of wide open as well. nathan isn't blind to the significance of his fascination with the painting either: "this worldly jesus would not turn away from sin. no. he would embrace it." "this was the jesus who could forgive himself anything, and in so doing, forgive all others of their sinning."

the final chapter of wide open is devastatingly powerful in its descriptions of each character's efforts to move on, its intensity only slightly tempered by the author's defiantly unique take on "forgive and forget." that's some consolation, at least, for the new year. hopefully that worldly jesus can convince ms. barker to forgive my not buying darkmans.