Darkmans, language and style

            Let me start out by saying I was not a big fan of Darkmans.  Some of my dislike has to do with style, but mostly I just found that I didn't like it on some grander level.  Despite this, I appreciate some of the things Barker does, even if I didn't really enjoy the novel all that much. 

            Already mentioned was Barker's grammatical style, and it is both brilliant and terrible at the same time.  Some might even argue with my choice to describe it as "grammatical" style, because she eschews so many "rules" of traditional grammar.  This is not something new to us in Contemporary British Literature, but in some ways Barker's style choices seem almost more egregious than, say, Kelman, because we can almost excuse the latter as stream-of-consciousness with Kelman making appropriate grammatical choices to express this specific mode.  Barker, on the other hand, sporadically departs from traditional grammatical forms for a more subtle, pinpoint effect.  Barker's italicizing, bolding, and loose (at times) punctuation and paragraphing all have authorial intention behind them to create a specific effect in the reader.  Occasionally Barker's stylistic choices can be confusing, but the underlying idea behind her choices--to add another layer to the text through grammar--is a concept that has a lot of potential for writers.

            Barker's other admirable achievement in Darkmans lies in the novel's preoccupation with language.  We have talked before about language being an arbitrary relationship between signs and signifiers, and Barker seems keenly aware of this.  Darkmans is laced with double-meanings and authorial influence attempting to influence how the reader makes meaning of the language employed.  What I'll call "language control" begins with the first sentence of the novel ". . . Ashford; the gateway to Europe."  It is very strange that Barker describes Ashford in relation to another place, and yet stranger that Barker assigns that other place to be "Europe."  Ashford is in the county (?) of Kent, in England (Britain or the United Kingdom), part of the continent of Europe, on the planet of Earth, et. cetera.  Barker's choice to use "Europe" in her description of Ashford is significant and intentional, and representative of the type of language control Barker employs on almost any given page of Darkmans.