Review | Book reviews: guru-busting fiction by Nicola Barker; a dystopian history by David Means
By Nicola Barker
(William Heinemann)
★★★★
Novels by English writers about eccentric Indian mystics are quite the thing. Last year,Stephen Kelman’s Man on Fire presented Bibhuti Nayak, who could withstand levels of physical discomfort that usually constitute torture. The Cauliflower, by the gloriously eccentric Nicola Barker, provides a character study of 19th-century guru Sri Ramakrishna, albeit one after Laurence Sterne’s heart. If you haven’t read a Nicola Barker novel before, you’re either in for a pleasant surprise or days of bafflement. Her narratives whizz and pop in all directions. The Cauliflower begins decades before Ramakrishna (“as yet unborn, but already floating like a plump and perpetually smiling golden imp in the navy blue ether”) and questions whether he was a good man, a comic character or something weightier: a charlatan, a heroic visionary or a fool. The investigation is largely mediated through Hriday, Ramakrishna’s nephew, who manages his uncle’s earthly self while his mind roams more ethereal realms. Barker is the perfect writer to swerve back and forth between our world and wherever Ramakrishna is exploring. “It is both sweet and sour/Made with lemons and it fizzes.” This could be Barker describing her own prose to a tee. Memorable, complex but not to everyone’s taste.
