Nicola Barkerās readers are primed to expect surprises, but her tenth novel delivers mind-meld on a metaphysical scale. From quiet beginnings in the picturesque English seaside enclave of Pett Level, āIn The Approachesā ultimately constructs its own anarchic city-state on the previously undiscovered common ground between G.K. Chesterton and Philip K. Dick. On the one hand, this is an old-fashioned romantic comedy of fused buttocks, shrunken heads and Irish-Aboriginal saints; on the other itās Barkerās wildest and most haunting book since 2007ās Booker Prize-shortlisted āDarkmansā.
Following previous celebrations of the enduring allure of the posted letter (āBurley Cross Postbox Theftā) and the pre-lapsarian innocence of pre-Twitter celebrity (Booker-longlisted āThe Yipsā), this concluding instalment of Barkerās subliminally affiliated ādigital trilogyā imagines a basis for the internet in Catholic theology. Set in a 1984 which seems almost as distantly located in the past as Orwellās was in the future, āIn the Approachesā offers a captivating glimpse of something more shocking than any dystopia ā the possibility of faith.