TonyInterruptor (2025)

Why this one?

Simply an intriguing description on Netgalley. I’ve read nothing by Barker before and now seemed as good a time as any to start.

Nicola Barker (1966- ; active 1993- ) was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, UK. When she was nine, her parents emigrated to South Africa, where she grew up. She returned to the UK to study, completing a BA at Kings College, Cambridge in 1988. Her first published book was 1993’s short story collection Love Your Enemies, followed in quick succession by her debut novel Reversed Forecast (1994).

She was longlisted for the Booker for 2004’s Clear: a Transparent Novel (set during David Blaine’s stint living in a transparent box next to London’s Tower Bridge), and shortlisted for 2007’s epic Darkmans (losing out to Anne Enright’s The Gathering). In 2017 she won the Goldsmiths Prize for H(a)ppy, which she at the time claimed had exhausted her interest in the novel form, but TonyInterruptor (which first saw the light as a Granta short story in 2023) sees her return to the form.

TonyInterruptor will be published by Granta in August 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

TonyInterruptor begins with a simple enough set-piece: at a provincial jazz night, the quintessential British jazzer Sasha Keyes and “his Ensemble” are playing when their set is interrupted, not by your average heckler but by a character who seems to want to start a serious philosophical conversation, asking “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?”. His interruption is filmed by a Gen Z attendee, India Shore, and this video (along with another detailing a backstage interraction between the band in which the character is mockingly referred to as “TonyInterruptor”) goes viral on social media. The book explores the impact of this moment in time, and its online aftermath, on a small group of characters including Keyes’ bandmates, India Shore’s parents, and the eponymous character himself.

I began this book in an almost frenzied state of excitement. Its epigraph is a quote from Mark E. Smith about the intoxicating powers of blue cheese. It continues in an appropriately irreverent, anarchic spirit. It’s set in the world of music, and manages to both celebrate and mock the worthiness of its most intensely intense characters. Its style is somewhat of another era, willing to land hard satirical punches and seemingly unafraid of causing offence, but its interest is very much trained on the modern era of social media, algorithms and hashtags.

The two characters at the heart of the initial conflict are revealed fairly rapidly to be cut of fairly similar cloth. John Lincoln Braithwaite (our TonyInterruptor) “despises algorithms” and “does not want to be told what to consume […] He senses that culture is a conversation - a series of clumsy nudges and mis-steps - and likes it to be a shock, a revelation […] He must be challenged.” Sasha Keyes sees jazz improvisation as a reaction to the fact that the world is “fucked” and views his role as “honourable… So bollocks to the rest of it. The baaing, the bleating, the digital fucking cacophony… It will pass. It. Will. Pass.” Both initially sound vaguely heroic in their distaste for the ills of the modern world, but both have their own reactionary tendencies too - challenging the woes of the modern world with provocative but ultimately meaningless intellectualism or willing it away in a haze of artistic evasion.

The book is short, and it rapidly shifts focus away from these rather intriguing protagonists into a series of rather less satisfying diversions. Lambert Shore, who took his daughter India to the concert, and is an architecture professor, receives a lot of focus, and while he’s the locus of some pretty funny moments (largely centring on his po-faced and very Gen X lectures on pop culture to his disinterested zoomer daughter) he doesn’t really command any emotional connection beyond that. He’s connected to Keyes through a work relationship with one of his bandmates, and the interruption spurs him down a more artistic path involving a collaboration with her.

This general theme of the event’s impact on its various related characters comes together in the book’s final third, which after a jump in time sees Braithwaite in Paris involved in the production of an art installation by Lambert Shore, who subsequently attends a (less improvisational) concert by Keyes based on his new relationship with Mallory, who left Lambert after a hospital-based moment of revelation at the end of the first section. It’s an odd kind of coda which feels at once overly engineered (“everything and everyone is connected, ooooh”) and also somewhat random.

So, by the book’s end my initial wild enthusiasm had become a little more muted. It’s a book that (like some of its characters) enjoys asking questions, setting up provocations and (it must be said) taking a degree of pleasure in the befuddlement of its audience. I loved it when it was energetically setting off fireworks in this way; but I lost that love a little when it seemed to be trying a little too hard to piece together some sort of meaning from its many fragments.

Score

7.5

A thrilling ride at times, so much so that I’m very much compelled to read more by Barker. On a single read, it didn’t entirely hang together for me, but then I’m not entirely sure it was even supposed to…

Next up

We are soon entering Booker longlist season…