NICOLA BARKER TonyInterruptor. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Nicola Barker interrogates the nature of honesty, creativity and improvisation with sharp-eyed humour in her new novel. 

Nicola Barker is a prize-winning author. Several of her books have been long- or shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, but she is known for ignoring the usual writing conventions. Her idiosyncratic prose is full of long sentences, parentheses, italics and block capitals, and her characters are often eccentric. There has been, for example, a woman who breeds wild boars and whose daughter is a part-time nudist and pornographer (Wide Open), and a man who slept inside a horse’s carcass (The Behindlings). The characters in TonyInterruptor, however, are more-or-less normal, although perhaps more introspective and prone to philosophical argument than most of us.

The book begins dramatically. In the middle of an improvised jazz gig, a man stands up, points a finger at Sasha Keyes, ‘who had just begun what he (Sasha Keyes) felt to be a particularly devastating improvised trumpet solo’, and asks ‘Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?’

This ‘heckle’, as architect professor Lambert Shore calls it, is recorded by his daughter, India, on her iPhone and circulated on her social media account.

‘Disgruntled Zoomer’, India, is a wonderfully bolshie, articulate and argumentative teenager who considers her father to be maddening. He suspects –

actually he knows – that India often pretends not to recognise particular words he uses simply to make it seem as if he is incredibly old and therefore given to communicating in a way that holds no significance to the modern (young) mind. He is an historical artefact, a period piece. He – and his words – are antique.

They argue about ‘intellectual property’, ‘privacy, permission and who owns or controls content’ and she tells him:

‘Kids don’t look at content in the same way your generation did … For us it’s just kind of … of …’

She twirls her hand descriptively.

‘Like a pick’n’mix counter at the cinema. Because we’re social animals by …’

Another hand twirl.

‘Design?’

‘Nature. And knowledge is just a series of …’

‘Pointless memes?’

‘Nothing is truly original,’ she huffs. ‘Everything comes from something or somewhere else! Everything. So to try and own a thing and box in a thing or a picture or a thought like it’s some kind of … of building?’

She gazes at her architect father, disgusted.

India’s video might have gone unnoticed if one of Sasha’s Ensemble ‘(the Ensemble didn’t consider themselves to be “his” or an “ensemble”)’ had not picked it up, added to it his own video of Sasha denigrating the heckler as ‘some dick-weed, small-town TonyInterruptor …’, inserted the comment ‘#TonyInterruptor’, added ‘Agree? Disagree? LET’S VOTE PEOPLE’, and posted it on Instagram.

There, of course, his video goes viral. But it is the question ‘Is this honest?’ and the relevance of this to the lives of Nicola Barker’s characters that she expands throughout the book in riffs that resemble jazz improvisations.

John Lincoln Braithwaite – TonyInterruptor himself – regards his own interruption as

‘a completely spontaneous enquiry about the true nature of improvisational performance, which I suppose became, in turn, almost a part of the performance, and so – at some level – the most authentic thing about it.’

Mallory, Lambert Shore’s wife, ‘is a trained barrister’ and she wants a forensic analysis of ‘honest’:

‘To be honest? With each other? With ourselves? Do you even have any idea what that means?’

Sasha, who prides himself on meticulous practice and performance – ‘he must improvise flawlessly; to the highest possible standard’, is infuriated that his honesty might be questioned:

‘To dare to call me out for not being honest, when I am virtually the only person on the planet who actually speaks their mind – and expresses themselves creatively – without visible constraint.’

Later, however, he is taken to task by Mallory, who is high on painkillers for a broken ankle and a sprained wrist. She lists his faults at length, including ‘endless bullshit’, ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘moral turpitude’, but then seems to backtrack and suggest that they are alike:

‘I’m saying that you and I – that we – don’t pussy-foot! Neither of us. And the AWFUL TRUTH about the fucking world is that it’s ALL ABOUT pussy-footing!’

Which makes Sasha wonder if this means he is too serious:

‘Doesn’t somebody have to take things seriously, though? Does THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD need to spend all its spare time watching cat videos on TikTok?’

Are they being ‘honest’ or ‘real’? All Barker’s main characters question this in some way. India challenges Lambert over what he calls his ‘friendship’  and ‘collaboration’ with Fi Kinebuchi, another member of Sasha’s ‘Ensemble’. ‘Is it really so hard to admit that you and Fi are a couple now? To yourselves? To each other?’  For her, this is another form of dishonesty, like his infuriating habit of framing everything ‘in terms of ART and IDEAS and MEANING’. It is ‘so META’. Can’t he for once in his life ‘risk being real?’

Nicola Barker brings her characters to life but they are, as improvisations always are, disconnected from a continuous story. Sasha and Mallory do change; Lambert and Fi do collaborate over a transactional video/performance art installation that John Lincoln Braithwaite (TonyInterruptor) helps to install in a Paris gallery; but perhaps Sasha Keyes speaks for Barker when he claims that he is ‘perfectly happy to inhabit cultural corners’. ‘We are scratchy,’ he argues. ‘We are particular. We are determined. We are persistent. We don’t turn away from the difficult stuff.’ 

TonyInterruptor’s characters are persistent and highly articulate and the book may need to be read in short bursts to absorb the ‘difficult stuff’, but it is often very funny and it certainly demonstrates the dissembling, self-delusion and dishonesties of our everyday lives. As Lambert realises, ‘We’re all flawed, all beautiful, all riddled with …’  The sentence is left unfinished.

Nicola Barker TonyInterruptor Granta 2025 PB  224pp $29.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy TonyInterruptor from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: contemporary fiction, creativity, honesty, improvisation, jazz, Nicola | Barker, social media