Book Review - TonyInterruptor
The interruption is filmed by 15-year-old India Shore, who uploads the clip. Fellow musician Simo Treen, Sasha’s nemesis, likes the post, hashtags it #TonyInterruptor, and adds his own footage of Sasha’s offstage tirade. As that clip goes viral, we follow its impact on the lives of a cast of characters: Sasha, Fi, India, her parents — Mallory and Lambert — and the eponymous heckler.
Barker is adept at capturing the paradoxes and absurdities of contemporary life. She won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award for her novel Wide Open (2000), Darkmans (2007) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and H(A)PPY (2017) won the Goldsmiths Prize. Like I Am Sovereign (2019), TonyInterruptor is a slighter and more playful novel, focusing on a series of encounters and comic interactions rather than a tight plot. Barker has said the idea came to her at a concert when she wondered: “Wouldn’t it be funny if someone just stood up now and said something, and became part of the performance?”
The moment — “which we are now calling, for the sake of clarity, The First Interruption” — becomes, in the narrator’s words, “a little piece of Performance Lore; a source of ferocious interest/ contention/ amusement/ debate across at least three creative disciplines, the subject of four books — this being the third — and the root of approximately 2.5 million tweets and countless memes”.
Barker’s metafictionality is present throughout, as she mischievously flouts various writing conventions. She flits between characters’ interior monologues, uses exclamation marks and parentheses (to wander off on tangents) and conveys emotional shifts or emphasis with italics or capitals, sometimes for whole passages.
TonyInterruptor is divided into two sections — Unstable Elements and Intuitive Constructions — and spans two time periods, four years apart. Riffing on her themes — art and authenticity in a digital world, intergenerational divides, cancel culture — Barker draws us into her characters’ fragmented thoughts, the connections they make, the meanings they find in love and life. As the fallout from the interruption deepens, Sasha becomes less worried about the heckle and more concerned that Simo will claim ownership of the hashtag. Meanwhile, Sasha’s “redoubtable, self-styled ‘lady-manager’” wants to limit the reputational damage after his public put-down of Fi.
Barker revels in clever turns of phrase and comic exchanges. The scenes between Lambert, an architecture professor, and his precocious daughter India, are particularly funny. The brittle cynicism of her exasperated riposte on intellectual property is pitch-perfect: “Kids are into sharing and expanding. You know: like the universe . . . But your generation is into guarding and owning; protecting, monitoring, policing.”
Barker’s metaphors are just as vivid. Mallory’s persistence is likened to “a seagull up to its knees in sea-swell, determinedly dissecting a crustacean as it rolls ceaselessly back and forth”. At times, the narrative detours can pall, and some sentences run away from themselves, leaving the reader breathless.
Her style mirrors the free-form jazz that opens the novel. By the end, the characters have sparred, duetted together, split and regrouped — forging new, often surprising, alliances. Sasha refers to the Buddhist Lineage of Mis-steps: “it’s not the things we get right which . . . lead to enlightenment, but the things we get wrong.” His description of Mallory — “Confusingly precise and sharp — even circumspect — yet still kind of . . . of wild and unfiltered” — could equally apply to Barker’s witty, gleefully disruptive novel.
Originally published by The Financial Times