H(a)ppy by Nicola Barker review – visionary satire of a new information age

Barker is as glorious and gnomic as ever in this vision of a dystopian future which defies narrative and typographic convention

For two decades now, Nicola Barker has been writing extravagantly ununusal books. Her subjects have ranged from a 15th-century court jester in Darkmans to the anxieties of golf in The Yips; her characters have been outliers, oddballs, obsessives of all kinds. Her last novel, 2016’s The Cauliflower, was a typically playful portrait of the 19th-century Indian mystic Sri Ramakrishna, riffing on holiness and eccentricity, the sacred and the profane.

So the odd thing about her 12th novel – a phantasmagoria in which willing submission to constant surveillance in a regulated virtual reality keeps the population happy, or at least h(a)ppy – is that it begins on such familiar ground. The trope of a society in which to deviate from the norm is to risk instant public shame is familiar from social-media satires such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle or Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, while the figure of a lone individualist resisting coercive conformism and ersatz contentment goes back nearly a century to Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.

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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2t9leTC