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Madness and other illusions Feb 26, 2006
By Editorial I
Victor Barker is not the first novelist to explore the mental illness through fiction but his devastating portrayal of autism in Krate the Fool places him in squarely among the best, alongside Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, William Burroughs and, more recently, Mark Haddon and Wally Lamb.
Barker's writing in this and his earlier novels, The Tangier Script, The Truth of Everything and Baudin's Last Breath, is distinguished by its multi-layered textures and extraordinary imaginative fluidity. The reality his characters inhabit is tenuous at best, a carpet to be pulled from under their feet as Barker unravels hidden layers of narrative beyond superficial appearance. He is an inveterate time traveller, an invoker of the parallel realities which prowl the recesses of ancestral memory.
Krate the Fool is the perfect vehicle for Barker's peculiar brand of time warp. The story leads the reader into the very skin of Krate, a socially dysfunctional autistic savant pacing out an existence of barely contained agitation in a home for the mentally disturbed. By gentle degrees, the reader is drawn ever more deeply into Krate's abominable reality, and through that reality into the wildly colliding worlds of the universal fool in time. We witness Krate's `madness' in the guise of a court jester in Merrie England, a shaman in a Vanuatu jungle, a Sufi alchemist, a handmaid of the Delphic Oracle. Finally, when Krate's hair-raising journey brings us face to face with the blatherings of a twenty first century psychiatrist, the irony is dark indeed.
The poet, Kenneth Rexroth, described art as the reasoned derangement of the senses. The description seems particularly apt in the case of Krate the Fool. Barker's art is in the steadiness of his hand and eye as he navigates through the perilous territory of madness to the profound and touching humanity at its very core.
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