It's moments like these when I delight in the fact that I don't currently review books for a living, and have no need to maintain any level of journalistic respectability. Because right now, at this moment, I really can't resist saying: ohmigod, you guys, Nicola Barker's Darkmans is soooo awesome.

And that wouldn't fly with everyone down at the NYT/LAT/WP/GU. Or with the folks at n+1, who would certainly grimace at my "phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satisfaction." (Sorry to bring up that old chestnut.) But this is a blog. Welcome to my exhibitionistic — is that even a word? — purr. Don't worry: I had to look up "phatic" too.

And, quite honestly, it's the best I can do. In his own take on Darkmans at The Guardian blogs, Sam Jordison noted that it's a difficult book to describe, and I agree. If I were to tell you anything about it, expose basic plot points, I can't help but feel that I'd irresponsibly ruin it for you.

But just a peek won't do any harm. I will tell you that the book is inhabited by a jester, and the jester's jokes abound. It's a creepy, funny book. To wit, my favorite line, written as a description of the mother of one of the characters:

Jabba the Hut with a womb, chronic asthma, and a council flat.

Barker, to use a phrase popularized by Ricky Gervais, is 'avin' a laff.

It's also a book of salad phobias, dead birds, pimped-out Ladas, and marshes. The book had me on Google Maps, zooming in on Dungeness, on Winchelsea and Bexley. Searching for petrified forests and dark woods. Watching from above over bends in highways. Seeking out a book called Scogin's Jests, delighted to find that it reall exists. A woman after my own heart, Barker even mentions Lithuanian and Old Church Slavonic as part of the myriad of languages that continue to pop up throughout the book. Language is key: it's the string that ties the past to — and also separates it from — the present. That, and the preoccupation with history, whether from one hundred years back, or just last week (I'm looking at you, Best Week Ever).

Nicola Barker herself is a television watcher, a lover of pop culture and literature (both Flannery O'Connor and East 17 get referenced), and I found in her a kindred spirit — yes! it's okay to be fascinated by history and still enjoy watching reality television. This alone does not make you a bad person.

Popular culture is a jumping off point for Barker, the impetus for her stories. Clear, the book she published before Darkmans, was based on the sympathy she felt towards David Blaine, who, having suspended himself over the Thames in a clear box, had found himself subject to the good people of London throwing things at him and taunting him during his month long residency. Barker was disgusted by and ashamed of her people's display of inhospitality, and thought she'd write a book about it. (I giggled when I heard of his reception in London. "That's about right." The Husband and I went to visit David Blaine in his water chamber in Lincoln Center when, coming home to discover that every inch of our apartment had been covered in dust from irresponsible workmen, we wanted to throw things and needed something bizarre and other-worldly to calm us down. So we went to stare at a man living inside a giant fishbowl. And didn't throw anything at him.)

Darkmans follows in the same vein of cultural fascination, using the construction of the Chunnel as the jumping off point for this book. But it's more than just the Chunnel, it's the collision of all the modern British preoccupations that come with the forward charge of time: new built subdivisions, trainers, text-messaging, eating disorders, religious revelation, prescription drugs, Darfur.

The British press was all over this book, raving from the moment it was published. But hardly a mention from this side of the pond since it was published just over two weeks ago. The first and only review I've been able to find appeared this weekend in the LA Times (a review that gives away a heck of a lot of the plot).

Oh yes! The New York Times said something about the book when it was shortlisted for the Man Booker:

the saga of an eccentric English family whose members become preoccupied with the past at the expense, perhaps, of the present

Excuse me while I process that. "At the expense, perhaps, of the present." Hmm. "Eccentric English family." "Saga" for Pete's sake. Like I said, let me process that. Because, honestly, if I had read that line, I'm not so sure I would have ever picked up this book.

Thankfully, I'd already heard good things from London. And the bookseller in Three Lives (I think I'll start calling them my "pushermen"), watching me linger undecided, one finger resting on the front cover almost listlessly, but electric, like Adam's touching God's, eyes squinting in decision-making concentration, encouraged me to take the book.

"Just go home and start reading!"

"But 838 pages... and I have so many other books I'd promised myself I'd read..."

"It's the only way."

And I did. And you know that moment when you meet someone and you click and this person is so witty and smart that you never want to stop talking to her? And what's more, she has this incredibly bizarre way of viewing the world that you find absolutely fascinating... She, my friends, is Darkmans.

Sam Jordison also wrote about the dangers of writing about a book while still in the "very first flush of enthusiasm." Obviously I'm still in that first flush. My cheeks are rosy. My hair a bit mussed. I'm writing with my head in the clouds, a cartoon character with flapping toes and heart-shaped eyes. But I couldn't hold back from writing about it, because, ohmigod, you guys...