The Author naturally asked the other Nicola why she had neglected to tell her this detail (about the burrowing insect hidden in the grass) until the final day of their holiday. The other Nicola confessed that it had slipped her mind (in the midst of a terrifying, ongoing, asiatic hornet infestation). The Author then exfoliated her private parts, vigorously, in the shower.
The two Nicolas also collected a giant haul of quinces from a bush near the motorway services and the scent of these exquisite fruits on the kitchen table has permeated the later stages of I Am Sovereign.
Is The Author truly Sovereign?
Is The Author truly Queen of her own Serenity?
On the drive from the ferry terminal, through Calais, the other Nicola kept pointing to the tall, wire fences and adjacent, green patches of ground and telling The Author how on previous visits the entire area had been inhabited by young (for the most part) African men trying to find any means possible of crossing the Channel to Britain. The Author gazed, impassively, at these blank, empty, liminal spaces as they drove by in the other Nicola’s little silver Audi TT sports car. Can it be any coincidence then, that only a couple of days later The Author began removing Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo from the narrative?
What does this mean?
For The Author?
What does this mean?
For The Reader?
What does this mean?
For Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ego …
No! E-bo! E-bo! E-bo!
The Author wishes The Reader to understand that she has been AT WAR – throughout the entire novella – with auto-correct as a result of the names she has (carefully/blithely) selected for her characters.
Every time The Author writes the name Wang Shu the text is automatically corrected to Wang She. Every time The Author types the name Ying Yue the text is automatically corrected to Ying Due. Every time The Author writes the name Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ebo, auto-correct instantly tries to alter the surname to Ego. Every time The Author writes the name Avigail, the text is automatically altered to Abigail.
Imagine how The Author has cussed and hissed and growled!
Imagine how The Author has railed against this all-pervasive technological urge to conformity!
The overriding concept for I Am Sovereign is that it should take place, in its entirety, during a twenty-minute house viewing in Llandudno. The Author estimates that she has a minute or two left over to play around with. But The Author is determined that this book will be a novella, and every word that she types is extending the length of the novella and thereby transforming it into something bigger and more significant. The novella, as a form, is marvellously unobtrusive. The novella, as a form, is delightfully slight. The novella, as a form, is not too ambitious. The novella, as a form, is eminently manageable. The novella, as a form, is generally unchallenging. The novella, as a form, is unbearably cute. The Author has been prey to ‘mixed feelings’ about the novel, as a form, ever since completing her last work (H(A)PPY ) which – to all intents and purposes – destroyed the novel (as a form) for The Author.
How can you continue to live inside a thing that you no longer believe in?
That would be like praying to a God who didn’t exist, surely?
No.
No.
I Am Sovereign.
The Author just needs to hope. And she needs to love. And she needs to believe, in spite of.
The Author planned – earlier on in the novella – to end the work with Denny Neale (who was then Gyasi ‘Chance’ Ego) doing a runner with the teddy, and with Ying Due ‘borrowing’ Charles’s late mother’s bike and careering into the town on it in hot pursuit.
But this seems all wrong now. The Author can’t bear the idea of those four people leaving Charles’s tiny work room. They feel so alive to her, all standing there, pushed up, shoved up, close together. There is something so strange, so unlikely, so wonderfully intimate about it all.
It dawns on The Author, as she types this, that the room as she describes it (Charles’s work room) is exactly like the tiny study in which she herself habitually sits to write. So these four characters are actually here, are they not? In The Author’s tiny study, keeping The Author company? The Author has unwittingly brought them here. They are crowding around The Author. Look! They are crashing into her bookshelves, they are poking her with their elbows, they are oppressing her with their demands, they are breathing down her neck. They are bitching and carping and buzzing and rippling and jingling and jangling with their own sweet significance. And The Author loves them all so much, so very dearly, that she cannot bear to say goodbye to them, somehow.
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William Heinemann
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London, SW1V 2SA
William Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Nicola Barker 2019
Cover photograph © benhood/RooM/Getty Images
Cover based on a design by Alex Kirby
Nicola Barker has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
Epigraph on p. vii taken from ‘Choruses from The Rock’ by T.S. Eliot.
Used with kind permission of Clare Reihill at the T.S. Eliot Foundation.
First published by William Heinemann in 2019
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473571099
Footnote
8. Let’s eat Grandma.Let’s eat, Grandma.Commas save lives.
1 shagua means, quite literally, ‘dumb melon’.
I Am Sovereign Page 11
