TonyInterruptor

As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives.

SAM'S REVIEW

TonyInterruptor by Nicola Barker - Sam's Review

I appreciate a good heckle. From age 9 - 15, I spent every other Saturday afternoon watching Gloucester Rugby Club and listening to cider-fuelled, West-of-England accents heckle the players and the referee with the driest of wit. I've seen many a bad heckle, spending a portion of my twenties working in a comedy club where countless fool would try and fail to out-funny professional comics. But I've never witnessed a heckle provoke introspective musing on the meaning of art or change the lives of those involved. However, that is the set-up for Booker short-listed Nicola Barker's first novel in six years, TonyInterruptor.

When a heckler shouts "Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?" at jazz musicians Sasha Keyes and Ensemble and the audience, it's caught on camera and posted to social media by self-righteous teenager India, attending the concert with her father, architecture professor and arts connoisseur, Lambert. Unfortunately for Sasha, his backstage rant about the outburst and   naming of the heckler "TonyInterruptor", is filmed by one his less than matey bandmates and joins the heckle on social media. From here, we witness the consequences for Sasha, his bandmate Fi, India, Lambert, Lambert's wife Mallory and TonyInterruptor himself, John Lincoln Braithwaite.

Barker’s cutting dialogue and plentiful use of parentheses and ellipses place us deep within the characters’ wildly digressing thoughts and opinions. The humour runs the gamut from belly laughs to appreciative head nods with wonderfully specific character descriptions setting the tone: "John Lincoln Braithwaite is like a leading character in a bad 1980s American capitalist drama… But he is also like an excellent, slightly clunky but extremely sincere first play about a demoralised primary school teacher who is struggling to nurture a gifted but troubled Irish traveller child written by a 23-year-old northern prodigy whose uncle once ran (and possibly still runs) an abattoir."

John Lincoln Braithwaite and Sasha Keys, the two characters at the centre of the storm, act as the lodestars at the extremes of the book's discussion of how we value and interact with the arts.  Sasha is the uncompromising artist – one whose refusal to conform has creatively stifled him and removed the emotion from his work. John Lincoln Braithwaite is the overly opinionated audience - a snob who does "not want to be told how to consume (or what to feel) in accordance with some finite sequence of data, a series of inferences, an automated calculation.”

Navigating the space between the two of them are Lambert and India, providing the views of contrasting generations and in doing so presenting the existential dilemma facing the arts right now. Should the arts be given away for free, "sharing and expanding", or is there a need for "guarding and owning; protecting, monitoring, policing" to give the creator control over their work, intellectually as well as financially? Barker doesn't do anything as mundane as address this directly, but instead lets the self-righteous bickering of teenagers vs parents, artists and audience members tie us in knots over the conundrum.

Alongside the arts, the question “are we being honest?” is asked of the characters. Are they being honest with themselves about their ambitions and desires? Are they being honest with each other about their feelings and histories? Mallory, Lambert's wife, sits at the heart of these questions. A woman who "loves to submerge her ferocious intellect into astonishingly mundane levels of detail", her relationship with India is fractious at best, while she and Lambert seem to co-exist as parents of India and their daughter Gunn more than as partners. This could be the normal strains of middle-aged life, or it could run deeper. As Lambert's crush on Fi, Sasha's bandmate, develops and Mallory finds her eyes drawn elsewhere, they are forced, at last, to be honest.

For two thirds of TonyInterruptor there's not a great deal to like about any of the characters. They're self-involved, over-opinionated, hyper-clichés of the liberal arts elite, brilliantly entertaining in their awfulness. But as we enter the third act of their stories, we witness a different side to each of them. Lambert’s and Mallory's backstory renders both more vulnerable and more sympathetic. Sasha dials down his "100% Main Character Energy" when he finds an unexpected muse. John Lincoln Braithwaite's militancy softens when questioned by Hawi, a gallery assistant whose face "almost feels as if it has been solely constructed for light... for joy.” Even India becomes less objectional, or at least her objectional self is given context.

It takes a writer of great skill to swing the pendulum of readers’ emotions so sharply yet smoothly. Barker's imagination and wit are front and centre in the first act, as sentences hum with mischief (Sasha Keyes' mum being named Marian Keyes, the same as the Irish author for instance). In the third act she displays her technical expertise: lessening the use of parentheses, ellipses and capitalisations to switch from the chaotic energy of the first act to a more reflective mood as the story draws to a close.

TonyInterruptor is an elbow to the ribs to remind us of the importance of the arts. It's a poke in the eye to those who place theoretical discussion above emotion. It's a comedian berating the audience, a singer entrancing the listener, an actor peeling back the curtain. It's the heckler in the audience and the retort from the stage. It's too clever for its own good and too generous not to fall in love with. It's a late contender for my favourite book of the year.

PUBLISHER REVIEW

'Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?'

You couldn't really call the man soon to be christened TonyInterruptor a heckler, but he seems to feel an unquenchable urge to disrupt and interrupt live cultural events. Who is he? What does he want? Why does he indulge in behaviour that violates the social contract?

After just such a public interruption goes viral, a small group of characters determine to find out the answers to these question, and end up learning more than they might possibly like about music, culture, relationships, Art, integrity, each other and their own endlessly disrupted and disruptable selves.

As profound as it is exuberant, TonyInterruptor is a comic masterpiece that traces the aftermath of a single event as it reverberates through the online world and its characters' lives, upending everything in its wake and posing fundamental questions about authenticity, the internet, love and, yes, truth.