Nicola Barker may have the zaniest voice in modern English fiction. In a career that has spanned over thirty years and more than a dozen novels, she has written about a sleazy, struggling pro-golfer (The Yips), a con man who feeds his body parts to owls and sleeps inside a horse’s carcass (The Behindlings) and a twenty-minute conversation between four people in Llandudno, one of whom is cut by an oyster shell falling from the sky (I Am Sovereign). But while her subjects change, her books usually involve frequent recourse to idiosyncratic paragraph indentation, sentences in block capitals and italics. Her latest novel,
TonyInterruptor, is no different.

It’s the story of a heckle that becomes a viral meme. A man stands up at an improvisational jazz concert in Canterbury and points an accusing finger at trumpeter Sasha Keyes. ‘Is this honest?’ he asks. ‘Are we all being honest here?’ India Shore, a hyper-online teen, posts a video of this to her social media account. The band’s disgruntled pianist, Simo Treen shares it on Instagram, along with a video of Sasha denigrating the heckler (‘some dick-weed, small-town TonyInteruptor’), and the clip goes viral. The ‘First Interruption’, as it will soon be known, becomes ‘a source of ferocious interest/contention/amusement/debate across at least three creative disciplines, the subject of four books – this being the third – and the root of approximately 2.5 million tweets and countless memes’.

TonyInterruptor is a novel of hectic questions and formal tricks. If you were to lock the Socratic dialogue and the experimental novel in a basement flat with five pingers, a post-punk record and an iPhone looping Instagram reels and only let them out once they’d reached an accommodation, this would