BARABUS

A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis-/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine.

In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.

If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris—the acerbity of Peter Weiss—and the ambiguity of Le Clezio, Fowler’s second novella is a work of disarming directness. A paean to the costs of life lived in service of the needs of others—in riverine prose cooked down to concrete—this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity.