Clear: A Transparent Novel Book

I don't really care for David Blaine. I don't really like his kind of dopey stoner like way of talking and most of his stunts I've always thought while kind of impressive physically I've always felt were kind of just clamoring for attention. What is wrong with that though, he is an entertainer, and he is in the entertainment business, so that kind of goes with the territory--do something big and get lots of people to watch you. Can you hold this against the man? Well sure, I can and lots of people do, surprisingly people do who probably wouldn't damn someone like Angelina Jolie for appearing on "The Tonight Show", which is also clamoring for attention but instead it's called promotion. I'd like to say that I can dislike them both equally for what they do, but I don't. I'm a hypocrite who isn't bothered by the entertainment industry in general, I think most of it's garbage, but I don't get upset over all the self promotion, so why should I get annoyed at someone like David Blaine when he makes a spectacle of himself and gets millions of people to watch, discuss, enjoy or hate what he's doing? In all honesty it's more impressive that he can sit in a box suspended over London for forty four days fasting than just about anything that anyone who shows up to be honored at the Oscars has done in the past year. But still something about Blaine annoys me, and it's not just him on TV, I can say that the man has annoyed me in my two near personal encounters with the man, once when I came within a breath of telling his posse they couldn't use cameras in our store (in that breath I realized that the dopey looking guy standing with them was the illusionist himself, and they were doing an event at the store), and the second time while I stood and listened to him talking to Karen about books he was looking for. I can't put my finger on what it is though.

At one point in Clear one of the characters says that Blaine is mirror, he's devoid of content and that he brings out the best in people who see the world brightly and attracts the negativity from those of us like myself who don't. I don't know if this is true.

Clear is a novel set in London during the last 35 days of Blaine's 44 day fasting stunt. The novel never really has Blaine do anything, he just sits there in his clear plastic box while the actions of the characters happen around him. He's there as a constant and his presence seems to change the way that the two main characters deal with their lives, one who had never even heard of Blaine before he started the stunt, and the other an opportunistic young man who initially sees the hoopla surrounding the event, and the extreme emotions it brings out in people, especially women, as a way to get laid more often by turning himself into a mirror of sorts that projects back and agrees with whatever a woman thinks about the Blaine stunt.

I have a hard time putting my finger on exactly what was really good about Clear. Barker's writing style was great, and it made me want to read more of her; and I think it's the style of the book that really drew me in. I don't really like Blaine (see paragraph 1), none of the characters are especially likable, most of the pop-culture references had to do with some kind of British Hip-Hop or Garage music that I know nothing about and in a way the story is kind of like others that you've heard before about guys and gals and all that lust kind of stuff, but still something in the book transcended all of that and made for a really tight novel, which in itself is kind of surprising if you make a cursory look at the text, it's written in a kind of blotchy style that usually makes for dreadful reading, but here it just works perfectly.

I'm looking forward to reading more of her books. If I liked a book this much that I didn't have much interest in the subject matter, I can imagine that she'll do wonders with something I'm more interested in.