Nonetheless it does all head in one direction: to the question of what happens when Middleton and Hencher predict that Barker is about to die. Even the shifty monochrome photos that punctuate the book add an otherworldly air, somewhere between a ghost story and a WG Sebald novel.
A book like this doesn’t really need an overarching plot it’s held together with the force of our fascination for the eccentric. Indeed, the book is clear on how the premonition business attracts those at the fringes, and I don’t just mean the percipients.
#Premonitions of death come true free#
Because of Knight’s factual style he doesn’t editorialise, but if premonitions were real it wouldn’t mean simply that some people are so supernaturally sensitive to echoes of distress that they feel them in advance it would have world-shattering implications that the course of life is predetermined, that free will is not free, that time’s arrow is a fix.
Knight shows a journalistic flair for the little details that buff up a story and make it shine.Similarly made vivid are the people. You finish the book, perhaps aptly, with more questions than answers. His flair for synthesis and compression keeps the reader riveted, yet ultimately these strengths are also the source of faint niggles the abrupt, rather too convenient ending supplied by Barker’s death from an aneurysm in 1968 makes it tricky to gauge the overall impact of a book that isn’t a biography, exactly, yet doesn’t propose any kind of thesis to stand it up as intellectual or social history. When it comes to the text itself, though, Knight mostly keeps out of the way, favouring out-and-out storytelling over talking-head commentary. Knight’s account is soberly sympathetic and wholly serious, with any spookiness confined to the outsize black-and-white images dropped randomly into the text without captions I swore I could hear Delia Derbyshire’s theremin when I turned a page to suddenly find Barker staring back at me from under devilish eyebrows.
A richly researched feat of compression, it tells a tantalising tale of the unlikely interplay between the press, psychiatry and the paranormal in Britain during the late 1960s. First book showcases the gifts that make him so endlessly readable.
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