Pat Barker

Pat Barker's fiction distills twentieth-century preoccupations with gender and sexuality, the family, crime and violence, and the human propensity for evil in fictions that combine the national with the local and the personal. Barker (born 1943) is an iconoclastic writer who addresses those aspects of society that are disturbing and distressing. Her stories transgress traditional boundaries between genders and classes, and between roles such as doctor and patient and criminal and victim; the stories break open the border between life and death and time and place so that the hauntings that occur in her novels are cultural as well as physical emanations of traumatic past events. For example, in novels that take World War I as their backdrop, Barker explores the psychological chaos suffered by individuals, but also explores war itself as a traumatic event, the effects of which reverberate down the decades. In Another World (1998), she creates something of an antifamily saga in which fratricide and other violent resentments combine in a powerful response to Victorian rhetoric about the sanctity of the family and its reworking in the 1980s as right-wing sound bites on “family values.”

In her clear-eyed depictions of the dispossessed and disappointed in her early work, of soldiers suffering from war neuroses in the Regeneration trilogy, of the contemporary family and the institution of marriage in Another World and “Subsidence,” or of middle-class professionals at work or in grief in Double Vision (2003), Barker is discerning of the ways in which larger contexts and ethical problems determine the most quotidian of encounters, and always provides imaginative, gripping literary fictions. The Early Work
Pat Barker first came to literary prominence in the 1980s for her uncompromising depictions of male violence against women in Blow Your House Down (1984), and of working-class women making do in Union Street (1982) and Liza's England, formerly known as The Century's Daughter (1986). Barker's early work propelled her into feminist circles. In the 1970s and 1980s, feminist publishers, such as Carmen Calil at Virago, broke new ground; strategically separating women's writing from men's fulfilled a feminist need to discover writing for and about women. Not only were stories by neglected novelists rediscovered, but new voices such as Barker's were valued. She was named one of the Twenty Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 1982 and began publishing with Virago, encouraged in writing her first novel Union Street by another best-selling Virago author, Angela Carter. Carter advised Barker to write about what she knew best, and Barker's first four novels are set in the region where she grew up, the northeast of England, and reflect aspects of her upbringing in a home dominated by women where she was raised mainly by her grandparents. Although she eschews simplistically biographical readings of her work, aspects of Barker's formative years resonate as signature themes through the fiction: the importance of women and the elderly as carriers of stories, the experience of war at the front and at home, spiritualism as a by-product of a collective need to remember the dead, and the significance of family—Barker never knew her father.

In the early work, Barker is a social realist writing out of a working-class tradition in British fiction that she felt had largely disregarded women. She has often been praised by readers and critics for her facility for capturing ordinary speech and for giving voice to groups that have traditionally been rendered silent or deemed inarticulate. She sees this emphasis on speech and dialogue as a form of recovery of voices and characters elided in fiction about the British working classes by D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, for example, so the working-class women and girls who only hover at the edges of their novels and essays are retrieved and find place in Barker's stories. Her women characters have complex interior lives, and the significance of her creation of articulate working-class women in British fiction was recognized when she won the Fawcett Prize for Union Street, awarded for making “a substantial contribution to the understanding of women's position in society today.” The New Statesman referred to Union Street as “a long overdue working-class masterpiece,” and her first three novels were republished as Virago Modern Classics in 1996.

Barker does not celebrate women for their feminine warmth or sisterly friendships. Rather, she takes a position in Union Street and Blow Your House Down that for many working-class and poor women the second wave of feminism changed little. Her women characters remain at the mercy of their biology, often having limited access to birth control, and finding themselves regarded as less than human by those people that society charges to protect them. When a prostitute is attacked by a client in Blow Your House Down, a police inspector is dismissive: “Well look, dearie, we want him behind bars even if you don’t. The next girl he attacks might be somebody decent.” Barker is penetrating in her barbed criticisms of social inequities and prejudices, often exposing and debunking myths of working-class harmony. But she is not without humor; it would be a mistake to assume that the early novels that deal with economic deprivation or feminist ideas are dull or depressing. Barker is very funny and very telling. In Union Street, for example, a pregnant young woman tells her alarmed boyfriend that “old wives’ tales” like gin and hot baths do not work, and, in any case, she only has a tin bath, not a bathroom: “If I start boiling meself to death in front of the fire don’t you think me Mam’ld notice?” Barker's humor can be earthy and it can be wry and witty, depending on the ideas it carries, so that in Liza's England, a bright woman in her eighties in Margaret Thatcher's 1980s delights in undermining a doctor trying to assess her faculties: “He asked … who was the Prime Minister. I told him I was trying to forget.” Shifts and Continuities
It has often been mooted that Barker changed direction when she focused on war in The Man Who Wasn’t There (1988), as if there were two “Pat Barkers,” a women's writer and a writer on “universal” themes. Consequently, her decision to move from Virago Press to Penguin in 1987 has been read as indicative of such a shift, especially by those reviewers who felt that Barker found her “proper” subject matter in masculinity and World War I. Barker did create powerful war novels, as acknowledged by the Guardian Prize for Fiction for The Eye in the Door (1993) and the Booker Prize for Fiction for The Ghost Road (1995). However, from the very first, Barker equated poor women's communities in postindustrial Britain with the camaraderie of men in the trenches in her focus on different communities operating under duress and the threat of violence. The carnage of war and the long-term effects of men putting themselves on the front line of battle receive detailed exploration in the trilogy that is Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. Nevertheless, violence was always a significant feature in Barker's oeuvre, as in the rape of a child in Union Street, the murder of a prostitute in Blow Your House Down, and the ransacking of Liza's house in Liza's England, during which a gang of boys leave the old woman for dead. Billy Prior, Barker's most vital and transgressive character to date, muses in The Ghost Road that “Murder was only killing in the wrong place,” as he is expected to lead his men in battle. Assumptions about patriotism and moral surety are shaken up in Barker's war novels, as are assumptions about typical masculine behavior. When men endeavor to communicate their feelings to one another—father and son, patient and therapist, fellow soldiers, or lovers—the conversation is rarely finished to either person's satisfaction. W. H. R. Rivers and Prior, the main protagonists of the Regeneration trilogy, are particularly noteworthy in this respect. Both doctor and patient are emotionally disabled insofar as they are living in a period during which they were conditioned to cope with warfare with silent fortitude. Barker breaks open such expectations, especially since, as Rivers observes, “The War that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale their mothers and sisters had scarcely known.”

Gendered identity is porous, and Prior's bisexuality is only one of the ways in which Barker plays out her idea of men as divided selves. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1896) informs any reading of Prior's struggles as a double agent in The Eye in the Door, for example. Expected to expose conscientious objectors and antiwar activists as criminals even when they are friends, Prior is tipped over the edge by the pressure, until he struggles with a pathological splitting of identity that leaves him exhausted and in need of Rivers's psychiatric help. The psychological rift Prior suffers is an idea to which Barker returns in Another World and Border Crossing. Underpinning her novels is the changing history of psychiatry: the Freudian treatment of “shell shock” through the talking cure, as epitomized by Rivers; the psychotherapeutic conversations between Tom and Danny in Border Crossing (2001); and the emphasis on post-traumatic stress disorder that colors Double Vision. Barker shows that while the terminology may be new, the condition is not, and she critiques populist “therapy culture” as spurious shorthand for more complex solutions, as when child psychologist Tom loses his professional objectivity while treating Danny but appears on a TV talk show as the ubiquitous expert on social maladies.

While preoccupations coalesce as themes across the corpus of Barker's work, her perspective has changed slowly. In her early work, Barker refuses the reader the comfort of a middle-class view, describing working-class life as a vat with smooth, slippery sides from which there can be no escape. Class relations changed radically during World War I, bringing the Labor Party to prominence in 1918, and in the Regeneration trilogy, class antagonisms fuel tensions between “temporary gentleman” Prior and the middle-class officers: doctors at Craiglockhart War Hospital where he is treated for neurasthenia by Rivers, and later at the Ministry of Munitions in London where he operates as a spy. In the later work, the protagonists’ view is undeniably middle class: historians, psychologists, artists, and journalists denote Barker's interest in media representations of war and crime. There are other shifts, too. At the end of Liza's England, the terraced street that Liza clings to for decades is bulldozed to rubble, whereas in Border Crossing, Barker describes the renewal of the docklands as part of a Newcastle Initiative Scheme. The shift from focusing on a postindustrial malaise—a form of declension in the 1970s—to urban renewal in the 1990s traces a similar turn taken in British city planning and development. Barker makes history and social change visible, and the region is often a metonym for her wider social concerns.

Barker is more than an uncomplicatedly “regional” writer; such terms work to limit a writer's range and scope for readers when Britishness, as T. S. Eliot pointed out in “Notes Toward a Definition of Culture” (1948), and by extension British fiction, is inherently fused with notions of regionalism so that regions form national culture rather than existing in liminal relation to it. Not only does Barker explore urban life, funneling the social effects of a crumbling economy through individual characters, she delves into village and rural settings. In Double Vision she shows that country life amid “greenwellied Christians” can be as internecine as in any urban center. Barker is a very British novelist, but that is not to say that she automatically confines herself to that milieu. Her fiction encompasses wartime France and early-twentieth-century Melanesia—most specifically, the Baring Straits, the site of W. H. R. Rivers's anthropological explorations—in the Regeneration trilogy. And in Double Vision, war-torn Bosnia and Afghanistan are salient to the story she tells, as is the 2001 trial at The Hague of Slobodan Milošević for war crimes. The effects of global events are felt as powerful emotional traumas in the local circumstances Barker describes. Living History
Reading across Barker's fiction, one is stretched from the 1890s to the present in stories that draw on British social history and that draw in characters from school age to old age. Yet it would not be accurate to describe Barker as a historical novelist. History is a vast and encircling pressure on the lives of her characters so that they become living archives, as in the case of octogenarian Liza Jarrett in Liza's England and Geordie, the hundred-year-old World War I veteran who speaks for a generation in Another World, a novel whose epigraph, “Remember the past won’t fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future,” is a succinct précis of the ways in which past events, such as two world wars, influence Barker's novels. Liza feels a powerful need to pass on her story of working-class life to her social worker, Stephen, so that he will remember it and understand its significance on the eve of the miners’ strike of 1984, which became a year-long battle between the coal industry and the government. Liza's own experiences—a husband traumatized and a brother killed in World War I, and a son killed in World War II—are inevitably bound up with Britain's changing fortunes in war, the interwar Depression as it affected the coal industry, and, finally, the recession of the postindustrial 1980s. In each historical moment Barker explores, lives are decimated by war and unemployment and are truncated by poverty and illness. Liza's stories are prompted by her age and also by her need to bear witness to the historical texture of the everyday; like the majority of Barker's protagonists, she is ordinary, and this is her importance. The first edition of Liza's England was retitled The Century's Daughter by Barker's publisher in an effort to reinforce the interdependence of the private life with public history. But Barker's preferred title privileges Liza over the century she describes and is, therefore, reflective of both subject and method. In Barker's fiction, history resides in the characters, each holding a precarious place in an unstable social landscape.

Barker captures what it means to live in the “shadow of monstrosities,” a phrase she first used in Another World but that infuses each of her novels. The prostitutes in Blow Your House Down are frightened they will become a serial killer's victims in a story that recalls “The Yorkshire Ripper,” Peter Sutcliffe, holding communities in the northwest of England in a stranglehold of fear from 1975 to 1981. The focus on murderous children in Another World, Border Crossing, and Double Vision recalls the “unthinkable” murder of toddler James Bulger in 1993. Barker has explored a number of zones of conflict: gender battles, and the tension between soldiers and governments via Siegfried Sassoon's public protest of 1917 against the prolonging of the war for political ends. Ethical quandaries such as this underpin the Regeneration trilogy of novels. The novels were published in the 1990s when commemorative concerns and millennial debates about war dominated the news, and when the last veterans of World War I were dying, and their stories with them. As so often in her fictions, Barker succeeded in tapping into the public consciousness with a subtlety that resonates far beyond the merely topical.

Historical figures, such as the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the military psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, are interwoven in her novels, yet it is important to note that while Barker's research on their lives infuses her characterizations, they are inventions as much as reclamations, endowed with psychological depths that she imagines for them. Similarly, Barker purposefully deploys language in self-conscious ways, sometimes deliberately using anachronistic words like “sexy” to describe a World War I soldier's visceral excitement in the moment of battle. In this way, she ensures that the reader is aware of the persistence of the meaning of such actions in the present rather than comfortably consigning them to history. Debates around the theories and politics of representation—language, art, photography, cinema, journalism—have begun to infuse Barker's most recent work. Examples of her interest in such issues can be detected in her early work, from the significance of Renaissance painting for a soldier traumatized by war in Liza's England, to The Man Who Wasn’t There, where a schoolboy borrows images of the father he never had from 1950s war films until his cinematic fantasies dominate his everyday life. However, in Double Vision Barker's focus is the role of the foreign correspondent writing of war alongside a photographer's and a sculptor's relationship to their subjects: war, religion, and death.

Barker's work is intensely visual, which has led to film adaptations of her work. The first, Stanley and Iris (1988), bears little relation to Union Street, set as the film is in Detroit and starring a lithe Jane Fonda as Iris King, a huge, heavyset woman in the novel, and only one of a chorus of characters. Yet the veteran director Martin Ritt was attracted to Barker's dialogue and to her shrewd disquisition on class and economics, and this much, at least, remains. Much more successfully, the Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon's film Regeneration (1998) was critically acclaimed, with Allen Scott's screenplay staying much closer to Barker's original story.

Barker's forthcoming novel, Life Class (2006), begins in the spring of 1914 in a life class at the Slade School of Art taught by Henry Tonks, and the novel takes as one of its key images Leonardo's drawing of Vetruvian man, an indication of how important the human body and its representation will be to this story of love and loss in wartime. Barker's characters wrestle with the problems of how—or whether—one should represent the “truth” of war, and whether it can only ever be communicated through representations. As she wrote in The Eye in the Door, “In the end moral and political truths have to be proved on the body, because this mass of nerve and muscle and blood is what we are.” Violent death not only is depicted, but also is censored by those who witness it, as well as by the societies that create the circumstances in which war takes place.

In novels that are ambitious in range and hugely popular with the reading public, Pat Barker began as one of the few overtly political novelists to claim mainstream attention in the 1980s. She built on this reputation to create a monumental testament to World War I in the 1990s novel sequence, which is made even more memorable when read alongside a variety of the many intertexts that enliven its texture, from Owen and Sassoon's poems and Rivers's essays, to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—all of which are revisited through Barker's contemporary lens. In her most recent fiction she continues to create character-driven stories in which history and memory inform the perplexities of the psyche and the anxieties that encroach on everyday life.