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Pat BarkerPat Barker
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
Further reading on this site |
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Biography
Novelist Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire, England, on 8 May 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics, where she read International History, and at Durham University. She taught History and Politics until 1982. She began to write in her mid-twenties and was encouraged to pursue her career as a writer by the novelist Angela Carter. Her early novels dealt with the harsh lives of working-class women living in the north of England. Her first book, Union Street (1982) won the Fawcett Society Book Prize, while her second, Blow Your House Down (1984), was adapted for the stage by Sarah Daniels in 1994. The Century's Daughter (re-published as Liza's England in 1996) was published in 1986, followed by The Man Who Wasn't There in 1989.
In 1983 she was named as one of the 20 'Best Young British Novelists' in a promotion run by the Book Marketing Council and Granta magazine. Her trilogy of novels about the First World War, which began with Regeneration in 1991, was partly inspired by her grandfather's experiences fighting in the trenches in France. Regeneration was made into a film in 1997 starring Jonathan Pryce and James Wilby. The Eye in the Door (1993), the second novel in the trilogy, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road (1995), the final novel in the series, won the Booker Prize for Fiction. Another World (1998), although set in contemporary Newcastle, is overshadowed by the memories of an old man who fought in the First World War.
Her novel Border Crossing (2001), describes the relationship between a child psychologist and a young man convicted of murder 13 years earlier. Double Vision (2003), concerns the atrocity of war and two men who are caught up in its shadow.
Pat Barker was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her latest novel is Life Class (2007).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction
Bibliography
Union Street Virago, 1982
Blow Your House Down Virago, 1984
The Century's Daughter (re-published as 'Liza's England' in 1996) Virago, 1986
The Man Who Wasn't There Virago, 1989
Regeneration Viking, 1991
The Eye in the Door Viking, 1993
The Ghost Road Viking, 1995
Another World Viking, 1998
Border Crossing Viking, 2001
Double Vision Hamish Hamilton, 2003
Life Class Hamish Hamilton, 2007
Prizes and awards
1983 Fawcett Society Book Prize Union Street
1993 Guardian Fiction Prize The Eye in the Door
1994 Northern Electric Special Arts Prize The Eye in the Door
1995 Booker Prize for Fiction The Ghost Road
1996 Booksellers' Association Author of the Year Award
2000 CBE
2008 Best of the Booker The Ghost Road
Critical Perspective
Pat Barker's work never makes comfortable reading, for she chooses to explore, with an unflinching eye, controversial, often taboo subjects such as prostitution, homosexuality, child rape, mental illness, pacifism, war, and murder by minors. Many readers come to Barker's work through her best-known books, the Regeneration (1991-1995) trilogy, the third book of which won the Booker Prize in 1995. There is no doubt that Regeneration, with its attention to historical detail and skilful blending of factual and fictional characters is her most subtle and satisfying work. These novels have often been criticised as horrific, brutal, even brutish, yet only by getting close to the base, shocking, palpable detail of the First World War and the mental, as well as physical distress caused by close proximity to danger and death, can we better understand it.
If you delve further into Barker's writing, reading her earlier novels such as Blow Your House Down (1984) and Union Street (1982), you find many of the characteristics for which she was criticised in the Regeneration novels coming out, not in the heightened emotional atmosphere of war, but in more everyday surroundings and, because of this, these novels seem even more raw and honest.
Whenever you read Barker, you get a strong feeling of unease. One of the reasons for this is that whereas many writers try to make excuses for negative moral behaviour - children turn to violence or murder because they were themselves abused, women fall into prostitution to alleviate poverty - Barker does not let us off the hook so easily. We long to hear of extenuating circumstances that explain what society considers anti-social behaviour, for example that Ian, the child who murders an old lady in Border Crossing (2001), was perhaps sexually abused as a child, but Barker tells us this was not in fact so. In Blow Your House Down, Barker shows how poorly educated but otherwise normal, sensitive women can slip into prostitution to escape poverty and because it is an easier option than the harshness of gutting chickens in a factory, but she also explains how, despite the shame and humiliation, once a woman turns to prostitution, the money is easy and she doesn't really want to get out.
Barker will not let us take things at face value. Life and people, she lets us know, are far more complicated than we have been taught to think: Siegfried Sassoon in Regeneration for example is a pacifist but also a dedicated and passionate soldier and a great leader of men. The neurologist Dr Rivers, who seems an intelligent, sensitive, one might even say 'moral' person, protests little despite his obvious unease when he sits in on a nightmare therapy session with his colleague Dr Yealland.
When we read a novel, we usually look for, and receive, a character with whom we can identify, a person who, even though he may be ordinary, we can call the hero, a person perhaps who learns or grows morally through the novel. With Barker it is very difficult to find a main character to latch on to and even to like. In the Regeneration trilogy we try to do it with Dr Rivers. He seems kind and sensible, but at the same time he is (to many modern eyes at least) morally weak, as he puts duty to country first and sends patients back to the front and to almost certain death despite moral scruples that the war might be wrong. We search for a strong lead from Sassoon, but again are confused when the noble pacifist agrees to go back to fight because his men need him.
Prior, with his violent father and fastidious mother and his search for human warmth in both hetero- and homosexual affairs is, alas, an unlikeable person. Iris, the fifteen stone Middlesbrough housewife with the heart of gold and a love of bairns appeals to the reader, yet she beats up her husband and refuses for a time to have her unmarried pregnant daughter in the house. Even the plucky child psychologist in Border Crossings who might be a likely hero candidate has impotency problems and is unable to talk to his wife.
Dialogue, tone of voice and the fact that the way a person speaks often belies the way he acts also help to create an aura of menace. When we first hear Ian, the child murderer in Border Crossing talking, we are struck by how articulate he is and how well-educated he sounds despite having been in prison for many years. Some of the most violent characters speak with sibilant voices. We are shocked by the man in Blow Your House Down who likes prostitutes to urinate on his face: 'He's very nice you know...He doesn't say "piss"...He says "wee-wee"'.
Humour exists in Barker's books, but it is almost always of the blackest kind - the prostitute who muses when a client open his flies and lets loose a cloud of talc that she is 'more likely to get silicosis than VD' or the fanatical Theosophist in Regenaration who 'spoke throughout in mock medieval English - lots of "Yea verilys" and "forsooths" - as if his brief exposure to French horrors had frightened him into a sort of terminal facetiousness'.
Physicality plays an important part in the novels. In her earlier works, Barker gives quite detailed descriptions of dilapidated living conditions, of the viaduct in which the prostitutes work, the park where the child meets her molester. In her later works her physical descriptions are more condensed and maturely handled, she describes a scene with a few broad brushstrokes, then illuminates it with an acute physical detail. There are always strong references to touch, and particularly to smell. The boy who finds the body of a dead woman is searching for material on a rubbish dump when his 'fingers encounter something that has the consistency of soft cheese', characters who are lying or about to do evil things often give forth a sweet, sickly smell of sweat. As often with Barker, things are turned around, so that smells usually considered attractive take on negative connotations - the murderer in Blow Your House Down for example sucks on violet-scented sweets because his teeth are rotting, in Regeneration we hear of how the patients cannot bear sweet smells like the scent of lime trees because they remind them of decaying flesh.
Though Barker's books are not for the weak-hearted, there is the chance that we may learn from them not only more about how the human psyche reacts under pressure, but also more about ourselves. In the case of the Regeneration Trilogy, perhaps by facing up to the extremes of man's inhumanity to man and its aftermath we might better understand it and, just as importantly, never forget it, so that it stands as an example for humans to learn from. As Barker said, on receiving the Booker Prize in 1995 'The Somme is like the Holocaust. It revealed things about mankind that we cannot come to terms with and cannot forget. It can never become the past'.
Amanda Thursfield, 2002
For an in-depth critical overview see Pat Barker by Sharon Monteith (Northcote House, 2002: Writers and their Work Series).
Further reading on this site
Vote for the Best of the Booker
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Booker Prize: Pat Barker , Peter Carey , J. M. Coetzee , J. G. Farrell, Nadine Gordimer and Salman Rushdie are all in... more... (12/05/2008)
Contact information
Publisher (General enquiries)
Hamish Hamilton Ltd
c/o Penguin Ltd
80 Strand
London WC2R ORL
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7010 3000
Fax: +44 (0)20 7010 6060
http://www.penguin.co.uk
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Agent
Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd.
18-21 Cavaye Place
London SW10 9PT
England
Tel: +44 (0)20 7373 8672
Fax: +44 (0)20 7373 6002
http://www.aitkenalexander.co.uk
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