Reading Pat Barker

Good news — I’ve now been accepted into my Master’s Programme starting September 2019, and I’ve also started working with my first client as a peer counsellor. For the last three weeks since I came back from Singapore, however, I’ve been reading a lot and, for the first time for many years, found myself completely immersed in novels. I’ve got Pat Barker to thank for that. 

I’ve come across Barker’s writing a few times over the last forty years. My first encounter was an extract from her early novel Blow Your House Down in Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists anthology, probably when I was an undergraduate in London in the early 1980s. Out of curiosity, I checked the contents of the issue again. There are several novelists who I’d later read extensively:  Kazuo Ishiguro, Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Julian Barnes. However, I can’t remember being powerfully struck by their writing at the time as I was by Barker’s. This might just be a lack of imagination on my part: I could relate to Barker’s quiet realism in contrast to Rushdie’s postmodernist pyrotechnics, her Newcastle settings that brought memories of the city where I spent my late childhood, and her direct, almost didactic concerns with class and gender, often focalised through women’s perspectives. 

I came back to Barker in the 1990s, in my early years teaching at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. At the time the Regeneration trilogy of novels – Regeneration, The Eye in The Door, and The Ghost Road – had established her reputation, and friends and colleagues were talking about them. I must have been a little late to the party because I remember reading the trilogy straight through, and also watching the 1997 movie soon afterwards. What did I like about the novels? The depth of historical research on soldiers’ experiences in the First World War, at a time that I was beginning to do archival research myself. Also the intersection with the lives of the First World War poets who I read and taught, notably Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon. Part of the reason I was teaching the war poets in Singapore at that time was the presence of a pioneering digital archive of their work produced by a university in the UK which I can’t now locate, but which may have been the basis of the First World War Poets Digital Archive . I liked the beauty of Barker’s prose and the very different voices of the characters. Curiously, Barker had moved from writing largely of women’s experiences to men’s: her central character in the trilogy is the anthropologist and psychiatrist William Rivers, who pioneered therapeutic work with shell-shocked soldiers. In the final novel of the trilogy, The Ghost Road, she embeds Rivers’ practice within his previous anthropological work, and in particular his memory of his 1908 expedition to The Solomon Island with his colleague Arthur Hocart. What intrigued me this time was Barker’s undermining of gender regimes and colonialism from the inside, her careful unpicking of the threads that held societal expressions of masculinity together. 

Fast forward to late last year, when I discovered Barker’s Noonday in the library, and resolved to catch up on her work. I started with the trilogy of which Noonday is the last volume, reading Life Class and Toby’s Room, and the world they presented, centred on the experiences of Elinor Brooke, a young artist studying at the Slade School of Art when the First World War breaks out. These books to still exemplify much of what I liked about Barker’s writing – careful research, powerful focus on the internal lives of characters, and a concern with gender. At the same time they had a faint feeling of secondariness, almost as if they were a retreading of the issues explored in the Regeneration trilogy over a decade before. One or two scenes seemed curiously similar, almost as if Barker had come back for a second look. More reflective, perhaps, but also less immediate. More adventurous was Barker’s recent The Silence of the Girls, a retelling of the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the slave woman who is the pretext for Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon. This novel was waiting for me at the library on my return from Singapore. I could see Barker’s intentions here: to retell a story that elides violence, or perhaps more accurately makes violence rhetorically permissible and indeed unremarkable, from the perspective of one who has been a target of this violence, and so make it starkly visible. The novel achieves this, but as a novel it didn’t fully work for me – and it may work for others – because Briseis is still peripheral to events, watching Achilles, and trying to understand him. It’s only with his death, at the end of the novel, that the characterisation becomes more complex and she gains greater agency. 

I also read two other novels that feature character who connects them: Border Crossing and Double Vision. If I had to recommend any of Barker’s novels of the last twenty years, I would choose Border Crossing, which features a psychologist, Tom Seymour, as its protagonist. Tom is caught in two complex relationships: a disintegrating marriage and a renewed connection with young man whom his evidence helped convict of murder in the past. In neither of the relationships are readers quite sure of the accuracy of Tom’s own self-perceptions. And reading these novels, of course, led me back to re-reading the Regeneration trilogy, twenty years after I first read it. Looking over what I’ve written, I do realise that I sound like someone with a lot of time on their hands, which is certainly true in the short-term! But reading novels, especially a string of related novels, also serves as a form of meditation, of work upon the self. 

In reading Barker’s novels, two things became clear to me, and perhaps explain why I’m drawn to her work again, despite growing awareness of some of its limitations, especially in terms of transnational perspectives and the absence of BAME characters. First of all, the core of her best work often centres on a counselling relationship, but it’s a counselling relationship, as with all relationships, from which power and other social dynamics cannot be excluded. Rivers’ own attempts at talk therapy (which to me seem curiously and perhaps anachronistically contemporary—something to research further!) are often undercut by self-doubt about his own motivation, and indeed more than one of his clients delight in turning the tables on him, and subjecting him to psychological questioning. The sessions are also embedded in larger class politics and the public politics of war and propaganda. And with this comes the knowledge of how “expertise” is inextricably bound up with social power and privilege. Rivers’ anthropological investigations are enabled by colonialism and themselves constitute a form of appropriation: he acknowledges this, but cannot escape it.  Tom in Border Crossing has given evidence at Danny’s trial in the role of an expert, but this does not free him from responsibility for subsequent events in Danny’s life, and in a larger social environment saturated with moral panic concerning child killers. When you transition from one career to another, as I’m doing, it’s sometimes comforting to think that you are giving up power and privilege: they do shift, but they are inescapable. 

The second aspect of Barker’s work that struck me is less of an idea, more of a generative image. The Life Class trilogy and Double Vision focus on the visual arts: on painting, sculpture, and photography.  A recurrent image in them is the notion of artists as part of their work, but only partially visible, a shadow or an almost erased shape buried in a landscape, or at the corner of a frame. There’s something appealing about this: a faint acknowledgment of an ineradicable presence, but also a refusal to move it to centre stage. Perhaps this is something to carry with me over the next few years, when I will have less time to think about non-academic writing, and yet when I still find myself inhabiting, among other identities, that of a writer and artist.