Barker, Pat (1943- ) novelist

Born Patricia Margaret Drake to a working-class mother and unknown father in Thornaby-on- Tees, Pat Barker was brought up by her grandparents. She was educated at the local grammar school, and in 1965 she earned a B.S. degree from the London School of Economics.

Barker was nearly 40 when her first novel, Union Street (1982), won the Fawcett Prize and she was instantly recognized as a strong new voice. Barker has a faultless ear for dialogue, and her language, at once earthy and poetic, is brutally blunt and direct.

Barker’s first three novels—Union Street, Blow Your House Down (1984), and The Century’s Daughter (1986)—concern working-class women. Union Street comprises seven stories about seven women living on a street in the shadow of a factory in a northern postindustrial town. The characters range in age from 11 to 70, their successive tales representing seven stages of a woman’s life from adolescence through old age. This book was followed by a novel based on the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper. Blow Your House Down centers on the Ripper’s victims, terror- stricken prostitutes; each of four parts presents one woman’s story.

The central character of The Century’s Daughter is Liza Jarrett, the “sole remaining inhabitant of a street scheduled for demolition.” Almost as old as the century, she tells her life story to a social worker. Liza figures, says scholar Sharon Carson, as “Barker’s barometer to measure the country’s afflictions, from the irrevocable losses of war to the unraveling of family ties and the gradual dissolution of community.”

Barker next turned to novels addressing the experience of men at war, blending fiction with fact, notably in the trilogy encompassing Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995). The New York Times rated Regeneration one of the four best novels of 1991. The Eye in the Door won the Guardian prize, and The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize.

Barker’s novels employ a technique she calls the “compound eye,” with a possible pun on “I.” Characters become multifaceted through a presentation that permits them to tell their own stories yet also indicates how others see and react to them. The view of life that emerges is hardheaded, realistic, unsentimental, and remarkable for its candor and integrity.

Regeneration opens with war hero Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Soldier’s Declaration,” his refusal (in July 1917) to return to the front because of a conviction that the war is evil, unjust, and insane. Persuaded by fellow poet Robert Graves to submit to a medical examination, Sassoon is classified “mentally unsound” and sent to Craiglockhart, the military hospital under Dr. William Rivers that specialized in treating shell shock. The fictional character Billy Prior, subject of the succeeding volumes The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, was conceived by Barker as Rivers’s alter ego.

Well-chosen imagery unifies the trilogy. In Regeneration the “unspeakable” horrors soldiers have witnessed cause some to become mute, like witnesses of the Holocaust. The image of the human eye dominates The Eye in the Door: The eye of the title signifies unrelenting surveillance. As Regeneration handles hysteria at the front, its sequel addresses hysteria on the home front, showing pacifists, homosexuals, conscientious objectors, and feminists hunted down. In The Ghost Road, Prior, returning for his final tour of duty, finds “ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making.”

Battles do not feature in Barker’s war novels. Instead, she penetrates the battleground of men’s minds, where subterranean forces drive them toward mass slaughter. Carson observes that Barker “has an ingenious capacity to associate differences and similarities, and to demonstrate that it is often the differences that are similar.”

Other Works by Pat Barker:
- Another World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.
- Border Crossing. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

Works about Pat Barker:
- Alexander, Flora. Contemporary Women Novelists. London: Edward Arnold, 1989.
- Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993.