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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

Pat Barker

by Roger Smith

Other literary forms

Although Pat Barker has published book reviews and the short story “Subsidence” (2003), about the Iraq War, she is known primarily as a novelist.

Pat Barker.

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(AP/Wide World Photos)

Achievements

Pat Barker is considered one of the premier British novelists to begin a career in the 1980’s. Critics praised her early novels for their gritty portraits of working-class life. The first novel, Union Street, received the Fawcett Prize in 1983. However, it was her novels about the psychological damage of combat in World War I that earned her the greatest accolades. The second novel of her Regeneration trilogy, The Eye in the Door, brought her the Guardian Fiction Prize and Northern Electric Special Arts Prize, both in 1993. Its sequel, The Ghost Road, won the prestigious Booker Prize for Fiction in 1995, and she was named the Bookseller’s Association Author of the Year in 1996. Subsequently, The Ghost Road was twice named among the all-time best Booker Prize novels.

Barker was awarded honorary degrees from English universities in Teesside, Napier, Hertfordshire, and Durham, as well as the Open University. She was made an honorary fellow of the London School of Economics in 1996. Two of her books were made into films, Union Street (renamed Stanley and Iris, 1989) and Regeneration (1997).

Biography

Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in Yorkshire, England, on May 8, 1943. She did not know her father, who was in the military during World War II, and after her mother started a second family when Barker was seven, she was raised by her grandmother and grandfather. Her grandfather, a laborer, was a wounded World War I veteran, and her grandmother worked in a fish-and-chips restaurant. Her grandmother took an interest in spiritualism and encouraged Barker to read from her books, as well as from the encyclopedia and various works of literature. From her grandparents she acquired a love of language and storytelling.

After finishing secondary school for girls, Barker attended the London School of Economics. She received a bachelor of science degree in 1965 and taught history, politics, and English to adult classes until 1970. She also enrolled for study at Durham University. She married David Barker, a professor of zoology, in 1978. They had one son, John, and a daughter, Annabel, who also became a novelist.

Barker’s early unpublished work includes novels of manners about the English middle class. She was resigned to remaining unpublished until she took a writing course from the novelist Angela Carter. Carter encouraged Barker to write about her working-class background and helped her find a publisher for the result: Union Street. Coming out in 1982, the novel was well received by critics, and she was named one of Great Britain’s best young writers by the Book Marketing Council and the literary journal Granta. Granta later placed her on its list of Twenty Best British Novelists. In 2003, Barker was named a Commander of the British Empire.

Analysis

Pat Barker’s novels are emotionally wrenching. As many critics have observed, Barker’s frank realism and attention to historical detail can equally satisfy and repel readers, often in the same passages. Barker brings readers’ attention to bear on terrible hazards: war, insanity, rape, murder, illicit sexuality, dysfunctional families, and child abuse. The prospect of violence—individual or communal, physical or psychological—gives great force to her plots. Moreover, she typically uses a third-person narrative point of view of limited omniscience. Shifting section by section from the inner thoughts of one character to another both enhances the immediacy of their experiences and constructs multiple perspectives on their temperaments. The effect is intimate and entangling.

Barker’s acute ear for dialects and individual quirks of speech is the hallmark of her realism. Through dialogue she creates lifelike characters from a variety of backgrounds: for instance, working-class women in Union Street; prostitutes in Blow Your House Down; common soldiers, medical personnel, and upper-class poets in the Regeneration trilogy; and artists in Double Vision and Life Class. In fact, it is primarily through dialogue in the Regeneration trilogy that Barker conveys the brilliance of a psychologist during his treatment of his patients. Likewise, dialogue contributes to the uncompromising horror of the rape of a prostitute in Blow Your House Down and the eerie savageness in children in Another World, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and Border Crossing.

The historical accuracy of the novels set wholly or in part during World War I received wide praise. Not only is Barker starkly vivid in portraying the confusion and shock of combat, she also depicts the struggles of physicians and psychologists to treat the wounded. She mixes historical people with fictional characters with flawless credibility and captures larger social anxieties, such as the fear gripping English women during the murderous career of the “Yorkshire ripper,” who figures in Blow Your House Down.

Sexuality is another focus of Barker’s unflinching realism, and often she treats it as a form of violence, yet there are also examples of principal characters growing closer emotionally because of sex, even when extramarital, as is the case with Billy Prior and Sarah Lumb in The Eye in the Door and Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke in Life Class.

In addition to love between characters in troubled times, Barker examines the dynamics of troubled families in ordinary times. Her early novels feature families comprising a mother and her children, the father either absent or unknown, as in Union Street and The Man Who Wasn’t There. In Another World, however, Barker considers the problems of a husband and wife who both have children from previous marriages. The children are secretive, prone to deception and violence, and manipulative; the parents must handle them with great care to avoid alienating each other.

The resolutions to Barker’s novels eschew completeness and closure; instead, characters make accommodations that set the terms for their future. In some cases, this means a compromise with beliefs. In the Regeneration trilogy, for example, a celebrated poet compromises his conviction that the war is wrong and returns to duty in combat. He later becomes a spokesperson for the generation nearly obliterated by the war. In other cases, the compromise means choosing among loved ones. In Another World, parents Nick and Fran must each send away the child from a previous marriage in order for their current marriage to succeed and their common son to survive. In most cases, there is death and guilt, if not despair.

The Regeneration trilogy

The Regeneration trilogy centers on the work of pioneering psychologist W. H. R. Rivers in treating shell shock, now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, late in World War I. The trilogy focuses on Rivers and several of his patients and their friends, some of whom, like Rivers, are historical figures, in particular the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. Several themes thread through the sequence, including antiwar protest, the origin and purpose of war literature, the horror of combat and its effects on the mind, techniques of psychoanalysis, sexuality, insanity, and relations between officers and enlisted men on the front lines. Barker particularizes these themes by switching among point-of-view characters in her third-person narrative voice; however, much of the story’s tension emerges through dialogue.

Regeneration, the first novel of the trilogy, finds Sassoon, an army officer, confined to Craiglockhart mental hospital for denouncing the war. There, he witnesses great suffering among fellow patients, one of whom is Lieutenant Billy Prior. Prior has ceased speaking as a result of the horrors of combat and because of his anger at the conduct of the war. He is one of Barker’s purely fictional characters, a man of the lower classes who has struggled into the officer ranks, usually reserved for the upper classes, thanks to his attention to duty, and his bisexuality. The reader finds that the war also exhausts Rivers as he works tirelessly to restore his patients’ health so they can return to duty. He tricks Prior into speaking again and argues with Sassoon about a man’s moral relation to the war and Sassoon’s homosexuality. Sassoon discovers a true poet in Owen, another patient, and helps him draft one of the war’s most famous poems, “Anthem for a Doomed Youth,” which graphically portrays death in combat.

The Eye in the Door begins in April, 1918. It follows Sassoon’s experiences on the front lines following his decision to return to combat in France, and Rivers’s continuing treatment of Owen and other patients. However, Prior assumes a central place in the story. The novel examines his homosexual and heterosexual encounters and his romance with Sarah Lumb, a woman working at an armaments factory. At the same time, Barker evokes the intensity of social tumult stirred up by a right-wing politician’s campaign to stigmatize and punish homosexuals and pacifists.

The Ghost Road maintains the focus on Prior. He becomes engaged to Lumb and eventually passes the evaluation of the medical board and returns to combat. So does Owen, after writing some of the most moving poetry ever about young men in war. Both die in a final campaign. Contrasting with them are Sassoon, now relegated to a minor character, and Graves, who takes a position at a training school rather than return to combat. Rivers comes to recognize that he has assumed the role of a father to his patients, and the fate of many of them in combat deeply disturbs him and causes him to reflect on the nature of his youth, his early experiences as a field anthropologist in the South Pacific, and therapy.

Another World

Another World also examines the psychological effects of combat in World War I. However, the novel’s primary theme is the intrafamily animosities that can lead to tragedy.

In Nick’s family, tensions are rife and worsening. His wife, Fran, has a troubled eleven-year-old boy from a previous relationship. Nick, a psychology professor, likewise has a thirteen-year-old daughter. Together, they have a two-year-old son, and Fran is pregnant. None of them likes the arrangement, but Fran and Nick are determined to make the family a success. They have moved into a large Victorian house to that end, only to discover that a two-year-old boy had been murdered there two generations earlier by jealous half-siblings. Fran and Nick also uncover a chilling, pornographic portrait of the original family, a portrait that reminds them of themselves.

To make matters worse, Nick’s beloved grandfather, Geordie, is dying of cancer. He is 101 years old and a veteran of World War I. Post-traumatic stress disorder still gives him horrible nightmares, which make a living hell of his final days. As Nick fears that his stepson and stepdaughter may repeat the house’s tragic past by harming their younger brother, Geordie dies a tortured, lingering death, and afterward a horrible secret surfaces. The old man’s nightmares come not just from combat but from knowing that he murdered his own wounded brother. Ostensibly, the act was to save the brother from pain, but in reality, Geordie hated him.

Geordie’s death and the revelation bring perspective to Nick on his own family problems. He and Fran arrange a solution to their family troubles, however temporary, realizing the primary danger lies in parental distraction, hypocrisy, self-absorption, and self-pity.

Life Class

Life Class addresses the role of art in World War I. It follows the experiences of three students at the Slade, a celebrated London arts academy overseen by Henry Tonks, a historical figure who was both a surgeon and artist.

Told in a third-person omniscient point of view, the novel opens with Paul Tarrant leaving the school in disgust after Tonks criticizes his drawings. Uncertain of his talent and future, he has an affair with a married model, but he is really in love with another student, Elinor Brooke, a woman intent upon making her own way in the world despite family disapproval and skimpy prospects for women artists. Also in love with her is Kit Neville, who has already gained a reputation as an artist despite being expelled from Slade by Tonks.

When war breaks out, Neville and Tarrant, both unfit for active duty, join the Red Cross. Tarrant becomes an ambulance driver, a grueling and dangerous job, and is wounded. Neville serves as liaison at a hospital for prisoners of war. Both struggle to capture in their art what they experience. Neville employs a dashing narrative style that enhances his reputation. Tarrant concentrates on the horror of the wounds that he has witnessed, and although his vivid, tortured paintings win Tonks’s grudging approval, they seem too horrible to be shown in public. Meanwhile, Brooke swears not to let the war influence her work. After she takes a risky trip to a village near the front to visit Tarrant, her paintings of the people she encounters, however, help her to mature her style. Thus, the war moves young artists in divergent directions as they struggle to make art relevant in a war whose corruption, violence, and chaos overwhelms them and causes them to drift emotionally from one another.

Bibliography

1 

Brannigan, John. Pat Barker. New York: Manchester University Press, 2005. Brannigan considers all of Barker’s novels in a critical assessment of their social realism, their examination of gender roles, their treatment of memory, and their narrative style.

2 

Falcus, Sarah. “A Complex Mixture of Fascination and Distaste: Relationships Between Women in Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down, Liza’s England, and Union Street.” Journal of Gender Studies 16 (November, 2007): 249-261. Falcus’s thesis is that Barker’s early novels portray women as trapped in imprisoning roles by their gender yet bonding with each other. Falcus examines that bonding in the light of feminist theory.

3 

Fraser, Kennedy. “Ghost Writer.” The New Yorker, March 17, 2008. Kennedy considers the influence of spiritualism in Barker’s family background on her Regeneration trilogy and other novels.

4 

Harris, Greg. “Compulsory Masculinity, Britain, and the Great War: The Literary-Historical Work of Pat Barker.” Critique 39 (Summer, 1998): 290-305. Examines how the Regeneration trilogy frames gender roles during World War I through the psychological work of the character Dr. Rivers.

5 

Kemp, Peter. “War Has Been Her Greatest Obsession, and It Looms Large in Her New Novel—But Is This Pat Barker’s Last Battle?” Sunday Times, July 1, 2007. Based on an interview with Barker, Kemp writes of the author’s reasons for returning to World War I as subject matter, and of her interest in artists of the day. Includes biographical information.

6 

Monteith, Sharon. Pat Barker. Tavistock, England: Northcote House, 2002. In a critical overview, Monteith contends that Barker’s fiction combines both individual character and the national mentality in considering the psychological effects of gender and violence in communities under stress from war, crime, or poverty.

7 

Westman, Karen. Pat Barker’s “Regeneration”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001. Following a short biographical chapter that also recounts the history of the writing of the three novels, Westmann addressed the themes of the Regeneration trilogy in detail. Includes a short bibliography.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Smith, Roger. "Pat Barker." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_10480141000009.
APA 7th
Smith, R. (2010). Pat Barker. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Smith, Roger. "Pat Barker." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.