Pat Barker may be the most important progressive novelist to reach full artistic maturity in the past 10 years. The more famous she becomes, however, the less frequently do critics acknowledge her as an ardently political writer. Border Crossing, her ninth novel--this one a crime thriller set in contemporary, urban England--is likely to cement the misunderstanding that Barker has become apolitical, a classic writer on "the human condition," or, worse, a "safe" woman artist in middle age who turned to writing only after bearing her two children, eventually found fame, and lately writes about families and ordinary life.
Just a decade ago, reviewers perceived Barker as a radical feminist who wrotegritty, committed novels about England's industrial north. "I had become stronglytypecast as a northern, regional, working-class feminist ... label, label,label," she wearily told The Village Voice in 1991. Barker's image changed when she published a celebrated trilogy of World War I novels primarily about men: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and TheGhost Road (1995). As the awards rolled in--including the Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's highest literary honor--her earlier political stance was forgiven, or forgotten. Regeneration and its successors, novels that looked serious and male, could be lumped into the familiar category of "antiwar." And an antiwar book is a book that anyone can love.
But this way of praising Barker's work misses its essence. When Barker wroteabout men disciplining other men, men falling in love, dissenters escaping socialstrictures or informing on one another, she wasn't just writing about history. Tosay Regeneration is antiwar was like saying that Toni Morrison's Beloved is antislavery. Barker's trilogy anatomizes regimes of gender and discipline that underpin the way we live now; it is a consummately political work, undeniably feminist, passionately intelligent, eminently readable.
Critics have never fully believed that "the personal is political." YetBarker's subtle novels, which interweave social and domestic drama, give thatslogan tangible meaning. Every intimate scene--every relation, hostile orkind--prepares the ground for violence or commitment. Her new book, BorderCrossing, is smaller in scope than the trilogy, and subtler and quieter than some would think a political work has any right to be. It's a crime novel that is only peripherally about crime-- a deep meditation on liberal values in the form of a thriller. Border Crossing returns to the paradox inherent in so much of Barker's work: How is rehabilitation possible if it takes place in a society that may not be good enough to reward a new self? But this time around, Barker exhibits a complex awareness of the flaw in individuals that can threaten any hopes for a new beginning: the problem, beyond all politics, of evil.
Border Crossing swiftly builds up a world of conflicting social and personal responsibilities. Psychologist Tom Seymour averts a suicide by pulling a young man from the filthy River Tyne; he then learns that the man he saved is Danny Miller, who as a boy went to prison for murder partly because of Tom's expert testimony in court. The state mechanisms that put Danny away 13 years earlier are working now to place him back into society. The young man attends university; he is oddly magnetic, hostile, bright, handsome, and possibly manipulative. Counselors and teachers who have worked with Danny since his conviction attest both to his charm and to his deviousness. Tom sympathizes with the boy's effort. Because Danny never received the counseling he deserved after his incarceration, Tom agrees that he'll do the sessions now.
But the more he learns about Danny's past, the more he must question his faithin the system and his own equivocal role in the boy's fate. The solitaryconfrontation between the two men, in pages and pages of psychiatric encounters,sits at the heart of the book. The therapy accelerates toward the half-repressedmurder of Lizzie Parks, the elderly woman Danny threw down a flight of stairs andsuffocated at age 10--an ultimate picture of wasteful violence, motiveless andincomprehensible.
The larger story is that of the shadowy borderlines of violence itself. As thedirector of the Youth Violence Project in a depressed northern city, Tom sees themost brutal (and brutalized) children who wash into the drift net of the juvenilejustice system. Michelle, raped at age eight, bit off the nose of a fostersibling. Ryan and his mates threw a security guard down an escalator. Perfectlysane, these children talk constantly about "justice." Any insult must be avenged:
Many of the children, and most of the adolescents he talked to,were preoccupied--no, obsessed--with issues of loyalty, betrayal, justice, rights(theirs), courage, cowardice, reputation, shame. Theirs was a warrior morality,primitive and exacting. Nothing much in common with the values of mainstreamsociety, but then they came from places that had been pushed to the edge: sinkhousing estates, urban ghettos.
But the children's values, of course, have everything to do with "the values of mainstream society," even if the two sets don't coincide. Loyalty and betrayal, rights and reputation, are as much the principles of the boardroom as of the juvenile detention center. Some citizens follow them to social success; others, like Tom's patients, into the arms of the police.
Border Crossing examines the causes and cures for violence without diminishing the story's suspense. Barker has produced a first specimen of what we might call the "social services procedural." It is a rich rewrite of the police procedural, one of the classic subgenres of the detective novel, in which the novelist renders the nitty-gritty details of police practice and we see how detection is done. There, investigators, beat cops, pathologists, and laboratory technicians all work together to catch a killer, and justice always remains on the side of the pursuers. Here, in Border Crossing, Barker shows the opposite: how the state can work to save a person, to release (rather than catch) a human being.
A radically different cast of characters substitutes for the usual vengefulprosecutors and dogged homicide detectives of crime fiction. The heroes are thetough-but-sexy parole caseworker, the world-weary public defender, the femalenurses and paramedic, policemen, reformatory teachers, and, of course, Tomhimself, the brilliant state psychologist. To describe the book as a tale ofpublic servants risks making it sound like some sort of government apologia or"inspirational" novel, depriving it of its depth. But not to catalog thereversals puts the reader in jeopardy of missing them entirely. The charactersare so natural, the drama so forceful, that we can forget that Barker isconsciously constructing a political alternative to the detective novel. She putstogether a cast of heroes who reward the traditional desires for suspense,character development, and teamwork but inhabit a public realm where the braveknow how to care rather than punish.
In 1938 the novelist Virginia Woolf completed the political tract ThreeGuineas. Even today, it is the least loved of her major writings; upon its publication, it was anathema. Woolf had already argued for feminist equality and recognition of women's contributions in the genteel Room of One's Own; with Three Guineas, her message became more urgent. Facing the threat of Adolf Hitler abroad and Oswald Mosely's uniformed paramilitaries in England, she saw the real enemy literally "at home." Masculine impulses to war, any war, and to the oppression of women were identical. What was denounced as fascism in Europe was hailed as good order in the English household. Men believed wars would save civilization, but their civilization was a mask for tyranny. A feminist analysis required the analyzing of men.
This goes some way toward explaining why what may be the most importantfeminist novels of the 1990s, the Regeneration trilogy, are almost entirely about men. Women figure into the narratives as dissenters, realists, workers, lovers--as powerful characters. But it isn't primarily women, after all, who have to change. Virginia Woolf had praised just one male figure in ThreeGuineas for escaping the taint of maleness--Wilfred Owen, the young doomed poet and soldier. Wilfred Owen, appropriately, begins Barker's historical Regeneration trilogy, as he undergoes treatment for war trauma at a mental hospital in Scotland. Barker's books can be seen as an extension of Woolf's final project--performing a kind of therapy on male culture.
Craiglockhart War Hospital, the setting of Regeneration, happens to be the workplace of the neurologist William Rivers, the real-life humane father figure of the trilogy. His perverse assignment from the War Department is to prepare shell-shock victims to return to the front. Wilfred Owen becomes his patient, as does the soldier, author, and antiwar dissenter Siegfried Sassoon. But Barker reserves her greatest attention for a cast of fictional young men who fill out the portrait of a society where male codes have broken open. One among them, Billy Prior, emerges as a hero: a bisexual rebel, both working-class and an officer, a brave soldier and an acquaintance of pacifists who crisscrosses the border between worlds.
The trilogy shows what it would be like to think through the contradictions ofmale power by living them in a time of heightened exposure. Its picture of World War I reveals men who are briefly rendered helpless--trapped in trenches, exhibiting hysteria, taught to form loving domestic bonds with one another. It details women who are partly freed from home--entering munitions factories, grasping at independence, seeking temporary partners among doomed young men. The mobilization of England for war provokes a crisis of gender, sex, and loyalty. In The Eye in the Door, Billy Prior seeks the informant who landed his old pacifist friends in prison and unconsciously becomes an agent of their persecution. Women on the home front suffer the indignities of the "voluntary police," made up of other women. Homosexual London confronts fierce repression. All begin to internalize the "eye" of power; they spy on themselves.
Antiwar, Barker surely was; but from the trilogy's first pages, she explicitlyrewrote earlier generations of antiwar literature, by Ernest Hemingway, DaltonTrumbo, or Wilfred Owen himself. Hemingway had already turned the hospital intothe scene of war, for example, in A Farewell to Arms--an innovation that television viewers later saw banalized on M*A*S*H. In these hospital narratives, grand historical conflicts devolved into private tragedies. Characters withdrew to a private world of heterosexual romance or basic pleasures or simple refusal. War was pointless or mad. "War is hell" became a principle as comfortable as any moral from Aesop.
Barker's characters, crucially, can't just withdraw. Society will not allowher outsiders and nonconformists to negotiate any separate peace. They travelthrough an iron world of law and manners with a grim double-consciousness.Barker's World War I isn't an aberration in society, a purposeless wound on thebody social; it manifests and exploits the essential, in-built brutalities ofEnglish society, uncovering what ordinarily is hidden. Her gay heroes expressthemselves at their peril and play it straight to survive. Her soldiers, who hatethe war more than anyone, return to their comrades at the front. Her pacifistseither endure or join hopeless plots to fight the orders of the state.
This surely is the characteristic Barker approach, to explore the public inthe private, and then--always, irresistibly--to return to public commitments.George Orwell is her closest relative in the English literary tradition in thisrespect. At the trilogy's end, The Ghost Road asks for a rebirth of social principles. "It was almost easier now," Dr. Rivers declares, "to ask a man about his private life than to ask what beliefs he lived by." If society had been opened up like one of the bomb-gouged grand houses of London, it needed to be put back together again.
The uniqueness of Pat Barker is her ability to recast the most familiarstories as urgent and political. By taking up literary forms we think we know,turning them upside down, and somehow righting them again, Pat Barker keeps thetask of rebuilding alive within an edifice shaken by critique. Since the trilogywas published, Barker has been asking questions about the tenets men and womenlive by today. In Another World (1998), she juxtaposed a composite family of the latest vintage--complete with divorces, remarriages, stepchildren, and kids born out of wedlock--with a grotesque painting of a Victorian clan that uncomfortably resembled it. The painting's subjects, previous inhabitants of the modern family's house, destroyed themselves in a scandal of repressed passions, hatred, and crime. Using the ghost story as a template for asking how the contemporary family is haunted by its past, Barker found both hope and caution in today's principles--approving the new family's freedoms but concerned with the precise ways it fragments.
The principles most at stake in Border Crossing are the liberal belief in rehabilitation and in what is called "moral perception"-- this latter topic is the subject on which Tom Seymour is writing a book. Since the children in his studies somehow fail to acknowledge a distinction between right and wrong, the temptation is to wonder if they are permanently defective, blind to what others see. Or, as Tom witnesses every day, are there inconsistencies in society's morality that threaten a child reared in the wrong place--in a slum, an abusive home, a "warrior" society?
As it emerges in the sessions, Danny's past suggests the limits ofexplanation. At 10 years of age, the boy committed murder. Nothing in hischildhood could fully explain the act. If he was abused--well, as Danny himselfsays, "I'm determined I'm not going to say, 'I was abused, therefore ...' Becauseit's not as easy as that." But the abuse set the stage for violence. A life ofgrinding misery on a chicken farm, regular beatings--these were the facts of theyoung boy's childhood. So was the horrific role model of Danny's brutal father, aveteran of army service in Northern Ireland and the Falklands who reared his sonon grim stories of slaughtering the enemy, killing for England. The boy's pastwidens the meaning of his crime without excusing it.
Just as the psychological sessions between Tom and Danny will seem familiar toreaders of the Regeneration trilogy ("Danny Miller" sounds suspiciously like "Billy Prior," with Dr. Tom Seymour sitting in for Dr. William Rivers), Barker's themes in Border Crossing extend from her earlier work. She writes again about the social reproduction of violence. Maleness is still at issue: Tom's role as Danny's psychiatrist is to create a nurturing relation and fill in where Danny's murderous, masculinist father failed so badly. The scene in which Danny is pulled from the mud of the Tyne is transparently one of rebirth. But that Tom should be sexually unable, or secretly unwilling, to father a child himself--the cause of his split with his wife, Lauren--shrouds this project of new life in doubt. Must suspicion accompany the bringing of any child into the world? Tom, for his part, has to decide about Danny's future in order to get right with himself: to sustain his confidence that bad deeds can be contained and redeemed, and also to make sure his own hand in Danny's childhood incarceration didn't contribute to the damage.
The novel comes down to this question: Can Danny be saved? A liberalconception of the criminal acknowledges nuanced connections among the person, thesociety that produced him, and his wrong act. It's not simply that there are"bad" people in the world who must be punished. Environment helps shape humandestiny; the individual is something more than his crime.
But the novel's complex take on bad deeds and a "bad" self also makessuccessful rehabilitation--especially after the most brutal, baffling, andunmotivated of crimes--that much harder to imagine. Once we abandon the idea thatsinners can be just "converted," as Barker's characters all have done, we're leftwith the massive effort of re-creating a human being. So rehabilitation reliesnot on miracles, but on a task that is always risky, a task that theoverstretched state may not be able to carry through. Plus, an imperfect society,where the parolee returns to poverty and brutality, may never be a fit place forrehabilitation to take root.
It is Danny, finally, who poses the question "Do you believe in evil?" to hisfather figure near the end of the book. And Tom gives the expected answer:
"In the metaphysical sense? No, I don't. But as a word to describecertain kinds of behaviour, I've no problems with it. It's just the word we'veagreed to use to describe certain kinds of action. And I don't think it's analternative to other ways of describing the same things. There's no logicalreason why 'mad' and 'bad' should be alternatives."
"And people? Do you think people can be evil?"
"I suppose if somebody's entire life is dedicated to performing evil actions,yes. But if you mean yourself ... Killing Lizzie was an evil thing to do, but Idon't think you were evil when you did it, and I certainly don't think you arenow."
There are evil acts, not evil people. This is the liberal line. And it ought to be the correct one, the one a decent person should be obliged to speak--at least given Tom's, or Barker's, or our own commitments to human possibility and rehabilitation. But Border Crossing, it seems fair to say, does believe in evil. That is, the novel acknowledges a point at which all certainty stops. Why Danny's first 10 years should have led him to commit a random murder, when the same environment would have left another child scarred but socialized, will always be a mystery. Some fatality--beyond the combination of surroundings and upbringing and temperament--closes its grip on certain sufferers and not others. Some offenders can return to society and slip gratefully into a new life, while others will be trapped in the past. Realizing this is no source of comfort to those who nevertheless know to do the right thing. Tom is left to remember, at the novel's end, that out of optimism, responsibility, or foolishness, he has given in to the unknown and let Danny loose on the world. Social hope walks a razor's edge in Pat Barker's books; she wants us neither to be less hopeful nor more illusioned than we are.
Border Crossing is a masterly, lovely book. Barker's literary method comes up through the popular novel, not down from the avant-garde. She uses a plain style, prose that has an earth-tinted palette and captures the place of human nature in crumbling cityscapes. The dirty Tyne, flowing among warehouses, bedded in mud, is her setting for the human action of rescue. The cement and barbed-wire structures of the prisons appear against a backdrop of ancient standing stones and moors that dwarf all human vanity. What makes Barker so exemplary, as a writer and as a social critic, is her ability to think both poles of any situation at once--good and evil, male and female, the supposedly ugly and the beautiful. Hers is the politics of serious thought. It's an impassioned dispassionateness, a viewing of issues from every side. And one doesn't want to let the fact that she is saying so much, so delicately, make it seem that she is saying--politically--little definitive at all.
