During the First World War, mud was where men died. It was also, occasionally,
where they were reborn. There is a scene in Ford Madox Ford's novel Parade's
End in which Tietjens, the hero, pulls free a young wounded lance corporal
who is stuck up to his chest in mud. Tietjens, writes Ford, "felt
tender, like a mother". Pat Barker has had a long-running imaginative
relationship with mud.
It clogs, kills and terrifies throughout her First World War Regeneration
trilogy. In the opening sequence of the film version (1997), the camera pans
across a silent shire of mud in which dead and half-dead men are embedded.
And mud -riverside, urban mud -also begins her new novel, Border Crossing,
in an episode that recalls Tietjens's deliverance of the young lance
corporal. Out walking one morning, Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, sees a
boy leap into the frigid and tidal waters of the Tyne. He dives in, and lugs
the boy to the mudbanks that border the river. Near "the groyne of the
bank", Tom pulls the boy to safety. "Black and glistening, he lay
there, a creature formed, apparently, of mud . . . . The boy looked like a
baby: purple face, wet hair, that drowned look of the new born."
The boy whom Tom so symbolically delivers from death turns out to be Danny
Miller, a former patient of Tom's, convicted at the age of ten for killing
and then mutilating a seventy-eight-year-old woman. After thirteen years of
imprisonment and rehabilitation, Danny is now out on parole, possessed for
his own protection of a new identity, but not necessarily of a new
personality. His suicide bid, it transpires, was staged: a ruse to get back
in contact with Tom, although it is unclear whether he is seeking help or
revenge, for Tom was the psychologist who declared Danny fit to stand trial
for murder. The relationship between Tom and Danny forms the centrepiece of
the novel.
Barker has long been interested in crimes that break taboos, that cross moral
or psychological borders. Blow Your House Down (1984) was based on the Peter
Sutcliffe murders. Another World (1999) was sidelit by the James Bulger
killing, and featured several incidents of child-on-child violence. Here,
the crime is one which violates the limits both of generation and gender.
There are several aspects of these anathema crimes which particularly
interest Barker, and Border Crossing seems to have been constructed
principally to permit her to explore these aspects; much of the novel
consists of extended dialogues between Tom and Danny, in which the nature of
evil is debated and dissected. Barker wants to know if we can understand,
explain, or even describe these crimes using our conventional diagnostic and
aetiological models. Are they, as it were, within our imaginative ken? How
does the individual memory shape and reshape the contours of the act itself?
And -the issue which concerns her above all in this novel, as it did in the
Regeneration trilogy -can a person be psychologically reborn after a major
trauma? Is regeneration (in this case of the criminal and not of the
shell-shock victim) possible?
The obvious parallel which Barker expects us to draw is with the two Bulger
killers, who are soon to be released on parole with fresh identities, after
eight years in secure units in the North of England. Their imminent
emancipation has focused the debate on the rehabilitation of extreme
criminals.
Although it is difficult to pin Barker herself down to a position, she seems
eventually to imply that for people - criminals -to be able to change, the
expectation that such change is possible must first be ingrained in the
criminal justice system, and in society.
This is a brave novel, but it is not a great novel. A chapter set in a
creative-writing retreat reads as though it was written in one. The bit-part
characters are unconvincing, and seem to be marched on as placard-bearers in
the debate. The solicitor who represented Danny, for instance, appears
briefly to declare him a "precocious little killer", and to assure
Tom that "some people act out of a disinterested love of destruction",
before disappearing back to his office. There is often a lapse from the
picture to the diagram; one feels that Barker is simply voicing the various
sides of a moral- philosophical conundrum (a problem with much of Iris
Murdoch's fiction). Though the discussions between Tom and Danny demonstrate
Barker's magnificent feel for dialogue and idiom, the segments connecting
the dialogues are generally unmemorable, written in a prose that is
flattened almost to the point of dullness. The text, one feels, could be
converted without much loss or damage into a 100-page play script. And, of
course, we take the measure of Barker's novels against the now canonical
achievement of the Regeneration trilogy, in comparison with which Border
Crossing feels definitely slender.
Despite these shortcomings, however, one leaves this novel with the sense that
a very important issue has been grappled with. "Is there something
wrong with modern England?", George Walden asked, as he back- handedly
awarded Pat Barker the 1995 Booker Prize for The Ghost Road. "Why do
our novelists shy away from us? Do we give off a bad smell, like old
vegetation? The flight from the present is becoming a general phenomenon. If
the past is another country, then we are facing a sort of mass emigration.
Nostalgia is becoming our heavy industry."
Barker later rejected Walden's indictments, quite rightly pointing out that
retrospection does not automatically default into nostalgia, and that the
present must often be read through the past. The First World War in
particular, she observed, "never becomes part of the past . . . we stop
remembering at our peril".
Nevertheless, Barker has modernized herself dramatically since 1995. Her
fictional environment, for five years the killing fields of France, has
become the modern home front -embattled NHS wards, urban violence in sink
housing estates and on inner-city streets, the trench warfare of marriages
-and in her last two novels she has squared up to some of the most
intimidating of latter-day social issues. She refuses to be horrified by
these issues, for to be horrified is to avert one's gaze. She prefers, as
Thomas Hardy put it, to exact a full look at the worst. This is to be
applauded.
BORDER CROSSING by Pat Barker
224pp, Viking, £16.99
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