Two major themes, class and war, have dominated Pat Barker's fiction since Union Street (1982). At their most focused and synthesized in the Regeneration trilogy (1986-92), they re-emerge in Another World, her eighth book, in a familiar form: the memories of a plucky old member of the traditional working class, a figure who has stepped down from book to book.

From The Century's Daughter (1986) and The Man Who Wasn't There (1989) onwards, Barker has used the notion of the past leaking into the present, forever unfinished. Time, in her novels, is one eternally present moment, one character's perspective a drop in the ocean. "Suppose time can slow down", she proposes in here: "Suppose it's not an ever-rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots over them, stops the flow . . . ." (Mediums also crop up often in her books, but while dealing with them in true rationalist fashion, she always leaves a coda: a little of what comes through from the spirit realm is genuine.) The present she plunges us into in Another World is violent, cynical and dangerous. In the first few pages, we are faced with disaffected youths with furry yellow tongues, and media images of Peter Sutcliffe, Cromwell Street and James Bulger's abduction are evoked. There is a sense of things being out of control, of people running exhaustedly on emotional and financial treadmills. Barker introduces us to the reconstituted family of Nick and Fran, their two-year-old son, Jasper, and their fractious young step-children, Gareth and Miranda, one each from a previous liaison. This strand of the book is essentially a modern ghost story. The family move into Lob's Hill, an old house on the outskirts of Newcastle previously occupied by an eerily similar and equally dysfunctional Edwardian family, whose group portrait, obscenely defaced, is uncovered behind the modern wallpaper. The supernatural element is occasionally chilling; in one scene, an unknown girl, who may or may not be a ghost, looks in through the venetian blinds, "scanning the room, her movements quick and eager, like a stoat outside a rabbit's cage".

The murder of a child by children lies at the heart of the Edwardian story, and Barker's oblique comments on the Bulger case are introduced in the present day in one particular scene in which two-year-old Jasper is stoned by eleven-year-old Gareth. Barker has drawn on a real case before in Blow Your House Down, which was based on the Yorkshire Ripper killings. She has always been concerned with why people do the worst. Here, she puts Gareth, bully and bullied, a child prone to flinging himself about the walls in a frenzy, at the centre of the mystery. Her portrait of this unattractive child is unsentimental, though touching at the edges. Desperately trying not to appear babyish on a trip to the beach with his embarrassing family, he wades in the sea: "It might look as if he's paddling, but he isn't, he's just walking with his feet in the water."

Parallel to this narrative, the First World War is still happening in the nightly terrors of Nick's centenarian grandfather, Geordie, whose horribly slow death from cancer and extreme old age is carefully observed, as his memories are mined. Geordie is a male version of previous feisty old working-class women such as Liza Jarrett in The Century's Daughter and Beattie Roper in the Regeneration trilogy. Barker looks back with nostalgia, tempered with an edge of steel. In the old days the family may have been intact as an institution, but all was not well. Maternal rejection haunts the book in the story of young Geordie who survived the war that claimed his favoured brother, Harry. The soldier's sad return is the real core of the book, simple, strong and devastating. There are times when one feels that the irritating modern characters, who question whether Geordie's memory is "real" or a manifestation of "survival guilt", are getting in the way. Perhaps it does not matter. Memory, time, reality - are equally vivid, fluid and shifting.

Barker writes with power and precision, interspersing passages of description with some intrusive speech-making from her sparkily socialist characters. Her feminism is gentle, her sympathy universal. Few writers are willing to brave the deep waters she enters. In spite of her humour, she is a serious writer, tackling the mystery of evil and showing the past repeating itself compulsively. In the end, her vision here is a conventional one. It is clear that Gareth needs a proper dad and this blighted version of the family is doomed.

Another World ends on an unsatisfying note, as if Barker hadn't really finished but just laid down the burden for the time being. Perhaps she is just drawing breath before plunging back in.

ANOTHER WORLD by Pat Barker

278pp, Viking, £16.99

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