Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

Although Barker was already well-known for her “working-class” novels, it has been with her World War I trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995, awarded the Booker Prize)—that she solidified her reputation and gained a much broader readership. The trilogy is often concerned with the effects of nonmasculine, nonheroic behavior—especially, but not exclusively—during a time of national crisis. In Barker's trilogy, “them” refers to those who do not conform to the heroic, masculine ideal—hysterics, homosexuals, and pacifists—who are often treated as dangerous outsiders. They are treated in this manner largely because of the way they are misrepresented and feared within the hypocritical society-at-large, as the character of Billy Prior recognizes. Society needs an “other” to bond the “us” (see Laing 92). Peter Hitchcock underscores this point: “For Barker, the dilemma of representation is not a psychological or philosophical conundrum, although it can be discussed as such; rather it is a symptom that seethes in forms of socialization” (7). Those who deviate from the socially accepted norm are often treated as though they threaten the larger population with a contagious disease, which in a sense they do, although the disease is social rather than biological. This disease—the nonrespect for dominant collective representations—must then be isolated and “cured” in psychiatric hospitals and prisons, institutions that police the limits of acceptable behavior in relation to a socially defined standard. Those whose interests are furthered by maintaining the status quo make every effort to ensure that the contagion does not spread, that unpatriotic voices are not heard, or if they are, that their cowardly, nonconformist message will be defined as mental illness or moral turpitude, and thus denigrated in the larger social environment.

The collective aspect of memory, especially as it reconnects history with organic, living memory, comes to the fore in Barker's next novel. Another World (1998) leads us on an uncanny voyage, with World War I in the background and the problematic histories of two families—one Victorian, the other contemporary—and their crimes of fratricide and infanticide. The Victorian, “Freudian” setting allows for a certain critique of the boundary between family and war, according to Maria Holmgren