Pat Barker and the Mediation of Social Reality By David Waterman

Troy: “Although the family is often seen as private, or even constituting the private sphere, and war as a public, often national endeavor, Barker's novel breaks down any simple division between the two and lays bare how war is all pervasive in everyday family life, both in the past and in the present” (102). These heinous crimes and the traumatic memories that they foster become collective and intergenerational through the family. In Another World, human minds and bodies bear the traces of the experience and the family based transmission of these traumatic memories, which become legible to others in the real world, through organic symptoms like aphasia and sleepwalking, or in an uncanny way, through contact with ghosts. This very legibility, however, calls into question any objective definition of reality, a reality where the time of “then” and “now” and the space of “there” and “not there” become inextricably linked.

Barker's next novel, Border Crossing (2001), is a story of complex and shifting identity, where “who I am” is defined by past events but also by the present environment as well. “Who am I” is also defined by the subject's current role within the community and society's perception of that position, especially in relation to the power and legitimacy of institutions like the legal system, and—as in the trilogy—its annexation of the institutions of medicine and psychology in the service of the state. The two main characters, a psychologist and his patient (a boy convicted of murder), illustrate the permeability of borders that otherwise might seem fixed: between guilt and innocence, child and adult, justice and rehabilitation, past and present, patient and doctor, fantasy and reality. Ultimately, we see that identity is always interdependent, existing in these grey border regions of unstable social relationships; we can never think of identity outside of the larger context, just as we can never define a subject's “true” identity as though it were fixed, individual, and absolute. Border Crossing, Brannigan tells us, “is concerned from the beginning with the problems of seeing and understanding clearly, with the very difficulty of representation…truth depends upon perspectives altered by time and space…[that] problematises the relationship between memory, consciousness and truth” (“Pat Barker” 142). Summers-Bremner calls