of institutional violence, its uses and abuses, and ultimately its effects on human beings. This book is testimony to my lasting enthusiasm for Barker's work, not only in her role as talented, Booker-prize winning novelist but in her use of the novel as an instrument of social criticism, fashioning a literature that has something to say about the world we have created, occupy, and may well destroy. If, in the pages that follow, I can claim to make a modest contribution to the excellent Barker scholarship that has appeared over the years, it would be to read Pat Barker through the lens of social representation theory, those social representations that, although unreal, create and structure our everyday reality as members of a group. Paradoxically, these same social representations that create our day-to-day reality also mask reality; it is this articulation, this dilemma of social representation, which Barker probes so well. Readers looking to Barker for clear-cut, definitive answers to society's ills may be disappointed; Barker is synthetic and dynamic in her philosophy, rather than reductionist, always taking a broad view while refusing the paralysis of the doctrinaire, of what goes without saying. The questions that Barker asks are our questions, and must be asked, in spite of the complexity of human reality, in spite of multiple, sometimes contradictory responses, in spite of never really hoping to find “truth.” A society that refuses to question the dogma of what goes without saying is a static society, trapped in a continuous present, incapable of regeneration.
