undefinedPhoto courtesy Pat Barker

The writer Pat Barker lives in the small city of Durham, in northern England, behind a blue door in one of the rows of nearly identical brick houses in the city center. She’s just a short walk from the famous Norman cathedral on the terraced banks of the river Wear, and less than an hour from the town where she was born. Barker’s husband, David, who died in 2009, taught zoology at the university here, and the couple’s son and daughter live within driving distance.

This slight remove from literary high society suits Barker, who has pursued a singular career. Her start was with the feminist press Virago, writing tough stories about the kind of working-class women she grew up with. She then turned to the past with the Regeneration trilogy (1991–95), blending fiction with the true stories of World War I–era figures including the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the anthropologist and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers. A second war series, the Life Class trilogy (2007–15), took a similar approach to the surgeon and artist Henry Tonks and the circle of painters he influenced. In 2018 Barker made another departure, retelling the Iliad from the point of view of a slave girl. She had just received galleys of that book, The Silence of the Girls, when we met at her home in April, and was with some trepidation looking forward to the publicity events. “I do feel that part of the process of promotion that makes it”—she paused, her voice dropping dryly—“worthwhile, just about, is that you get ideas back from audiences or discussions that you have. Somebody always has a take on something that you haven’t seen.”

Barker is a slim woman in her seventies, with short hair dyed a reddish brown and shrewd hazel eyes. In person she has a crisp but gracious demeanor and an eloquent speaking voice. She was born to a single mother in 1943, a time when that mattered, and refers to herself now “in terms of the English class system—bloody boring thing” as a “chameleon.” Her living room, where we had our first conversation, has blue carpeting, a tile fireplace with framed photos on the mantel, and two large tanks of fish. It’s open to the room where she writes, sitting with a laptop in a worn, blue-terry-covered chair with an ottoman, overlooking a classically English view of rooflines and chimneys. 

Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, the last volume of the Regeneration trilogy. Her focus on the early psychiatric understanding of trauma was a subtle and far-reaching innovation in literature about war. These days, she says, her pace has slowed. “I am seventy-five all but a few weeks. You don’t have—I hate to break this to you—you don’t have as much energy,” she said. She writes every day, and traditionally has considered breaks from work, even when it’s not going well, to be “skiving,” but now fewer of her days are long ones. “These days I think even if I am skiving a little bit, perhaps I should do it.”

Valerie Stivers

 

INTERVIEWER

You grew up in a poor and working-class milieu like the one inhabited by the characters in your early novels. I’m assuming that the people around you weren’t highly educated and weren’t becoming writers. How did that happen for you?

PAT BARKER

I suppose I went to grammar school, and I had good English teachers. But reading at school is probably not enough—I had the public library as well. The libraries are suffering badly today, but from that kind of background, without the public library it would have been difficult to become a writer. Just by visiting the library and picking things at random, I read an enormous lot of all kinds of things, a lot of good stuff and a lot of nonsense, and I think both were valuable.

We had books at home, but they were strange books, a series of spiritualist manuals. My grandfather—my biological grandfather—was a spiritualist medium, and he died before I was born, but he left these books behind. They were manuals, setting out a spiritualist faith, all done in the form of question and answer. I never shared that faith, but it crops up in my books over and over again. 

I’m interested in the idea of the medium as a sort of analogue for the novelist, especially the historical novelist. I read something by Alice Walker, and I can see that she sees herself as a medium—she is actually hearing voices.

INTERVIEWER

When the writing is going well, are you hearing your characters’ voices in that way?

BARKER

Oh yes, absolutely, yes. They rabbit on endlessly, and only a small part of what they say ever gets into the book. The reason why I find this period where I’m about to start promoting the last book so difficult is that I’m trying to hear voices from the next project, and right now the voices from Silence of the Girls are interrupting that.

INTERVIEWER

You knew from a young age that you wanted to write?

BARKER

By the time I was ten or eleven, I knew. I wrote my first novel then, a sort of Ruritanian romance full of scenes that I thought were very steamy and naughty. I showed it to a friend. I went for a walk while she read it because this was the first time I’d shown it to anybody. She was absolutely horrified. She said, I didn’t think you were like that.

INTERVIEWER

You do get attention, both positive and negative, for writing well about sex.

BARKER

You either pretend that sex is something that is totally outside of normal experience, or you accept that it’s part of that experience. My criterion for writing a sex scene is, Do people know more about this character, having gone through this scene with them, than they did when they started? If they know more, then that scene is fully justified. I don’t think I’ve ever written a sex scene that was there just to titillate—it’s always about the revelation of character. But, you know, I was once interviewed on local radio, and the woman said, it was something like, You seem so nice and normal. If I bumped trolleys with you in the supermarket, I’d think you were quite a nice woman, and yet you write all these mucky books. And I thought, All these mucky books! Why am I bothering?

INTERVIEWER

I’ve always thought that it’s larger than just writing well about sex. You write well about the body. You are precise and graphic and talented in evoking the feeling of people who have war wounds or are injured physically.

BARKER

Well, you see, this is what we have in common with the Bronze Age or World War I. We have these bodies that have actually not evolved during that time, as far as we know. The truth of the body is for me the most important route into the historical past, and into the mythic past as well. You have five senses—well, more than five, at least six because you have this sense of gravity, of where your body is in space—but that’s all you’ve got as a writer. There is literally almost nothing else. The whole thing rests on this incredibly simple foundation.

INTERVIEWER

Speaking of generations, not in the Regeneration books but in several of your standalone books, you’ve written compellingly about old or extremely old characters. Why does that interest you?

BARKER

I was brought up by my grandparents. I think it’s as simple as that. Writers write out of their early years, after all. After the age of fourteen, perhaps, very little impinges. You change when you decide to be a writer, and I made that decision comparatively early. It was my parents’ generation that seemed a bit weird to me.

INTERVIEWER

You had difficulty getting published at first?

BARKER

By 1982 I’d written two novels, and had both rejected. These were sensitive middle-class-lady novels, the kind of thing the person who bumped trolleys with me in the supermarket would have been quite happy to think I was writing. I’d worked quite hard on them, and when they were turned down I simply sat down and asked myself, What is the book that you would write if you absolutely knew you were never going to be published? Union Street (1982) was that book. 

I think in the end what continual rejection did for me was drive me back into the basics of who I was, which was a woman, Northern, working class. And of course there was this business of the missing father and my parents not really having known each other. That is very much at the core of my personality, I think. Union Street was exploring lots of those things in a voice that was quite different from the voice I’d used in the two earlier novels. I stopped compromising. There was no reason to compromise because I was writing for myself.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve read that you had a writing breakthrough when you were a student of Angela Carter’s.

BARKER

I met Carter at a course run by the Arvon Foundation, in which the poet Ted Hughes was heavily involved. It now has three residential places, and the one I went to was at the farmhouse Hughes lived in with his partner Assia Wevill, the one who killed herself with her daughter. It’s very intensive. The students do the cooking. It’s relatively isolated so you’re not going out to the pub in the evening, you’re reading your work, or there’s a guest speaker, or tutors read their work. I was in my thirties. 

I wrote part of Union Street while I was there. Toward the end of the book, where there’s the miners’ strike and the two old ladies who are on opposite sides, I wrote that there. It was part of an exercise, actually. So it was a breakthrough moment for me, but I think the Arvon courses are breakthrough moments for a lot of writers.

Carter was a good teacher in the sense that she was capable of appreciating work that was very different from her work, and not all teachers can do that. An awful lot of teachers just end up telling you what they would have done with what you’re trying to do, but she wasn’t like that at all.

INTERVIEWER

I see parallels between the destruction of people’s homes, both literal and metaphorical, in early books like Blow Your House Down (1984), and the larger-scale destruction of homes and lives wrought by the wars in your later books. 

BARKER

When I was growing up, I was thirteen or fourteen, perhaps, there were massive slum-clearance programs in Stockton. People were moved out of the old streets for miles around, and those houses remained boarded up and empty, and the streets empty and echoing and deserted, for what seemed like quite a long time. That is not unlike a battle zone and it is an image that has haunted me.

INTERVIEWER

As a child, were you aware of the kind of violence and domestic violence you portray in the books going on in the houses around you?

BARKER

There wasn’t any violence in my upbringing directly, but it was not far away. There was one woman in our neighborhood who had seven children by, as far as anyone could make out, seven different fathers. And the council kept trying to take the kids into care. At one point she actually got the carving knife and chased the social worker down the street. They were much more wary about trying to take the kids into care after that! 

From about the age of seven or eight, I suppose, I did have, at fairly close hand, the violence of father against son. It was never directed against me, since I was brought up by my grandparents, but my stepfather, the man my mother married when I was seven, was violent to one of his sons. That boy responded by joining the army the minute he could, at the age of fifteen, and he himself subsequently became violent. That’s interesting to me—the way violence passes from generation to generation within a family. 

Also, our lives were shaped by public violence in the sense that my father died in one world war and my stepfather fought in the one before that. There were these absences.

INTERVIEWER

I knew you grew up without a father, but I didn’t realize he’d died in the war.

BARKER

It’s what I was told when I was growing up. I subsequently found out that he hadn’t, it was just that my mother chose to remove him from the record.

INTERVIEWER

She got pregnant in the Wrens?

BARKER

Yes, the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She wasn’t married to my father—she didn’t really know him at all, and she didn’t want to have to answer questions, so she presented herself as a war widow. She was a great fantasist. She believed what she wished to believe.

INTERVIEWER

And when she married again you chose not to live with her?

BARKER

I don’t think there was much of a choice. They didn’t have a house—there was nowhere to put me. They had a back bedroom in a pub, which they got rent free because my mother did the cleaning. By the time they got a house I’d been living exclusively with my grandparents for two years. And in any case I didn’t get on with my stepfather. He wasn’t an easy man to get on with, actually. I always thought I didn’t like him and he didn’t like me, but I thought this was mainly him and me. It was at my mother’s funeral that I got talking to my stepsiblings and my half siblings and I realized that they all hated him, it wasn’t just me. Even the two he favored hated him.

INTERVIEWER

So you had a relationship with your mother?

BARKER

Of sorts. I didn’t see enough of her after the age of seven to have a proper relationship. When she moved out, I think I grieved for her. And if you grieve for somebody, they can’t pop back up and say hi. It’s gone, the relationship, you’ve worked through it. You know, we never had a row, and how many mothers and daughters can say that? But it wasn’t because we were close, it was the opposite.

INTERVIEWER

How did you evolve from writing feminist books for a feminist press to writing literary fiction about war?

BARKER

After Union Street and Blow Your House Down I was quite restless. I think I stayed at Virago a bit too long because I never felt the emphasis on female experience almost to the exclusion of male experience was genuinely me. It was a relief to move to Penguin and feel unconstrained as to what I could write about.

I’d always wanted to write about World War I, ever since I was eleven or twelve. My grandfather—my grandmother’s second husband—had a bayonet wound in his side, and I would see it when he got stripped off at the sink before heading off to the British Legion for his weekly pint. It was a hideous wound, and I would ask him what it was, but it must have been difficult for him to answer that question, since he never spoke about the war. I can’t remember what he said—there was the wound and there was silence, so there was a mystery, and that is what usually sets a novelist going. People are always saying, Oh, I know a wonderful story, but you don’t want a wonderful story, you want a little something that you can turn into a story. You need a gap. You need mystery. 

Anyway, for a long time I couldn’t decide how I wanted to write about the war. I didn’t want to pretend to have been there. I didn’t want to write about it from the point of view of the combatants. I discovered the way I could write about it when I found the figure of W. H. R. Rivers. He was immensely compassionate and well informed, but hadn’t been there—he knew a lot about it, but hadn’t experienced it. His position was essentially the same as mine, so it felt to me like a very honest place to be.

In a way it’s like being an outsider and looking in. The perspective of the outsider is a very good way of looking at society, because the outsider by definition is not fitting in, not taking things for granted, not comfortable either in his own skin or in his role. That is gold dust for a novelist.