Pat Barker
Pat Barker(1943– ) is a writer of a different kind. She came from a broken family
in north-eastern England, and her first stories deal with the harsh lives of its women-
folk. Then, as she told an interviewer in 2004, she became fed up with being ‘type-
cast as a northern, regional, working-class, feminist, label, label, label, novelist. It’s
not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where
people are reading the labels instead of the book.’ Like other writers who report from
their own worlds but then feel confined by the impression they have created, Pat
Barker turned to writing about men and about history, producing the Regeneration
trilogy in the early 1990s. She chose a famous subject, the friendship of Siegfried
Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, poets of the ’14–’18 war. Her focus, however, is not on
their poetry nor on the nature of their friendship but on the work of St John Rivers
at Craiglockart Hospital, Edinburgh. Her Sassoon is not very like the man we meet
in his own memoirs. Rivers’s practice was in regenerating the nerves and the psychic
health of men badly injured or shell-shocked in the trenches. Barker’s trilogy is an
ambitious cross-sectional social history, focusing more on damaged men in England
than on men fighting in France. This extremely talented writer has a penetrating
mind, yet the final effect left by the trilogy is odd, for its strenuous research has no
clear purpose beyond a painfully real exploration of the effects of trauma. It is very
well written, and its conversations between men when no women are present (some-
thing which Jane Austen thought she should not represent) are especially convinc-
ing. Some brutal sexual scenes are introduced, perhaps to illustrate another effect of
trauma.
Looking back
The last two novels discussed are ‘historical novels’ in the strict sense: fictional
accounts of real events involving historical persons, events which took place before
the writer’s birth. The historical turn in fiction was inaugurated by Walter Scott (see
p. 249), who had a model in Shakespeare’s Histories. Scott wanted to introduce
Scotland’s religion to its Enlightenment, the country to the town, and the Scots to
the English, and vice versa. The historical novel has since produced major work in
most European literatures – Tolstoy’s War and Peace is an historical novel – and
continues to do so – Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Floweris an example.
Many recent novelists, perhaps exhausting their own fund of experience and
seeking new subjects, have turned to history, often recent history, to explore more
general themes. It can be easier to explore present issues in a past period, sometimes
at the expense of the historical realities supposedly portrayed. Others novelists feel
drawn to deal with a particular history which has directly affected their family or
their identity. Identity, in today’s more diverse and supposedly more egalitarian soci-
ety, one with fewer shared beliefs, is a recurrent issue. This is especially so for those
who find themselves out of place, or who have, in imagination, in attitude or in real-
ity, gone beyond the expected norms of their upbringing – or their class, race, coun-
try, creed, sex or age-group. They need to get their bearings in a new situation, to
explore, explain, rationalize a new world. Historical fiction can mediate between
historical research and imaginative experiment: performing itself for others yet indi-
rectly exploring matters closer to home.
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 421