The Art of Fiction No. 243
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.”
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