Does the talking cure work? Can we ever truly understand wrongdoing? Are there degrees of innocence? These are the questions Pat Barker grapples with in this, her twelfth novel. Anyone who has read her Regeneration trilogy will be familiar with Barker's preoccupation with altered psychological states and the individual under extreme duress. Set in the first World War when psychology was in its infancy and shell-shocked soldiers exhibiting symptoms of severe trauma were subjected to violent physical "cures", Barker's sustained masterpiece focused on the humane response of Dr William Rivers to the dark legacy of violence in an essentially hostile medical world. Border Crossing is the flip-side of that thesis, examining the limitations of the professionalising of trauma and crime.
It is an extremely timely novel concerning a child murderer who has served his time and has re-entered society complete with a new identity. Given the current controversy about the killers of Jamie Bulger and their imminent release under just such circumstances, Barker's novel could be seen as opportunistic. But Barker, no doubt, started writing Border Crossing well before the Bulger killers were catapulted back into the public eye. And her choice of this difficult subject has less to do with opportunism than with her continuing artistic exploration of the nature of good and evil.
Danny Miller, aged 10, kills an old woman, apparently without motivation. Tom Seymour is a psychologist who is called as an expert witness at his trial to assess whether the boy is capable of such an act. In the boy's eyes, Seymour's determination that he understood exactly the gravity of what he had done, swings the case against him. Miller is jailed though all the while protests his innocence.
The novel opens with a rescue scene reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, that of two worlds colliding catastrophically.
Seymour and his wife, Lauren, gingerly contemplating the break-up of their troubled marriage, are taking a winter stroll by the river when they spot a young man throwing himself into the icy waters. Seymour jumps in to save him and realises after he has dragged the young man to the bank that this is the boy whose fate he contributed to 13 years earlier when he was cast in the role of reluctant moral arbiter.
Miller is anxious to re-establish a semitherapeutic relationship with Seymour. It is an uncomfortable alliance for Seymour since it falls uneasily between the personal and the professional. It is further complicated by Seymour's guilt about his decisive role in sending Miller to prison in the first place. In the intervening years, Miller has been held in a secure unit where the pedagogic ethos has been to concentrate not on the past crimes of its inmates but on their future. But Miller forms a relationship with one teacher at the unit who encourages him to write about his childhood - with disastrous consequences.
The sessions between Miller and Seymour chillingly reveal the young man's sophisticated grasp of professional psychological parlance, an over-theraped vocabulary if you will, so much so that he dominates and manipulates the relationship, prompting a host of doubts for Seymour. Is Miller merely trying to reiterate his innocence and prove Seymour's assessment wrong? Or is he genuinely trying to come to terms with the enormity of the crime he's been punished for? Has Seymour become involved with the case again because he cannot face the possibility that he might have been professionally mistaken?
As a backdrop, Seymour's divorce is bleakly played out. The irony of his situation is not lost on the reader. Here, after all, is a man who makes his living out of counselling others through marital separations. Yet for all that he is no better equipped to deal with the ignominy and pain of failed love.
Barker jousts tantalisingly with such ambiguities. Her own language is determinedly unshowy. She is not a stylist; her unadorned prose gives a documentary feel to the narrative but when she slyly inserts an image into the plain fabric of the text it stands out with poetic acuity. Hence flocked wallpaper is like "fur-lined intestines", the river "sweated oil" and a nervous Miller is described as making "small foetal movements of his hands".
For those readers who know Gitta Sereny's seminal account of the Mary Bell case (a child killer in the 1960s subsequently released under licence and mercilessly hounded by the tabloids when the Bulger case went to trial) the disturbing denouement of Border Crossing will strike an eerily familiar note. Seymour once again finds himself playing an unwitting but pivotal part in Miller's fate when their relationship threatens to compromise the young killer's new identity.
That Barker has managed to knit in such testing moral dilemmas into an absorbing work of fiction is a testament to the quiet mastery of one of the most serious and authentic voices at work in British fiction today.
Mary Morrissy's latest novel, The Pretender, recently appeared in paperback. She is currently writer-in-residence at UCC