Much has been written about the difficulty a writer faces following a well-received first novel. Spare a thought, then, for English novelist Pat Barker, who won the 1995 Booker Prize for her seventh novel, The Ghost Road, itself the final part of her Regeneration Trilogy. No reading of any of her previous four novels would have prepared one for the quality, subtle emotional force and artistic maturity of the trilogy. How would she follow up these books? The answer is, quite well.
Another World (Viking, £16.99 in UK) is a solid, thoughtful performance which shows that Barker, though not an inspired or particularly imaginative novelist, brings the increasingly rare qualities of integrity and honesty to her work. Initially, it seems that she has deliberately moved far away from the theme of ordinary heroes, lost men and battlefields. This new novel opens in the world of a different form of conflict, that of family fractures and emotional pressure. Nick is a middle-aged university lecturer who, having left his wife and daughter, now finds himself dealing with a hostile stepson, an unhappily pregnant partner, and their toddler. The entire fraught, unhappy group has moved into an old house with its share of sinister secrets. Into this chaos arrives Nick's teenage daughter Miranda, who may be disturbed or merely fed up.
Barker works hard at evoking the tensions and pressures of trying to survive in a situation in which everyone is seething with resentment. Even the drive to the train station to collect Miranda becomes a nightmare. As a portrait of modern living out of control, Barker's opening sequence is effective if laboured. There is no lightness of touch, she is not that kind of writer: her prose is heavy and deliberate, with no humour, and much of the dialogue is forced, even wooden. These characters are trapped by circumstances. Nick is presented as a man no longer in control. As for his partner, Fran, she is positively outraged at finding herself pregnant yet again. While she tries to cope with their domestic situation which is increasingly threatened by the behaviour of her son Gareth - who may or may not be capable of killing his toddler half-brother, and who certainly despises Nick, never mind Miranda - Nick is preoccupied by his dying grandfather. It is on this relationship that Barker's novel both faces risk and ultimately succeeds. While his own household is in turmoil, Nick, who felt only "a kind of despair at his failure to feel anything" when his father died, has decided to direct his attentions to Geordie, his grandfather, who has outlived his wife, his son, Nick's father, and, at the age of 101, pretty well everyone else.
Cancer has finally decided to kill off a man who has survived the Somme. However, Geordie remains a formidable character. Having spent most of his life refusing to speak about his wartime experiences, in his final years he has become a witness of sorts. Most of Geordie's trauma is attributed to his having returned from the war in which his elder and more favoured brother died.
Written largely in the continuous present tense to heighten the atmosphere of tension, the narrative moves between domestic upheaval and death-bed scenes. Returning home from hospital to die, Geordie is tended by his faithful daughter, Frieda, herself in her seventies but still unable to accept her father's impending death. She is a minor character, yet is sympathetically drawn. It is interesting how quickly the old man takes over the novel. Once he enters the action, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain any interest in Nick's household. At the old man's bedside he becomes the helper he fails to be elsewhere.
Geordie is the sort of character Barker feels comfortable with. He has his ghosts, principally that of his brother, and the nightmares which that death has inspired throughout his life. He is plainspoken and simple; his life effectively began and ended in the trenches. None of the characters in these books has a past: they are all caught in their present hell. While the detail of the moment is minutely described, Barker provides scant background.
The reason Geordie finally confronts his war experiences is because of an interest shown in his past by one of Nick's university colleagues. Her research leads to many taped conversations in which the old man describes, somewhat neutrally, what it was really like. In keeping with the tone of the Trilogy, Barker makes no attempt to glorify war, and instead allows Geordie to recall his difficulties in finding a job on his return from the Front. Hampered by a stammer, he has no hope of a relationship until he meets a woman who takes him on nightmares and all. His story is told bluntly, with Barker's characteristic lack of sentimentality. The best writing in the book occurs in the passages featuring the old man. His death scene is well handled, and Barker does well in dealing with the ambiguity and mixed feelings evoked in the face of death.
Another World is the story of several worlds, most especially of several types of emotion, dependency, fear and guilt. There are many moments when the force of Barker's intelligence overshadows the limited artistry of the writing. Ultimately, war is the most powerful theme in a novel of ghost stories. At Geordie's funeral, Nick finds himself thinking about "the white-haired sons and daughters of murdered children". War seems set to continue haunting Pat Barker's fiction for some time to come.
