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| Interview with Pat Barker by Debbie Taylor ON STILL summer evenings when I was a child, you could sometimes hear a man’s voice sobbing and crying for his mother. We never saw his face and his house was hidden by trees. But on those long warm evenings, when everyone slept with their windows open, his sobbing sent a shiver through the neighbourhood. My mother said he had shell-shock. I imagined it as some jolt to the brain caused by the noise of war. My father liked to watch war movies in the afternoons. They were full of men, machines and explosions. I imagined the sobbing man crouched in striped pyjamas with his hands over his ears. Even as a child I thought war was a man’s thing, that hurt men in crude and noisy ways. So I didn’t want to read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy when the books came out, one by one in the early nineties. Though I’d read and admired her earlier work, I didn’t want to go into the trenches with her. I bought them, sure, and moved them about a bit: from shelf, to bedside and back again. But I couldn’t bring myself to open them until recently. Yet it’s these books, about men and war, that have brought her fame and critical acclaim. Regeneration was made into a major feature film. The Eye in the Door won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Then, to top it all, The Ghost Road won the Booker. Barker’s latest novel, Another World, still has its feet in the trenches in the person of old man Geordie dying of cancer, increasingly tugged back to a still-frame memory of his brother with a bayonet in his side. But this time the book’s set in the present and, as if to underline the fact, it’s written in the present tense. Pat Barker is tall and rather stately… For the whole interview, read Issue 5 » Subscribe! Go to » Pat Barker's Method |
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For more on PAT BARKER, go to www.contemporarywriters.com
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