After delivering one of the most powerful fictional depictions of psychological turmoil in the trenches, Pat Barker has now set her sights on the second world war. She tells Alex Clark about her new novel, Noonday, her ambivalent feelings towards London, and the love and loss that have shaped her life
• Read an extract from Noonday below
Pat Barker returns from being photographed having encountered, en route, a dead pigeon. Wouldn’t it have been better, she jokes, if Martin Amis had been there instead of her? I see what she means: Amis’s writing, and certainly the persona that has been created for him, more obviously lend themselves to such a macabre prop. But, alas, “there the poor photographer was, stuck with me. I think I’m fairly edgy, but not dead pigeon sort of edgy”. It’s not true, of course. Not only do stricken pigeons actually feature in her new novel, Noonday – their wings ablaze during the so-called second great fire of London at the height of the blitz – but her work returns over and again to notably painful and complex subjects. Ranging widely, her books require her to confront and convey violence both personal and military, the morality of war, class and sexual conflict and the nature of psychopathy. In her early novels she focused on the day-to-day lives of working-class women in the north-east of England, making a debut so striking with Union Street (1982) that she was included on Granta’s inaugural selection of the Best of Young British Novelists (she was photographed alongside, among other luminaries, one M Amis). In 1991 she began her epic Regeneration trilogy, which concluded in 1995 with the Booker prizewinning The Ghost Road; and, in Border Crossing and Double Vision, she explored both the internal life of and society’s response to a child who kills.
Related: The other Pat Barker trilogy
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment