Border Crossing by Pat Barker

I want to talk to you this morning about a frighteningly good book by Pat Barker, entitled Border Crossing. Many of you readers will know Barker for her trilogy Regeneration, the third of which The Ghost Road, won the Booker prize in 1995. In the first book of the Trilogy, Regeneration, Barker describes what was then called shellshock, but would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder, and the near barbaric ways in which it was treated in World War I. As one commentator puts it, “Pat Barker understands the dynamics of psychic trauma and shutdown as well as any writer living…In Border Crossing Barker brings post-traumatic stress disorder from the literal to the domestic battlefield.”

I will not tell you much of the story, since it is the story, itself, which is so frightening and insightful. A therapist, Tom Seymour is walking and quietly arguing with his wife as he sees a young man jump into the icy Tyne river. He jumps into the river to save the young man without realizing that Danny, the boy he is saving, is the same boy who was convicted of murdering an old woman when he was ten years old, convicted in adult court largely on the basis of Tom’s psychological assessment of him and his ability to understand what he has done. Due to the notoriety of the crime, when Danny is released from prison, he is given a new identity. Tom’s marriage is dissolving as the story begins, and the two main strands of the novel have to do with Tom’s ‘treatment’ of the young man and  the struggle he and his wife Lauren are going through as their marriage unravels.  

Tom is in the process of writing a book on children with “conduct disorder”

It was too easily assumed that such children simply lacked conscience. Of course, a minority did… Many of the children, and most of the adolescents he talked to, were preoccupied—no, obsessed—with issues of loyalty, betrayal, justice, rights (theirs), courage, reputation, shame. Theirs was a warrior morality, primitive and exacting.

In spite of overwhelming forensic evidence that Danny did commit the murder of which he is accused, he claims to have no memory of it, and even after being released from prison, still maintains his innocence. The discussions between Tom and Danny, not really therapy sessions, but more like discussions about morality between adults are wonderfully complex. Barker is able to lay out the inner working of the mind in such incredible rich detail.

I think I will not reveal more of the plot of this short but intense novel, but instead remark that while Barker will, I think, be remembered primarily as a war novelist, her themes are actually much more diverse than that. Her novels about poor Irish women raising their children usually with no help from their men make it clear that she writes from intimate experience. Her early novels, Union Street and Blow Your House Down are every bit as profound and revelatory as Regeneration, though they did not get the critical acclaim deserved.  

Having been mired in contemporary mysteries and romances for a bit too long, it was exciting and refreshing to discover this Barker that I had not read. I recommend all of her books to you and think her one of the most important novelists of the last fifty years. 

Double Vision by Pat Barker

Unlike Pat Barker’s horrible/wonderful depiction of war up close in her now famous Regeneration trilogy, her 2003 novel, Double Vision, has its setting far from actual theaters of war, but war and its effects on everyday people are still dominant themes. This novel is set in the English countryside and begins with the story of a sculptor, Kate, who has been commissioned to do a sculpture of Christ, though she is not herself a believer. Kate’s husband, Ben, has recently been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan where he was on assignment as war reporter. In just the first few pages of the novel, Kate, herself, is badly injured in a road accident. Behind schedule and with a rapidly approaching deadline for completion of the sculpture, she is forced to hire an assistant, and thus begins one of the threads of this rather complex novel. We soon discover that Peter, the newly hired assistant, is more than fascinated with Kate’s work. In fact, he begins to display behavior much like that of a stalker, and this relationship between sculptor and assistant adds an aura of suspense to the entire novel.

Without giving away much of the novel, let me say that there are two other characters central to the story: Stephen Sharkey, a photographer who, like Ben, has covered 9/11 as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Justine, the daughter of the local vicar. Stephen is living in a cabin on land owned by his brother while he attempts to write a book on the role of war reporter and photographer, and Justine is hired by the doctor-brother and his busy career-oriented wife to help with the young children and maintenance of the main house.

Having been a rather close friend to Ben, it is not surprising that Stephen looks up Ben’s widow, Kate, when he finds himself in quite close proximity to her, and they begin a series of discussions on war reporting as well as their relationships with Ben.

Stephen is clearly in limbo, not sure that he wants to continue in his life as photographer of grisly war scenes, but unable to see beyond it. My hunch is that the character of Stephen allows Barker to address what is the central theme for her in this novel: namely, the motivations of war reporters and the role they play. Certainly, being around Kate and talking about her recent loss of Ben stirs up these questions in him, but it is the much younger Justine who asks him the tough questions.

‘You don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt, do you?’
‘Not often.’
‘The truth is, you’ve been digging around in violence so long you can’t see anything else.’
‘I see you.’
‘Do you?’
Stephen sighed. This was a surprisingly married conversation to be having with a girlfriend. It had the intense acrimonious pointlessness that only comes from long years of cohabitation.
‘Why do you do it?’
‘What?’
She jerked her head at the girl who was talking to camera. ‘That. Be a war correspondent.’
‘Foreign.’ The distinction mattered. He was damned if he was going to call himself after an activity he despised.
‘You covered a helluva lot of wars.’
‘They were there to be covered. I didn’t start them.’
‘You know there’s a Barbara Vine book called A Dark-Adapted Eye? That’s what you’ve got.’
‘Now you’re being silly.’
‘No, I’m not. People get into darkness, to the point where it’s the light that hurts.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Why did I do it? Adventure, proving myself, proving I could take it—and once that wore of, which it does, very quickly, being in the know. That sort of thing.’
She was looking at him scornfully.
‘Yeah, OK. I know—pathetic. But why do you think people become doctors? Pure altruism? I don’t think so.’
‘Why then?’
‘Knowledge. Access to secrets. Power.’
‘Not the only reasons.’
‘There are plenty of good reasons for being a war correspondent. Witnessing. Giving people the raw material to make moral judgments.’
‘But you said yourself, the witness turns into an audience, and then you’re not witnessing any more, you’re disseminating.’

While there are many twists and turns to this novel, including a simple and convincing love story, I think Barker mainly wants to talk about wars and about the way they are presented to the so-called folks-back-home. The ways in which television homogenizes and sanctifies war, both by what it shows and what it omits.

I haven’t mentioned just how this novel evolves into a kind of mystery thriller, and I don’t intend to give anything away. But while the plot is interesting and the suspense palpable, it is really war and countries that wage war that is at the heart of Barker’s interest. Let me close with one other quote from the book on a day when Stephen is trying, not very successfully, to get on with his book.

On Friday he’d broken off in the middle of a discussion about the bombardment of Baghdad in 1991—the first war to appear on TV screens as a kind of son et lumiere  display {sound and light show}, the first where the bombardment of enemy forces acquired the bloodless precision of a video game. He’d found it disconcerting at the time, and still did. What happens to public opinion in democracies—traditionally reluctant to wage war—when the human cost of battle is invisible: Of course there was nothing new in strict wartime censorship: it had been imposed in both world wars. But, in the first, nothing could hide the arrival of the telegrams nor, in the second, the explosion of bombs. What had been new about Baghdad and later Belgrade was the combination of censorship with massive, one-sided aerial bombardment so that allied casualties were minimal or non-existent, and ‘collateral damage’ couldn’t be shown. These wars designed to ensure that fear and pain never came home.

I haven’t even mentioned Barker’s analysis of two-career with children families, nor her  beautiful take on why and how good relationships require faith and risks. There is so much in this novel. I’m glad I read it; I hope you will.

Ghost Road, by Pat Barker

“Murder was only killing in the wrong place.” So reflects Rivers, the therapist who is a central character in all three of the novels in Pat Barker’s incredible World War I trilogy. Ghost Road is the third of the trilogy, and the one for which she received The Booker Prize, though Regeneration, the first in the series, was shortlisted for the prize and any one of the three would have deserved the prestigious award.

This is not a glorification of war book. Instead, it talks of the war and the battlefield in graphic and horrible detail that shows the bravery of the men who fought, but also the corruption of the British class system and the money interests of big business, especially as the war drags on long after if should have with men dying not to secure the victory, but to line the pockets of business men who are more interested in profits than the lives of soldiers.

Many of the characters in the novel, including the therapist Rivers, are drawn from actual historical figures. In fact, this novel actually moves back and forth between the battlefront, the hospital where Rivers treats both the physically and psychologically wounded, and cultures in the south seas where Rivers spent time as researcher and doctor before the war started. The so-called tribes he dealt with were descendants of head-hunting people and both the heads brought home from raids and the captives brought back from those same raids played pivotal roles in their cultural lives.

Head-hunting had to be banned, and yet the effects of banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of the people’s lives. Head-hunting was what they had lived for. Though it might seem callous or frivolous to say so, head-hunting had been the most tremendous fun and without it life lost almost all zest.

It is no accident that Barker compares the head-hunters with atrocities of the war. While we may excuse the actions of the warriors in World War I while condemning as barbaric the head-hunters, Barker is less quick to judge.

As you might guess, this is not a happy book, but then none of Barker’s books is happy. Just as her earlier novels focused in on blue-collar workers and their struggles for a decent life given the brutality of market economies, so too in this one she focuses not on officers but on enlisted men who have everything to lose in fighting the war, and yet very little to gain by its so-called successful conclusion.

Besides the sadness of the events, the grimness of the novel is accentuated by Barker’s  simple and often harsh prose. Billy Prior, who is another genuine historical character who appears in all three of the novels, is unashamedly bisexual. Many of the sex scenes she describes are cold and repelling, and yet there is honesty in her prose that shines forth. Like the prostitutes who are the focus of her second novel, Blow Your House Down, there is nothing sentimental about Prior’s descriptions of his sexual relationships with either men or women; sex is simply a part of life, sometimes bartered, sometimes given as a gift, sometimes taken on the fly.

For this reader, both this novel and Regeneration were most interesting because of the accounts of the varied and horrific sorts of physic conditions suffered in the trench warfare of World War I, and the surprisingly compassionate care William Rivers gives to the men whom he encounters at Craiglockhart’s, the British hospital where the wounded are sent to be ‘fixed’ and sent back to the front. Of course, when Rivers succeeds, his charges are sent back to the French front, not because they are truly healed, but because they can, at least, talk again, or walk, or sleep without impossibly horrible dreams.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think—at least not beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

…the bayonet work. Which I will not remember. Rivers would say, remember now—any suppressed memory stores up trouble for the future. Well, too bad. Refusing to think’s the only way I can survive and anyway what future?

Perhaps I have described this book too bleakly; there is warmth and even humor in it along with the chilling battle scenes. While I have to admit that I am ready to move onto something less intense, less troubling, this is a book all of us should read. Indeed, every book of Barker’s I have read has been well worth the time and effort. She is one of the finest writers alive.

Download the Podcast

Union Street & Blow Your House Down by Pat Barker

Those of you who know of the author Pat Barker probably know her through her Regeneration trilogy, the last of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995. As I have done with so many novelists, I came to read Pat Barker long after she had become famous, but once I began to read her, I realized I just had to read everything she ever wrote. When I picked up the two books I’m talking to you about today, Union Street & Blow Your House Down, reprinted as one volume after she became famous, I had no idea that they were the first of her published works. How wonderful to stumble on these books and to see that long before she became famous, the articulate voice and the depth of insight were already in place.

Reviewers praise Barker for the meticulous research that preceded her trilogy about the trench warfare of World War I. She obviously researched the two books I’m discussing today as well, but the research was way more up close and personal. All the stories in these two volumes are about poor, working-class Northern England women and girls and the incredible lives they endured. Barker, too, is from a working class town in Northern England, raised by a single mother who had to struggle to keep food on the table. These are not happy books; even the language is harsh and spare, because she speaks in the dialects of the women about whom she is writing and whom it is obvious she knows very well. None of her characters are typical heroines, and yet it could not be more obvious that Barker sympathizes with and admires her characters. She writes of young girls who are raped or molested, forced into a kind of adult life when they are still only children, of women who marry too young to men who haven’t the slightest idea of who the women are or what they dream. Like their fathers before them, these boys-pretending-to-be-men take out their frustrations on their young wives, first with words, and then fists, and finally simply with their absence.  The women are left to fend not only for themselves, but for the too many children whom they cannot bring themselves to abandon. She writes of an old woman battered by life and left to die in an unheated flat, preferring cold and near starvation to the horrors of the health-care facilities that would be her next, and final, destination.

Her home. They were taking it away from her. The dirt and disorder, the signs of malnutrition and neglect which to them were reasons for putting her away were, to her, independence. She had fought to keep for herself the conditions of a human life. 

She was calm again. What she wanted was simple. She wanted to die with dignity. She wanted to die in her own home. And if that was no longer possible, she would go away. She would not be here waiting for them when they came.

Union Street, her first novel, published in 1982, is really a series of stories about these women and their interconnected lives, all of who live within a short distance of each other on Union Street. And while the women, unlike many of the men, remain with the children and do their best to provide for them, they cannot hide the resentment they feel not only towards the men who have left or who drink themselves into stupors every night at the local pubs, but towards the very children they want to nurture and protect. Barker describes in horrific detail the work lives of some of these women—some who work on an assembly line cake factory, others who spend every day in blood and feathers working in a chicken processing plant. No wonder that many finally turn to a better life, that of prostitution, which has its own horrors and dangers, but affords them an almost livable wage and a chance to spend more of their time with their children. In fact, Blow Your House Down, the second of the two novels, is all written through the eyes of working class women who have turned to prostitution as a better alternative to the nasty, low paying jobs they leave behind. Each story is riveting and utterly convincing; Barker knew these women (or women much like them), and her accounts are sympathetic rather than condemning. In the voice and language of the characters, she reveals so much about the inner lives of these women. Hard, struggling lives in many ways, but one cannot help but admire the strength, insight, even the humor of these women. One of the young women, Jo, describes the cake-making assembly line she works on.

The noise was horrific as usual. There was no possibility of conversation. Even the supervisor’s orders had to be yelled at the top of her voice and repeated many times before anybody heard. At intervals, there were snatches of music. It was being played continuously but only odd phrases triumphed over the roar of the machines. Some of the women moved their mouths silently, singing or talking to themselves:  it was hard to tell. Others merely looked blank. After a while not only speech but thought became impossible.

Descriptions of work in the chicken-processing plant are even more horrible—the  smells, the blood underfoot, the chickens swinging overhead on conveyer belts. And Barker does not spare the reader; she describes what she sees, what she has seen, with almost brutal accuracy.

While I think it is important to read these books when you are feeling strong, and to give up all hope of happy endings and cozy resolutions, this is social-political writing at its very best. She does not have to be didactic; she simply describes what she has lived and seen. I will leave you with a final quote from the story of Muriel, a woman in her early twenties who already has three children and a husband who is sick unto death.

She had never been able to take happiness for granted, perhaps because she had lost her father while she was still a child. She must always be aware of time passing, of the worm that hides in darkness and feeds upon innocence, beauty and grace. John’s hands on her breasts, the children asleep upstairs:  nothing was to be taken for granted. Love, security, order:  these were achievements painfully wrested from a chaos that was always threatening to take them back. She remembered the children playing in the lamp-light. Life was like that. Her life was like that. A moment in the light. Then the lamp goes out, the circle is broken, the chanting voices are silenced forever.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

I think I am a reader who is so reluctant as to be almost unable to read novels that contain violence. Unless it seems to me obvious that I am learning something very important in reading descriptions of violence or that a novel contains a clear and well articulated denunciation of violence, my tendency is simply to avoid it. Pat Barker’s superb little novel about World War I, Regeneration, leaves no doubt that there is much to be learned simply by reading it.

I stumbled onto Barker a few months ago by reading a novel of hers entitled The Man Who Wasn’t There and realized at once, simply from the power of the writing, that this was a novelist I needed to gobble up. Probably lucky for me that I started with this less shocking, less sad novel, because when I realized that The Regeneration Trilogy was all about this grisly war, I almost decided not to read any of the three. Fortunately, I swallowed my reluctance and picked up the first of the three books. (Incidentally, she won the Booker prize for the last book in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, and I intend to read that and the intervening volume as well.)

This novel is superbly researched, and it begins with a declaration made by a soldier in that war, a man by the name of Siegfried Sassoon. I am going to read to you all of that declaration, since virtually all of the novel is about events that occurred before and after this declaration.

A Soldier’s Declaration

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.

S. Sassoon
July 1917

There was at this time considerable resistance to the war mounting in England and against the government in power, so much, in fact, that the authorities were reluctant to simply court martial Sassoon for cowardice or desertion (although plenty of other soldiers had been silenced via court martial). Instead, a medical board concluded that Sassoon must be suffering from war-related neurosis and he was sent to a Craiglockhart, a military hospital that treated soldiers who were suffering from a wide variety of psychological illnesses due to the stresses of incredibly ugly trench war-fare.

I think we, especially we in the U.S., tend to get our views of World War I from Hollywood war movies that glorify both the war and the reasons for which it was fought. If nothing else, reading this novel ought to shock us out of any romantic notions about the brutality of that war. Simply reading the number of casualties is sobering to say the least; 102,000 killed in one month in 1917, and literally millions who lived in trenches in conditions that are, at least to me, unimaginable. Protest against the war, especially any hint of protest from men still in military service, was greeted with swift punishment and silencing.

But quite apart from informing the reader about the realities of this war and the conditions the men at the front endured, this novel is a wonderful story about relationships between men. Again relying on historical fact, Barker takes us through a few months in the life of W.H.R. Rivers, an army psychologist and his unusually humane methods of treatment for men suffering from horrible events and the unbearable strains of trench warfare. The task facing Rivers is to rehabilitate and send back to the front the men who are sent to him for treatment. And while his voice on the medical boards is a very powerful one, allowing him to disqualify those whom he thinks are simply unfit (physically or mentally) to return to active duty, he sees it as his duty to send back to the front as many men as he can. However, while he is dealing with Sassoon, he comes to doubt more and more his own role as doctor, and indeed, comes closer and closer to the position declared by Sassoon.

Rivers eschews the electric shock treatments that are coming into vogue at the time and used to shock, jolt, those suffering from psychosomatic paralysis, uncontrollable stammering, loss of voice, and a host of other conditions back into so-called normalcy. Instead, he uses a combination of Freudian psychoanalytic methods and treatments he discovers for himself during the course of his contacts with these poor, trench-weary men. He is especially adept in helping soldiers who are unable to recall battlefield experiences (except in their recurring and horrible nightmares) simply by urging them to remember as much as they can during their days. “Rivers’s treatment sometimes consisted simply of encouraging the patient to abandon his hopeless attempt to forget, and advising him instead to spend part of each day remembering. Neither brooding on the experience, nor trying to pretend it had never happened.”

I doubt that I have to mention that the contents of this book are more than relevant to current events and to the alleged war of liberation now being fought by young men and women. I had not realized that there had been such suppression of dissent in England during World War I, but it really should have come as no surprise. Barker reminds us that, “A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.” Indeed, what is required is constant and total questioning and soul-searching—action rather than complacence.

Although (or should I say because) this novel was written by a woman, it explores with great insight and tenderness the relationships between men. While it is often very sad, very hard to read, it is beautifully written. I have barely scratched the surface of the many layers of this extraordinary novel. I hope I have said enough to get you to pick it up, even you readers who, like me, hate war novels. I’m quite sure if you pick it up, you won’t put it down until it is finished.

The Man Who Wasn't There by Pat Barker

Colin Harper leads a dual life: He is, most importantly, a fearless fighter in the French Resistance movement, smuggling messages under the noses of the ruthless security of the Nazis, sometimes dressed as a woman to facilitate his brazen, death-defying tasks. At more mundane times, he is simply a twelve year old British boy, born during the Second World War and now raised by his mother who works nights as a cocktail waitress in a not very reputable working class bar. Colin, left on his own every night with only token overseeing by another single mother in the same boarding house, wanders the streets of a war-ravaged British town scarred by the air-raids of the recent war, one part of himself constantly on the lookout for his unknown father, the man who wasn’t there, and the other on the alert as he transforms into the famous Gaston, freedom fighter par excellence, risking his life daily in his struggles to overcome the evil Nazis.

This is the minimalist skeleton of Pat Barker’s superb little novel entitled, The Man Who Wasn’t There. I initially picked up this book simply because Barker seemed to have stolen my title for a novel, and I wanted to see if she had done the title justice. Perhaps I also vaguely recalled the enthusiastic recommendation of a few students and reader friends who were shocked that I had not yet read any of Barker’s work. You readers will already know of her work via her Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and Ghost Road, the latter of which won the Booker prize.

She is a writer of incredible talent. Without once breaking out of character or showing herself as the omniscient author in the background, Barker manages, simply by telling the tale of this boy and his wonderfully imaginative life, to say so much about childhood, about the thin line between fantasy and reality, about the tough blue collar standards of what it is to be a man, the difficulty of being a low income single mother, and about the search for a parent never known. It is a sweet tale, but not sentimental. The men Colin and his young street-smart boyfriends look up to are themselves boys of seventeen and eighteen, often in trouble with the law, some having already been to prison, and destined to lives of semi-poverty and small-time crimes.

What caught me immediately about this story is the crystalline accuracy of Barker’s portrayal of how a young boy perceives the world. I was instantly reminded of my own boyhood in which many plays worked themselves out simultaneously as, from outward appearances, I simply lived out the life of a school-boy in a blue-collar neighborhood. Whether walking to school, walking the mile or so to the bakery where I got the pies I then sold door to door after school, walking to Sunday school or to a friend’s house, my inner life was rife with adventure. I rarely actually walked anywhere, preferring to lope or run outright, and needing to do so in order to function as the inner hero that I was. There were enemies lurking in every ally, spies looking through slits in curtains, while I was always on some dangerous mission with the salvation of many hinging on the success of my ventures. I recall the sense of offense, near outrage, at being called back from my important reverie life by some mundane errand, or worse, reminded to wash my hands before dinner, to go back outside to clean my muddy shoes. The adults around me so pitifully unaware of my dual life and so caught up in the ordinary, the banal.

Often when I read an author, I can see how he or she does what they do, even if I haven’t the talent to duplicate their efforts. But I cannot understand how Barker was able to envision just how much she could tell us readers simply by letting us in on the fantasy life of one small boy. How did she come up with the idea, and how can she speak through the eyes of a twelve year old boy so convincingly and with such veracity. I am still shocked that she brought it off, and that she was able to catch me so completely, absolutely absorbed for a few hours by this simple story.

Colin plodded up the hill, half moons of sweat in the armpits of his grey shirt. In the distance, lampposts and parked cars shimmered in the heat. All around him was the smell of tar.

Gaston jerks himself awake. A sniper is crawling across Blenkinsop’s roof, but Gaston has seen him. He spins round, levels the gun, and fires.

The sniper—slow motion now—clutches his chest, buckles at the knee, crashes in an endlessly unfurling fountain of glass through the roof of Mr Blenkinsop’s greenhouse, where he lands face down, his fingers clutching the damp earth—and his chest squashing Mr Blenkinsop’s prize tomatoes.

Gaston blows nonchalantly across the smoking metal of his gun, and, with never a backward glance, strides up the garden path and into the house.

As he passes through the hall, Gaston taps the face of a brass barometer, as if to persuade it to change its mind. No use. The needle points, as it does unswervingly, in all weathers, to Rain. Madame Hennigan, the landlady, believes in being realistic, and no mere barometer is permitted to disagree.

Gaston clatters up the uncarpeted stairs to the top-floor flat.

Where he becomes, abruptly, Colin again.

And so throughout the book, we move from Colin to Gaston, from lonely, father-seeking, daydreaming and late-for-school Colin to Gaston the great. Just as I remember being amazed that so few adults saw me as who I really was, taken in by the ordinariness of my appearance and apparent life, Colin is half ashamed, half proud of the duplicity that has him scolded and reprimanded by dull school masters, coddled and sent to bed by a loving but harried and overworked mother, and an inner life so full of adventure, so important, so vital.

Barker is the master of understatement. This little novel is only one hundred and fifty pages long, an easy afternoon read, and yet it covers so much. Simply by telling her story, the reader comes to see how and why tough, poor boys, lured by all the superfluous riches of market economies, turn away from the drudgery and meaningless occupations offered them to a life of petty crime, despite knowing on some level that they will likely end up in a shuffle between prison and street life. We see through Colin’s school experiences the cruelty of boys to one another, often enough abetted by equally cruel teachers. We see a boy embarrassed by his own sexual longings alternately attracted and repulsed by the crass sexuality of the older children and adults around him. And we see the deep longing for a father to admire, a man to teach him how to be a man, a lonely search for the man who wasn’t there.

This is a story of loneliness and longing and hope. If it is a sad story, it is also strangely uplifting. And it captures the wonderful imagination of childhood (so often crushed or forsaken in adulthood) in a manner as rare as it is wonderful. Give your self a treat; read this book.