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.

The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin

“It’s not that I didn’t remember what I saw. It’s that I didn’t know what I was seeing.” It’s 1963 in Mississippi, and Florence is ten years old, almost eleven. Although the above quote refers to a particularly horrible and devastating event that Florence witnessed, it could be used as a description of almost everything that happened to her in that summer of her life. Florence is the eyes and ears of Minrose Gwin in her novel, The Queen of Palmyra; it is a wrenchingly sad novel, but then it is about events that are, indeed, wrenchingly sad.

A few months ago I reviewed another novel about this same time period in Mississippi, and I felt a great deal of ambivalence about that novel; it was Kathryn Stockett’s novel, The Help. In that novel, a well-off young woman who aspires to being a writer decides to write a book about African American servants as seen through the eyes of those women in order to expose what they really thought about their white employers. What bothered me about that novel was that the heroine, the woman writer,  gets those servants to take grave risks by telling their stories, while she, herself, incurs very little risk, but stands to profit by the risks of others. And while Stockett is once removed from the writer heroine of her story, she, too, it seemed to me, stood to profit from the pain and struggles of others while incurring little risk on her own. I would have felt much more comfortable had the author been African American—more comfortable with the heavy dialects she uses for the voices of some of her characters, more comfortable with her (perhaps audacious and presumptuous) descriptions of their inner lives.

I have none of those reservations about Gwin’s novel, because this book is so clearly the world as seen through the eyes of the little girl. Yes, like Stockett’s character, Florence is mostly raised by and cared for by an African American family, one of who happens to be the woman servant (cook, housekeeper, babysitter) of Florence’s grandparents. But the relationship between Florence and the black people in her life seems so much more honest and conflicted than those described by Stockett.

Quite understandably, this novel has been compared to Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and it is like that novel in how consistently and convincingly the voice remains that of a young white girl looking out at a confusing racist world. But unlike Scout, the heroine of Lee’s novel, Florence’s father is not an attorney who defends the civil rights of a falsely accused black man, but instead a well known member of the local clan, and only slowly does Florence come to understand that the little club her father belongs to (and the play costumes he dresses up in when he goes to meetings) is feared and hated by those in the world she most loves.

One more quick point before telling you just a bit about this novel, on the jacket cover one author and critic says of this book that “it is the most powerful and lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird.”  My first reaction to that excessive praise was to wonder if the critic had somehow forgotten to read Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Yes, this little novel is a wonderful if frightening look at a racist world through the eyes of a sad and abused little girl, but simply does not, and cannot, compare to the accounts written by the authors mentioned above. Nor, I think, would Gwin welcome such a comparison.

Florence’s mother is much more aware of the nighttime activities of her husband than is Florence.  And although she is in many ways (and for good reason) afraid of her own husband, she does what she can to warn the African American community when she knows the local clan is gathering. Those affected admire her bravery in passing along the warnings, though they wonder about how she can remain with her husband, and cannot quite fathom or totally trust her. Florence’s grandparents are also decent folk who treat their black employees well, even to some extent stand up to the local clan, but they are themselves locked into a world that sees separation of the races as inevitable.

Although I don’t want to give away too much of the story, it is not surprising that Florence’s mother eventually has to escape from her husband, first with alcohol, then via an attempted suicide, and finally by other means. Unfortunately, she leaves poor Florence behind to deal with a father who continues his late-night meetings, and who visits her in the night, placing a heavy hand on her stomach. Florence is as unaware of the meaning of her father’s visits to her bedroom as she is of his club meetings. Finally, he takes her to one of the meetings, even has her own little outfit sewn for her, proud of his own role as a leader of the local clan and wanting his daughter to share his pride. Passed around, tickled and teased by the smelly, scary old men, she slowly begins to realize that there is something sinister in these meetings and in the “play-clothes” the men wear.

I didn’t know what miscegenation and some of the other words meant until I had looked them up in the dictionary later that night, but the whole letter and pictures made me feel scared about Daddy in a way I hadn’t before. Yes he could be mean and ill tempered and hurtful when you aggravated him, and yes I was sick of him coming into my room at night, and yes I knew it was him that Mama was running away from. But this was somehow different.

As the opening quote implies, all of the ugliness is out there to be seen from the beginning, but it is only through her dealings with her real family, the African American family that raises and protects her, that she is finally able to interpret what she has seen all along.

In the end, I thought this was a superb little book. While the reader does realize once in awhile that there is, after all, a grown woman looking back to tell the story of Florence, in the telling the voice is consistently, unwaveringly, that of a young lonely and confused little girl. The novel shines with authenticity.

Solar by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan’s newest novel, Solar, has already generated a lot of commentary, much of which is critical. Some accuse him of a kind of flippancy for combining the grave topic of global warming with the absurd and ribald sexual affairs of his lead character, an aging and cynical Nobel prize-winning physicist. On the contrary, I think his switching back and forth between environmental issues that he obviously takes very seriously and the ugly and yet comedic life of his main character shows a deep understanding of human nature as well as of the ways in which greed and ignorance drive world markets and scientific research and threaten the lives of humans and other species on the planet.

Michael Beard is McEwan’s fictional physicist, and the reader is introduced to him as a scheming husband, seething with jealousy as his fifth marriage is crumbling. Throughout all five marriages Beard has cheated on his wives, but now he is outraged that his fifth very attractive wife has decided to turn the tables on him. He wants her back, wants her to love him again, though he knows even through his pain that were he to get his wish, his old ways would quickly return. Beard is seriously overweight, drinks far too much alcohol, is engaged in no new or productive work, and lives primarily on the laurels of his now distant accomplishments.  One of the things I admire about McEwan is his ability to display clearly how brilliant accomplishment in one area of a life can be, and very often is, combined with absurd ineptness or worse in other areas. Like his British predecessor, Iris Murdoch, McEwan understands all too well how brilliance and folly often combine in the same person. Murdoch’s famous and accomplished philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil is so good at what he does that he is able to provide rather profound insights even in ethical theory, an area of philosophy that he remains skeptical about, and yet in his personal life, he is a scoundrel who attempts to seduce his own granddaughter.

At least for this reader, while there are sections of the novel that are, indeed, darkly humorous, even uproarious, the book is not a comedy. Yes, even great people are flawed and often enough lead personal lives that are ugly and immoral. In many ways, Beard’s habits mirror the habits of greed-driven markets. He is a metaphor for the world we find ourselves in. He is smart enough to know that he is eating and drinking his way into an early death, but his understanding does nothing to dissuade him from his disastrous course. So, too, it takes very little smarts to understand that economies dependent on fossil fuels and on constant growth are rapidly producing and consuming us into oblivion, but that understanding seems to have little effect on the course that history is taking. Michael Beard is unable to wake up and do something to change his life; McEwan hopes that his readers are not.

Only slowly and due both to historical accidents and his own crumbling finances does Beard take up environmental issues. He is much more concerned with his own life than with the future of the planet, “But…was always on the lookout for an official role with a stipend attached.” Happenstance delivers into his possession the research notes of a colleague and catapults him into researching new sources of energy.

Deploying techniques and materials still only talked of in nanotechnology, the idea was to exploit direct energy from sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using special light-sensitive dyes in place of chlorophyll and catalysts containing manganese and calcium. The stored gases would be taken up by a fuel cell to generate electricity. Another idea, also taken from the lives of plants, was to combine carbon dioxide from the atmosphere with sunlight and water to make an all-purpose liquid fuel.

I found the sections of the book on global warming and photovoltaic energy to be fascinating, and I also loved McEwan’s humorous but perceptive asides on deconstructionism and how it has entered the academic world of science as well as the arts. As Beard and a group of physicists listen to a woman professor of science studies explain how genes are really socially constructed and do not exist outside the domain created by geneticists and their technical language, they politely avoid exchanging glances:

They tended to take the conventional view, that the world existed independently, in all its mystery, awaiting description and explanation, though that did not prevent the observer from leaving his thumbprints all over the field of observation.

It is pretty clear that in this case, McEwan’s sympathies lie with the physicists who believe that there is a real world out there that we are trying to understand and describe.

I think McEwan is one of the really great writers of our era. He is what I call a maximal user of the language; he supposes that his readers will be able to understand big words and difficult concepts. While he laughs at his lead character and pokes fun at the absurdities of human lives, he certainly sees himself as a being who is chock full of contradictions and driven by competing forces.

I will leave you with a quote from the book where Beard is trying to convince a group of investors that they should be investing in solar-energy research rather than in finding the last drops of oil on the planet:

An alien landing on our planet and noticing how it was bathed in radiant energy would be amazed to learn that we believe ourselves to have an energy problem, that we ever should have thought of poisoning ourselves by burning fossil fuels or creating plutonium.

Imagine we came across a man at the edge of a forest in a heavy rainfall. This man is dying of thirst. He has an ax in his hand and he is felling the trees in order to suck sap from the trunks. There are a few mouthfuls in each tree. All around him is devastation, dead trees, no birdsong, and he knows the forest is vanishing. So why doesn’t he tip back his head and drink the rain? Because he cuts trees expertly, because he has always done it this way, because the kind of people who advocate rain-drinking he considers suspicious types.