An Interview with Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born and grew up near Middlesbrough in the industrial Northeast of England and now lives in the same region, in Durham. Apart from her student years in London, this area has been her home, and it is home to most of her characters. Once renowned for its coal pits, iron and steel works, shipbuilding, and manufacturing industries, and for the distinctive working-class communities built around those industries, the region was decimated by economic depressions several times in the twentieth century and experienced large-scale unemployment and deindustrialization in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of Barker's novels reflect this state of decline, from the empty steelworks at the heart of Union Street (1982) to the derelict wharves along the quayside at the beginning of Border Crossing (2001), although this bleakness is tempered in her later novels with signs of regeneration and tourism.

Barker was brought up mainly by her grandparents. She was led to believe that her father was an RAF pilot who was killed in the Second World War, but she later discovered that this was a myth invented by her mother, who in fact never knew who her real father was. Her grandparents cared for her from the age of seven, when her mother married and moved out. She was raised first on a chicken farm and later in a fish and chip shop, in working-class environments. When she was eleven, however, she told her grandmother that she was certain she would be a writer, and she was also awarded a place in the local grammar school. In the English education system in the postwar period, the grammar school was a route out of working-class life and into middle-class professions. Barker earned a scholarship that took her through an academic secondary-school education, in which she excelled and earned a place at the prestigious London School of Economics, where she read for a degree in international history. Her education effectively secured her move away from working-class culture. When she began to write in the 1970s, she tried to imitate middle-class novels of manners and social refinement but failed to find a publisher. It was only when she attended a writing course tutored by Angela Carter that she found a way of bringing the distinctive voices from her working-class upbringing into fictional life. The result was her first published novel, Union Street, which earned her a place among the "Best of Young British Novelists" in Granta magazine in 1983.

Since then, Barker has been one of the most rooted and consistent writers of her generation, publishing ten novels within a career spanning over twenty years. The stability of style, setting, and theme in her work shows a remarkable continuity, all the more laudable for the fact that her repertoire of characters and concerns has constantly expanded to incorporate new ideas, discover fresh insights, and reflect current social and cultural issues. Union Street was followed by Blow Your House Down (1984), which explored issues of sexual violence and social deprivation arising from the murders of thirteen prostitutes by the "Yorkshire Ripper" in the 1970s and early 1980s. Barker's third novel, The Century's Daughter (1986), later published as Liza's England, extended her depiction of life for working-class women in northern England back through the twentieth century, using Liza's life story to examine the role of memory in narratives of community and connection. The Man Who Wasn't There (1989) continues to explore similar interests in gender and class identities to her previous novels, but it does so through the narrative of a young boy struggling to come to terms with the absence of his father.

Barker is best known and most widely acclaimed for her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration [1991], The Eye in the Door [1993], and The Ghost Road [1995]), the last novel of which won the Booker Prize in 1995. It articulated many of the recurrent concerns with...