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When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's old world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?'What Pat Barker has to say of society's attitude to children is spot on.'
'Barker...is second to none at writing about the tragedy of life as it affects ordinary people, making her novels readable without ever underselling the subject.'
'Pat Barker once again shows how she warrants her international success and popularity. Border Crossing is a thrilling, gripping novel that will leave you in a fearful trance throughout, thanks to Barker's mesmeric style of writing.'
'Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story, expertly told.'
'...A tremendous piece of writing'
'Barker's talent for gently sifting through the hidden depths of the human psyche is awesome, and the edgy quality that ripples under the surface of her prose makes this fascinating and chilling.'
'It's a bold book, courageous about our culture's craven obsession with violent children, mercilessly acute about the ways we all stand by, judging without feeling, hating without fearing, sacrificing without loving, the children crossing the borders into the dark places of the mind.'
'This is a deeply intelligent and skilfully constructed novel that could scarcely be more timely.'
'This is Doctor Seymour,' Mary said, 'Who rescued you. I don't suppose you...' Her voice died away, as she registered the atmosphere in the room.
'You know, when something like this happens,' Danny said, 'it makes you realise things aren't just random. There is a purpose.'
There were no grapes. No visitors. Nothing. Looking round the bleak, bare room, Tom knew it was impossible just to take his coat and go. 'When do they say you'll be out?'
Pat Barker, critically acclaimed author of the Regeneration Trilogy returns to more contemporary subjects in her latest novel, Border Crossing. She talks exclusively to Penguin.co.uk about her reasons for writing, Middlesborough housewives and Jane Fonda. You studied history at university, and then worked as a teacher. What made you start writing fiction? I started writing fiction when I was ten or eleven. I loved reading stories so it seemed a natural progression to start writing them. I didn't begin writing seriously for publication until after the birth of my first child and then it took me a long time to get published. You're probably best known - so far, at any rate - for The Regeneration Trilogy, which is set during the First World War and shortly afterwards. With Border Crossing, your latest novel, you return to a wholly modern setting. What do you think are the relative merits and pitfalls of historical and contemporary novels? There are periodic protests by critics about the preponderance of historical novels on the Booker short list, and demands that writers should be more involved with the contemporary scene. I think this is largely a false distinction. Fiction is always about 'then' simply because a novel takes two or three years to write and a year to publish. So you can either write about the distant past or the recent past. The good thing about historical fiction is that you're likely to choose a time which has gone on fascinating succeeding generations, each of which will have asked their own questions about it. The pitfall about writing about the recent past is that nothing is more dead than yesterday or more irrelevant than last year's news. You clearly do extensive research for your novels: what kind of research did you do for Border Crossing? Compared with the trilogy very little research was involved in writing Border Crossing. I read a couple of psychiatric texts about personality disorders and the various ways of treating them. Despite this, or because of it, Danny Miller has no diagnosis. In the end I didn't want to attach a label to him. You have often seemed interested in the psychologically disturbed. Why do you think you find those kinds of mental states so interesting to write about? I think of my characters as normal people under immense pressure rather than as sufferers from mental illness. Why the immense pressure? Because you need to crack the shell to find out what's inside it. In the course of your career as a novelist you have shifted, broadly speaking, from writing about women to writing about men. Why is that? The questions that interest me at the moment, which are essentially questions about the causes of violence both for individuals and societies, seem to produce narratives that almost inevitably have male protagonists. Men commit more violence than women (both state authorized and criminal violence) and they are also more frequently its victims - a fact which is often lost sight of. Two of your novels, Union Street and Regeneration, have been made into films. (Stanley and Iris and Regeneration.) Were you closely involved in these productions? What do you think of the films? Stanley and Iris - the film version of my first novel Union Street - was a joke, in the sense that my heroine - a fifteen stone Middlesbrough housewife - was played by Jane Fonda, a woman who is famous for being slim. At the time a lot of journalists expected me to say I was angry but in fact I wasn't. My film agent, after watching the movie, said, 'We-ell, that's Hollywood!'. I can't think of a better comment. I was much more involved with Regeneration, visiting the set and reading the script. I thought they did a good job. I became fascinated by the challenge of telling stories in another medium - but without being tempted to try it myself. Which of your novels are you most proud of, and why? I don't know whether proud is the right word. Of all my books I'm fondest of Regeneration, but that may be because I enjoyed the research so much. You've said in the past that writing makes you 'miserable' and should only be done by those who have no other option. What do you like to do when you aren't writing? I'm not miserable all the time when I'm writing - only when it's going wrong. Unfortunately, in the course of producing multiple drafts, things go wrong a fair bit of the time. When not writing I enjoy all the obvious things: family, friends, wine, open fires, purring cats, the pot of snowdrops on my desk as I type this, clean, white linen sheets, lying beside a swimming pool somewhere sunnier than Durham... In addition, I enjoy swimming, long walks, modelling in clay and wildlife gardening. Finally, what advice would you give to a writer starting out on his or her career? The best advice I can give to writers is to persevere if you really have to do it, but remember that writing isn't easy, and that promotion (the other half of the job these days) isn't glamorous. Be true to yourself, and to what you, uniquely, have to say. Don't give the market what you think it wants, because you don't know what it wants. All anybody knows is what the market wanted last year - and that's a dangerous guide.
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