Tracing trauma and its aftermath
Pat Barker might be described as contemporary fiction's best anthropologist in the trenches of warfare and trauma. Renowned for her "Regeneration" trilogy ("Regeneration," "The Eye in the Door," "The Ghost Road"), which dealt with shell-shocked World War I soldiers, Barker has dealt with tragedies even closer to home in more recent novels, including 2001's "Border Crossing."
"Double Vision," published in December, tells the story of Stephen, a war correspondent who returns to England after Ben, his friend and colleague, is killed in Afghanistan. The England he returns to is hardly a comforting place, still literally blackened by the cremation of huge numbers of livestock, in the wake of an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease.
Stephen's life intersects with that of Kate, a sculptor whose commission to create a bronze Christ is interrupted by a debilitating accident. She is also Ben's widow. Among a handful of other characters who come together in the same English village is Peter, a somewhat sinister gardener who becomes Kate's assistant.
The author has visited the war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, and the novel poses questions about the need to report atrocity, the price of not recording, and the role of the novelist. Barker spoke from her home in Durham, England.
Q. Why is trauma your subject?
A. I'm not sure there's any obvious explanation. I think I'm attracted not to trauma but to the process of recovery from it, and if, like with a broken bone, people can heal stronger than if they had never had it. I'm also interested in the idea that trauma memories are recorded in an entirely different way than ordinary memories. They are recorded by a more primitive part of the brain. . . . One of the reasons that recovery works is that you are transposing that memory to a higher part of the brain so that language becomes a way of subduing it.
Q. Is there medical evidence for this?
A. I don't know if this is commonly accepted or if it's just a hypothesis, but it fits into subjective accounts of trauma. Memory is a common theme for me . . . that we've forgotten 90 percent of our lives. Especially with conscious memory -- why the bits that have survived have.
Q. One of the characters in the book who experiences trauma says she will never feel safe again.
A. I'm very interested in the way Justine reacts in this book. She is very robust in that she refuses to let [the traumatic event] define her. . . . What I was interested in was that nothing in the book leads up to that [event]. It's a dangerous thing to do in fiction, because all these things are supposed to grow logically out of previous events. I became interested in the random accident, of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There may be a political context, but from the point of view of the victim, it is a completely random, unmeaning act. I wanted to grapple with the random act of violence. I came to the conclusion that [fiction] can't.
Q. Really?
A. There are a lot of writers that do that. Hardy -- his books are full of extraordinary coincidences. E. M. Forster has random acts. They are spoken of as weaknesses. But if you look at real life, it's random. It's a process of human life that's difficult to explore in fiction. It's such a broad, capacious receptacle, you start to think there's nothing the novel can't do.
Q. At the heart of the book is the sculpture that Kate is making of the resurrected Christ. It's one of the primary visual images we have in Western art, and we sometimes don't acknowledge that it's rooted in violence.
A. I was interested in the particular influence of Christian representations of violence and suffering. [In "Regeneration"] Billy Prior is surrounded in church by images of beautiful men all dying. All those images are slightly sexualized. I was interested in that. There is a strand in Western art, a sickly representation of physical suffering. Over the years it must have impacted badly on people, yet what can you do? Christianity was built on a man who was tortured to death in his early 30s. There's no getting around that. . . . I was quite conflicted about using the image of Christ to represent the human capacity to regenerate and leave the suffering behind. It excludes people, but I thought, in the end, it's such a central image of Western culture, it has a meaning whether or not the reader is Christian.
Q. The scene in which Kate discovers her sinister assistant Peter in her studio, trying on aspects of her personality as well as her clothing, is one of the scariest things I've ever read. It's kind of Hitchcockian. Talk about its genesis.
A. I think what I started with was the idea that, because she is attempting to re-create an image of recovery and triumph over suffering and death -- [one] that is also not ignoring the horrors of the past -- she is faced with [the issue of] balance. To give darkness its due but not let darkness dominate the conception. I see her and Peter, who represents that darkness, as almost fighting for that image.
Q. Is Peter what we would call a borderline personality?
A. Yes, but I never like using the label.
Q. There's a character in "Border Crossing" who might also be said to be a borderline personality, a person who has problems with boundaries. Also, Billy Prior in "Regeneration." Why is this the character who travels with you from book to book?
A. I don't know. . . . Billy Prior is a more positive character. He has a more powerful sense of his own identity. Danny Miller [from "Border Crossing"] and Peter are much darker versions of Prior. . . .
[This borderline type is] a very useful character. His position in the English class system is anomalous, especially Billy Prior -- he operates in a more stratified society than the modern world, and he's also bisexual and he responds to both men and women and has characteristics of both men and women. He is a marvelous character to work with because he can walk into any number of worlds and be at home.
Robin Dougherty, a writer and critic, lives in Washington, D.C. Her column appears every other week. She can be reached at inkrd@aol.com.
