Border Crossing passes the post

Barker's latest novel grapples with moral issues

Fiona Shaw, currently playing Medea in Deborah Warner's acclaimed West End production, reviews Pat Barker's latest novel, Border Crossing.

Here is another wonderful novel from Pat Barker. It is both a thriller and a meditation on millennial life, set in a northern city, against a backdrop of mudflats, docks and suspended industry. It is the meeting of two men battling over the morality of the past.

Tom Seymour is a criminal psychologist whose marriage is falling apart due to lack of children and the malaise of pointlessness.

Danny, a young, intelligent man, bludgeons his way into the story in the first chapter via a suicide. He attempts to drown in the river which Tom wanders along, trawling the wrongs of his marriage.

In a brilliant sequence, Barker describes Tom's saving of the boy.

Fiona Shaw: Currently starring as Medea

"A second later, the water encloses him in a coffin of ice. His mind becomes a pinprick of consciousness as he fights the river that pushed him under, tossed him about, slapped him to and fro across the face like an interrogator softening up his victim."

The shock of the first chapter produces the fallout which is the novel.

Moral debate

Like Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, the reader is grabbed into the terrible happening and so is fated to take part in the moral debate that follows.

Danny, the drowned rat, wants to rebuild his life by understanding the events of a decade ago when he was imprisoned for the murder of an old lady.

Tom had been the expert witness at the trial and his evidence had overturned the jury's sympathy towards the boy and he was found guilty.

These two flawed men agree to meet, Danny stalking Tom while Tom stalks the truth.

The book becomes a labyrinth of desolation, empty moors fold into empty lives.

As we follow Tom in his attempt to sleuth Danny's past, we visit the twilight zone of Long Garth, the secure unit for boys, run by the strangely committed Bernard Greene - a descendant of his Dickensian forebearers.

"You know the first thing I do with any boy coming to this school?

Barker creates "a labyrinth of desolation"

"I say to him: this is the first day of the rest of your life. I don't care what you've done. All I'm interested in is the way you behave now."

Alcoholic night

"Greene glittered with conviction," Barker writes, but it is his wife who tells him of the whereabouts of Angus MacDonald, Danny's shamed English teacher, who we find in the next chapter, running a writing course.

The book segues into a very entertaining interlude as we enjoy an alcoholic night of aspiring writers and their weekend commune.

But we are never allowed to relax for long. Sweat and sleeplessness upset the brain and reality is always tempered by this frame of mind; the reader is made uneasy in the swift exchanges of dialogue, and the lonely descriptions of landscape, smell and mood breed the anxiety that marks the search.

The river runs through this novel like an eternal warning reminding the reader of their vulnerability.

Tom finds himself diving into it in the first chapter to save a drowning boy, later he remembers his wife from whom he is parting, painting with relaxed abandon on its shores.

Later still, he looks out at its misty desolation as one realises both his mind and body are in the midst of danger.

Lost memory

The river runs through this novel like an eternal warning reminding the reader of their vulnerability

Fiona Shaw

The boy, who seems so susceptible at the beginning of the story, gains ground as he plays adult off adult, false memory with lost memory.

The abandonment of structure in both men's lives makes them vulnerable to each other and the novel tells of a world where nothing is certain.

Yet as the story unfolds in its swirl of brown and grey mist, some of the characters' desires are answered.

Compassion

I found it a compassionate description of much of the experience of England today, a closed-off world where the police and services are functioning on a different plane to those who are living a restless existence.

Danny's description of his upbringing is chilling, just like many others who have and have not committed crimes. It made me think that we are all satellites of each others' failures.

Much of morality connects to our isolation even within families, marriages, or cities.

There seems to be no benign spirit who is guiding or watching, no pyramid of certainty.

Life is as complicated for the psychologist as it is for the reborn criminal, people muddle through, there is no order in their needs or the ability of others to answer them. Failure, like greatness, is thrust upon them.

There seems to be no benign spirit who is guiding and watching, no pyramid of certainty

Fiona Shaw

Danny is given a false name but he is found out when another similar crime is discovered. His anonymity is as frail as the meaningless fame of Tom's TV appearance.

Evil floats in and out of our lives, a manifestation of inherited weakness. So many suffer from the damp unenviable state of the outsider. As Tom eerily quotes from his amateur operatic experience, Danny, like Miles in The Turn of The Screw might: "Rather be in an apple tree than a naughty boy: in adversity" - wouldn't we all?

Border Crossing is published by Viking.