Another World

Having read what I think might be a fair amount of Pat Barker’s work in the past (hell, I’ve even blogged about her already), I was pretty sure of what I was getting myself into with Another World.  Aside from the fact that is caused Asleep by The Smiths to get stuck in my head something chronic, it was pretty much what I expected.  Although it’s set in modern(ish) times, it is mostly about World War One.  This time, though, Barker’s focusing on memories and interpretations rather than the events themselves.  Added to this there’s a pseudo-horror-ghost story thing that I was hoping would be utterly appropriate in the run up to Hallowe’en.  (I am well aware that this ship has now sailed, and at this point would like to reiterate my holiday).

The World War One stuff’s difficult to argue with really.  Geordie is a 101 year-old veteran slowly dying.  Fairly appropriately, the closer he gets to death, the more the war spills out of him.  It’s not that he has a burning desire to confess while there’s still time, quite the opposite actually, but the memories that used to haunt him return at night.  Barker slips in odd lines to the prose itself that paraphrase the war poets, Wilfred Owen especially- Geordie’s last words are, “I am in Hell”- echoing Owen’s Strange Meeting (“By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell”).  Sorry, there’s a spoiler there.  The 101 year-old dies.  I want to say that there’s also an element of Barker Peggy-Sue-ing her way into the book in the form of Geordie’s main confessor Helen.  She is an Oxford scholar who used his experience in her dissertation.  I’m not sure if Barker did actually have conversations like those between Helen and Geordie but I feel like she’s challenging the reader to assume she did only to remind us it’s only a book.

This unease is caused by the ghost portion of the book.  Another World actually focuses on Nick and the amalgamation of his and his (relatively) new wife’s families and children.  One night when redecorating the family discover a portrait of the house’s original owners, the Fanshawes.  It’s sufficient to say not only is it a creepy-as-hell scrawled on the wall affair but also the Fanshawe family mirrors Nick’s own.  Naturally, a bit of digging reveals a murdered Fanshawe son, fallen foul of fratricide.  At this point things don’t look too good for the infant Jasper, especially as his half-brother seems adamant on taking out his violent tendencies on him.  Half-sister Miranda also appears to be playing just as much of an ambiguous role in it all as her historical counterpart, who may or may not be haunting the modern family.  And then, right on the last page, Barker goes and writes, “It’s easy to let oneself be dazzled by false analogies- the past never threatens anything as simple, or avoidable, as repetition.”  Because, of course, Nick’s family are not the Fanshawes.

As much as I feel like I’m having the rug pulled out from under my feet at the end, I like the book.  Barker has a talent for writing short books that leave you wanting more- not as an epilogue to her stories, which are complete, but throughout the stories themselves.  She is a minimalist, but I want more.  More of the illusion that the Fanshawes and the Halfords, more worrying about Jasper’s fate, more stories about children killing one another.  So close to Hallowe’en especially, I want a clearer cut ghost.

I've just finished the last of my holiday reads (it was only a few days away), Anna Karenina.  Expect a new blog soon.