Search Results

“... the unexhilarating compensations that might remain, however, it is a good deal less convincing. Pat Barker has also written, with more anger and much less decorum, about the confinements that hedge us in. Her novels have all been versions of the same intense story: working-class families or, more specifically, the women of such families, contending ...”

“... had a catalytic effect on Owen’s poetry has long been recognised. When, in her new novel, Pat Barker shows Sassoon and Owen discussing the diction and title of the latter’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, she is following manuscript evidence of Sassoon’s suggestions and Owen’s revisions. But although Sassoon plays a crucial role in ...”

“... In the Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker distilled the trauma and drama of the First World War into a series of minutely observed pairings between the neurologist William Rivers and his severely shellshocked charges. The most famous of them is Siegfried Sassoon, who was sent to a psychiatric hospital after he issued a public declaration against the continuation of the war ...”

“... Pat Barker​ has written about war, mostly the First World War, again and again. In her new novel, Noonday, the last book in a trilogy, she takes characters forged in the first war, in Life Class (2007) and Toby’s Room (2012), on into the second – or into the second phase of one long conflict. They are middle-aged in the London Blitz ...”

“... for satisfactory solutions. The gallery of individual female portraits is also the form chosen by Pat Barker for her first publication, Union Street. But it is hardly necessary to point out that the philosophical purpose of Mme de Beauvoir, and her use of the rhetoric of liberation, are very far indeed from the conception of a work like this. ...”

“... Working-class memory generated Pat Barker’s writing. Her early fiction presented itself as a tribute to generations of suffering and survival in the industrial North-East of England. It seemed to fall into a ready-made tradition: ‘the grit, the humour, the reality of working-class life’, Virago burbled cheerfully about Union Street (1982 ...”

“... The present novel completes Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy. It ends just before the war itself ends, with the attempted crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal in which Wilfred Owen was killed. You can read it without having read Regeneration or The Eye in the Door, because these are novels that cover the same ground again, and again, like the battles their characters replay in memory and nightmares ...”

“... which all its other merits ... helplessly and submissively depend’. Unfortunately, that one – Pat Barker’s The Century’s Daughter – is also a consciously ‘working-class’ fiction whose claim to reality-status might be found off-puttingly vehement. Still, her book, risking as it does a limiting categorisation and, inescapably, a caricaturing ...”

“... interesting people to the lodgings – a privilege I have valued. Remembering that many years ago Pat Barker had asked my old college friend Mick Standen, the WEA tutor-organiser for Durham, to tell her if she’d ever be a writer, I asked her and her husband David to dinner when I was sitting in the North-East and exposed my dilettantish flank by ...”

“... sure if they should be digging around.’ In this respect, the novel lives in the long shadow of Pat Barker, Tim O’Brien and especially Ernest Hemingway, who is credited by Singleton with capturing ‘a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away for ever’. The result of all ...”

“... insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after all, simply describing the same ...”

“... story reminds us just how innovative was the forgotten psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers, revived by Pat Barker in her magnificent trilogy about the Great War, and how Maudsleyan were most of his contemporaries. Whether, in any case, the therapeutic answer to serious mental illness, once dreamed of, will ever be found remains uncertain. It is as ...”

“... The novel’s delicate counterpoint of psychiatrist and war-damaged poet invites comparison with Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1991). But whereas Barker was concerned with the immediate ethical dilemma of returning mentally shattered men to the trenches, Edric is interested in the war’s lingering psychological ...”

“... now 48. Somebody should write about women obsessed with the First World War. Everybody knows Pat Barker, of course, but there’s also Lyn Macdonald – a former BBC producer whose dense, addictive, exhaustively researched oral histories of the war (1914: The Days of Hope, 1915: The Death of Innocence, Somme, They Called It Passchendaele, The Roses ...”