Ghost Writer.(Pat Barker )

As a little girl, the novelist Pat Barker felt quite at home in the company of ghosts. She was taught to treat them politely. She grew up in a gritty industrial town in northeast England, in a family that practiced Spiritualism as their religion. She came across some of the family's Sunday-school textbooks, years later. "Did you know that astral beings have no anus?" she said, when I met her in England this winter. She hooted with laughter. "That is one of the many useless facts that clutter up my mind!" Barker was born in 1943, a child of the Second World War, but her circumstances made her a survivor of the First World War as well. Her family had very little money. She was brought up in the home of her grandmother and her grandmother's second husband, who had served in the battlefields of northern France and had been bayonetted in his side by a German soldier. He was also profoundly deaf, which made it hard to talk to him about anything. The child would stare at his scar as the man, stripped to the waist, stood washing himself at the kitchen sink; sometimes, like St. Thomas, she put her fingers in it. But how he came by the wound, like every other aspect of his horrific wartime experience, was never mentioned.

He was the forerunner: the first of all the silenced, traumatized, physically damaged veterans--living spectres--who would inspire the "Regeneration" trilogy, the masterpiece that Pat Barker was to produce in the nineteen-nineties. (It won her the Booker Prize, and an international reputation.) With her new book, "Life Class," she puts the First World War at center stage again--especially as it affects a group of youthful artists, who are struggling to survive, resist, or represent it. Even her female-centered, social-realist early novels--"Union Street" (1982), "Blow Your House Down" (1984), and "Liza's England" (1986)--had ghosts in them, of one sort or another. In "Liza's England," the title character's husband was wounded in the throat in an action that killed most of his comrades. He has nightmare visions of their faces rising out of the earth, and, as a Spiritualist medium, devotes his energy to channelling their voices.

Spiritualism was popular with the British working classes after the First World War. "A lot of the impetus was this horrendous grief and denial that nearly a million dead in a country produce," Barker said. She recalled that an uncle of hers lived in a house where a door would swing open for no apparent reason: "You had to say, 'You're welcome.' " All the family believed it was a poor woman who had gassed herself, walking across the room to the fireplace. "As metaphor--and similes are trivial, but metaphors go to the heart of what human beings are--there is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of ghosts haunting the living," Barker said. "It is simply a statement about our relation to the past, and to the parts of the past we haven't managed to cope with. I thank the Lord I grew up in a setting like that."

Barker lives in the ancient cathedral city of Durham, some thirty miles from her birthplace, in Thornaby-on-Tees. Her husband, David Barker, is a retired professor of biology and neuroanatomy at Durham University. (The couple have a grown son and daughter, both married, and three grandchildren. Their daughter, Anna, has just completed her second novel. "I wish she had chosen an easier profession," her mother says.) When I went to Durham to meet Barker, the drive took me through starkly contrasting topography. First I crossed the moors, stretching away with eerie light on their midwinter khaki coloration, and with, here and there, the burial bumps of Bronze Age chieftains. Then I dropped down from the heights and through the industrial landscape around the mouth of the River Tees: the country that witnessed the birth and death of the Industrial Revolution. Even now--with the remaining chemical factories wrapped in pipe-work like their own intestines, the huge, sullenly puffing cooling towers, the perpetually flaming waste-gas chimneys against the backdrop of a cold gray sea--Teesside remains an exhilarating, though vaguely infernal, vista. But it is a postindustrial relic, a doomed shadow of the muscular, self-confident place where Pat Barker was born, at a time when factories and steel mills ran round the clock, and the Luftwaffe guided their bombs by the glow of the blast furnaces.

Barker is protective of her privacy, and has been known to complain about critics who seek a facile key to her art through biographical detail. We met by arrangement not in her home but in a featureless hotel in Durham. Anyone who has read her novels will be aware that Barker is an expert observer of two people talking, listening, or being together in a room in silence. The engine driving the "Regeneration" trilogy is the therapeutic encounters between Dr. William Rivers (a psychiatrist and anthropologist who really existed) and his patients--Army officers suffering from different forms of shell shock. His patients include the real antiwar poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who play secondary parts in the plot as it unfolds, leaving the starring role to a fictitious officer called Billy Prior. A "temporary gentleman," with an aspirational working-class mother, he is a complex, amoral, seductive, and knowing antihero: a man defiant of boundaries of class or sex. Once he recovers from his mutism (he lost the power of speech around the time when he came to in a trench holding a dead man's eyeball), he is by far the trickiest of Rivers's patients. He challenges Rivers by drawing attention to the analyst's stammer and suppressed childhood memories, and he calculates what Rivers wants to hear by observing the dilation of his pupils.

Barker, creator of this shape-shifter ("There's a lot of Billy Prior in me," she says), is surprisingly direct and candid in manner. In a way, she reminded me of the Northern women in her novels, chatting as they scrub floors, iron clothes, or sit knee to knee in factories making ammunition, boxing up sponge cakes, or plucking chickens. But her identity is far from simple. With her air of plain living and high thinking, her long, intelligent face devoid of makeup, and a rather provincial haircut, she looks like a Cambridge don or the wife of a Hampstead intellectual. Her speech is that of the educated middle class anywhere in England, except for traces of the lengthened vowels of her birthplace. Her tall, slightly gawky figure retains something of her adolescent self, as well.

Before she took up full-time writing, she was a teacher of young adults. She still misses working side by side with colleagues. "But I choose not to have a community of writers," she said. From her relatively isolated vantage point, away from the London literary scene, she has staked her claim to a literary territory of ambitious range. She has published eleven novels covering more than a century of English history, from 1900 to the present. (She is a trained historian, who took her degree at the London School of Economics.) She defies categorization; she once said that she didn't write historical novels, since for her the First World War was history that we had not "come to terms with." Nevertheless, she is part of a generation of English writers that the writer and editor Ian Jack once described as creating a "literature of farewell," fascinated by a "country and people that seemed to be there a minute ago, before we blinked and turned away." However modest her childhood circumstances, Pat Barker grew up in a nation that was a great world power and then (like Teesside) experienced a dizzying decline.