Blurring the borders.(Critical Essay)

Less flashy than her compatriots and contemporaries Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, Pat Barker has, over the last couple of decades, been quietly building up a body of work that more than holds its own against theirs or that of any other writer of her generation. Her Regeneration trilogy, dealing with the First World War, is one of the most powerful pieces of fiction in recent years; its brilliant last volume, The Ghost Road, was awarded the Booker Prize. Her last novel Another World (1998) was an extraordinarily moving exploration of hatred and love between siblings.

In her new book Border Crossing,(1) Barker continues to probe many of the themes and questions she raised in Another World. Is anyone and everyone capable of committing an evil act? (The answer would seem to be yes.) Does an evil act make an evil person? Should an ordinary person, neither less nor more evil than others, be compelled to pay forever for the wrong committed in a moment? Why do some of us kill and others not--is it a matter of character, or might it simply be a matter of chance, or luck?

Such questions are urgent as we confront the current spate of school shootings and other killings by children with inadequate parental supervision and ready access to firearms. The get-tough attitude these tragedies have engendered has caused lawmakers to bypass the traditional route of juvenile or family court in favor of making young killers stand trial as adults. But in the recent case of a twelve-year-old who--accidentally, according to family members--killed a smaller child, even the toughest were shaken at the sight, on television and in the newspapers, of the killer's heartbreakingly childish face. Is he, on the basis of this one act, an irredeemable human being? Should he be tried as an adult, and be liable for adult punishment? Is it necessary, or desirable, to have him rot in prison for the next fifty years? These are decisions that our society appears philosophically unready to make; each time one of these atrocities takes place the rules are called into question all over again.

Furthermore, and on a more frightening and challenging level, is it possible that in fact many children would kill given the right combination of circumstances? Many children occasionally wish to kill their siblings; some even make feeble attempts to do so. For the most part they--and their unwitting victims--are lucky enough to have adults intervene in time. Not everyone is so fortunate.

Border Crossing addresses these questions with all of Barker's usual delicacy and straightforward emotionalism. The novel is set in the industrial city of Newcastle, in England. Tom Seymour, a clinical psychologist, has come to a rather grim turning point in his life. His marriage is coming to an end, having finally been broken by the stress of a long, and fruitless, attempt to conceive. "If only getting pregnant hadn't become such an obsession," he thinks. "She reminded him of one of those female fish that, in times of environmental hardship, dispense with the male sex altogether and carry his gonads in a purse on their sides."

Though he is disturbed by the separation, it's clear that he doesn't much love Lauren any more. It is not she herself he will miss, so much as another presence in the house. His dread of his impending solitude combines with an uneasy realization that he is approaching forty and, after spending years dealing with disturbed and abused children, he is getting emotionally cold, letting his necessary professional detachment turn into a frighteningly automatic chill.

 
   He'd learnt early, in his first few months of practice, that those who take 
   the misery home with them burn out and end up no use to anybody. He'd 
   learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart.