As the World Turns

The containers of memory are emptying. For those of us born at the tail end of the baby boom, it is impossible not to be conscious of the fact that the eyeballs that looked on the events of World War II are slowly clouding with age. Our fathers, our uncles, their friends, soldiers and sailors, survivors of the Holocaust, all before too many years will no longer be among us to communicate what they have witnessed and what they have lived and how (with regard to the survivors in particular) they have endured. The firsthand account, with its throb of Scheherazade urgency, will soon disappear into the archiving embrace of history. History is indispensable, but it does not have quite the magic, or mystery, of sitting at the feet of a man or a woman who was there.

If World War II is withdrawing into these fogs, then World War I has nearly vanished. How many people are living and cogent today who fought at the Somme, the Marne, Ypres? The loss of direct experience--and how memory shapes and remakes this experience--is a matter that has concerned and inspired Pat Barker in four novels to date, beginning with “Regeneration,” continuing with “The Eye in the Door” and “The Ghost Road” (all later grouped as “The Regeneration Trilogy”) and advancing still further in her latest book, “Another World.”

In “The Regeneration Trilogy” Barker did not address the issue of the vanishing witness head-on; instead, she performed her own act of resplendent testimony by setting her novels against the war and populating them with sharply and authentically imagined characters, some of whom were based on actual people. Over the course of these three books, Siegfried Sassoon, Dr. William Rivers, Billy Prior, Charles Manning, Wilfred Owen and others crossed paths in such a way as to bring to dramatic and tangible life the psychological and moral consequences of the war.

“Another World,” by contrast, is set in the present and turns pointedly to the subject of the evanescing witness, how he remembers and is to be remembered. Geordie Lucas, 101 and dying, joins Barker’s frieze of soldier heroes, only he has survived far beyond the temporal frame of the earlier novels to become a near ghost, a relic of a long ago, momentous, tenebrous time.

Geordie’s extraordinary endurance, stalwart character and acute (though uneducated) intelligence combine to make him a powerful and poignant presence in the life of his grandson, Nick. Geordie is a painfully aware, vividly remembering man whose dying has brought back a version of the nightmares, flashbacks and hallucinations he experienced when he first returned from the war. His dying is charged with acute despair that alternates with brief moments of revival. Tedious and filthy, it is sobering to behold and in every way masterfully done.

The encasing novel is somewhat more problematic. Barker has set in motion three narratives in “Another World” when two might have sufficed. One, a ghost story, lures her onto spongy ground. It is almost as though she mistrusted her unflinching domestic realism, the counterpoint to Geordie’s war experiences and his dying, to transmit the idea that hatred can be as vicious, divisive and unavoidable in family life as it is on the battlefield.

Barker’s afflicted contemporary family is headed by Nick, a teacher of troubled children, and Fran, a parent of them. It is a hot Newcastle summer, and Miranda, Nick’s daughter by his first wife, has come to spend time with them at Lob’s Hill, their newly acquired Victorian ruin of a house. Miranda is 13, sullen and private, and hideously disliked by Gareth, 11, Fran’s son by her first marriage, a cruel and unhappy boy who is obsessed with dental hygiene, video games and making everyone around him miserable. Together Nick and Fran have produced Jasper, 2, and are expecting a second baby.

Barker’s depiction of the hardship of this jaggedly blended family is withering. Bitterness, hurt, jealousy, neediness, anger and outright hatred (along with infrequent moments of patience and compassion) branch and loop over one another throughout the family organism, like a tangle of veins. Nick is repelled by his breast-feeding wife’s body; Fran dislikes her own son’s physical touch. Gareth despises his half-brother and stepsister equally; Miranda resents Nick for abandoning her mentally ill mom. Jasper is the embodiment of foul smells, unsated appetite and tears.

In spare, rapidly moving, present-tense prose, Barker gives us family life straight up. There is not a smudge of sentimentality, not a single decorative arabesque. But there is humor. Fran, for example, is “expected to wash, iron, change sheets, cook, shop, clean--all on four hours’ sleep a night. Oh, and supply conversation and entertainment--the little darlings’ minds have to be stimulated.” The darkly sardonic turn is typical of Barker and works to animating effect, with one quibble; the beleaguered Fran lacks the faceted variety of feeling that courses through Nick, whose love for his grandfather rounds and humanizes him. When Nick visits Geordie in his home or at the hospital, he does indeed seem to enter another world entirely.

The second narrative that threads itself through the novel is a ghost story, which is set in motion when Nick, Fran and the children, during a rare collaboration, agree to refurbish their shabby living room. In an unusually visceral scene, a sinister painting emerges on one wall as the contemporary family strips off wallpaper to find a caricatured but palpably disturbed Victorian family underneath: the father with an erect phallus, the mother with exposed swollen breasts, a scornful son and daughter and an infant. Nick, Fran, Miranda and Gareth all agree that the picture, “an exercise in hate,” must have been painted by the young boy, who has the “inward-directed gaze of the self-portraitist.” They agree on something else too, as Miranda, “who finally says what they’re all thinking,” announces: “It’s us.”

The picture represents the Fanshawes, the previous owners of the house. James Fanshawe was a local munitions manufacturer during World War I. In his family there was a famous unsolved murder, which Nick soon reads about in a book: The toddler was one day found dead, killed purportedly at the hands of his older siblings. While this information comes forward, Nick, Fran, Miranda and Gareth are in turn, and some more than once, visited by an apparition, always a young girl, perhaps the sister. At the same time, Gareth becomes more reckless in expressing his dislike of Jasper, first dropping him in a parking lot, later throwing rocks at him when the family visits the beach.

It’s not hard to see what Barker is going for here: the legacy of manufacturing armaments, which poisoned the manufacturer’s family; the presence of ghosts as a reminder of the intractability of the past, the persistence of hatred in human nature and the unexpected outcroppings of memory; and the sheer gothic storytelling thrill of spectral images passing across night-blackened windows and milky computer screens. But the effects feel like they want to be in a separate novel; here, they seem to wander too far from the critical area of narrative suspense--how far Gareth will go in his delinquent behavior--and its far more organic emotional core, which is Geordie and the effect his dying has on his grandson and on himself.

“So old he’s almost not allowed to live,” Geordie Lucas looks like Caravaggio’s portrait of St. Jerome. He is all skull and bones, his flesh nearly transparent. After an exploratory surgery, cancer has been discovered in his bowels, and he has been sewn up again. His pain, though, which is partly physical and partly psychological, seems to originate not in the surgical site but nearby, in the bayonet wound he sustained during World War I. Following his older brother, Harry, into the army, Geordie signed up at 17 and returned from battle when he was 21. He survived; Harry did not. Although the fact and the manner of Harry’s death-haunted Geordie all his life, he is only now beginning to speak of it. His nightmares, Nick notes, are not so much about the war as about Harry.

Barker’s writing tightens as Nick nurses his dying grandfather. She circles around and around the marks the war left on Geordie’s life and thereby on his grandson. In one beautifully sustained passage, Nick remembers a recent trip he and Geordie took to see the battlefields in Germany, where nothing he “had heard, nothing he had read, prepared him for the cemeteries” and where the cemeteries in turn “failed to prepare him for the annihilating abstractions of Thiepval,” the monument to the missing of the Somme, where Geordie stood for 10 minutes looking up at his brother’s name. “Geordie was attempting to graft his memories on to Nick. . ,” Barker remarks, “and perhaps, in spite of Nick’s resistance, he’d come close to succeeding.”

What does it mean to pass on these memories, by grafting or any other method? This is a preoccupying concern to Barker, whose work here is largely about the problems, and the indispensability, of memory. Several different kinds of remembering are presented in “Another World.” Memory-grafted Nick endeavors to understand and preserve Geordie’s experience because his grandfather was a constant in his childhood and a profound influence on his life--and because, as Geordie dies, he chillingly and horrifyingly cries, “I am in hell,” thus setting up a mystery infinitely more haunting than the appearance of any Fanshawe ghost. Helen, a young historian who has taped Geordie’s stories about the war and its aftermath for a book, contends that memories are never fixed but always shifting to accommodate changes in public attitudes to the war. For Geordie himself, memories are not to be systematized or tamed by theory; they are unbearably real. They have a “wordless, hallucinatory filmic quality.” “Geordie’s past isn’t over,” declares the narrator. “It isn’t even the past.”

Near the end of “Another World” Nick reflects that “It’s too easy to dismiss somebody else’s lived experience as a symptom of this, that, or the other pathology: to label it, disinfect it, store it away neatly in slim buff files and prevent it making dangerous contact with the experience of normal people.” Along with preserving and re-imagining history, as she did in “The Regeneration Trilogy,” and demonstrating the alternately ever-changing and unyielding nature of memory, as she does here, Barker’s other abiding achievement is the way she skewers some of the facile thinking that suffuses our time. Her approach to Geordie’s death is a reminder that our contemporary techniques for restoring the human soul may be fleeting and inefficacious. Some experiences cannot be treated. They can only be observed, respected, recorded, allowed to incite awe, perhaps, and perhaps to produce a modicum of careful, sober understanding.

At Thiepval with Geordie, Nick finds himself thinking, “You should go to the past, looking not for messages and warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days.” In the finest parts of “Another World,” as in “The Regeneration Trilogy,” Barker succeeds in thus humbling her readers. Her remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century’s often bleak and undignified human record.