His mother dead and father vanished, our hero is dragged up by a disagreeable old Scottish grandfather. “Through a fog compounded of tobacco smoke, the stink of spirits and the breath of bailiffs, we see their melancholy faces.” Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was a Scotsman by birth – his grandfather turns out to have been one of the architects of the 1707 Act of Union – but Pritchett’s collection of Grub Street irregulars would be radically diminished by his absence. ‘The English humorists!” V S Pritchett once exclaimed, with rather daunting candour. To read more than a few paragraphs of his voluminous output is to be plunged headlong into a reeking 18th-century sub-world full of rakish swindlers and their bold-eyed mistresses, where every man’s aim is seduction and every woman’s marriage, and the most common sound in a London street is the smash of a loaded chamber pot breaking on the cobbles. What stays with the reader are Barker’s unflinching intelligence and dry humour, her undoubted compassion and commitment, the glimpses of terror and brutality that resurface in Stephen’s mind.. Similarly, Kate, as a resolutely figurative and non-experimental sculptor, thinks female bodies unsuitable to express heroic emotions and suffering. Renaissance artists had no problem with this, though Kate thinks they did.

The final paragraph, featuring Stephen and Justine walking along the beach into the dawn, seems trite. The novel’s espousal of realism allows some oddly old-fashioned generalisations about “silly menopausal women” to creep in. Winter, changes in the weather, and the dreadful toll exacted by foot and mouth are precisely observed, swiftly rendered.Sometimes, Barker’s writing, when it moves people from room to room in a businesslike way, can seem flat. The best writing in the book embodies Stephen’s and Kate’s responses to the natural and material world. The last thing he’d expected, after several weeks of celibacy, was to be left standing on the starting blocks with his shorts around his ankles.”Interwoven with these themes of creativity, violence and memory are satirical riffs on modern urban and country life Various marriages shift and crack Middle-aged spouses agonise over their differences. Barker does not go into detail about their lovemaking, instead presenting the reader with characteristically unsentimental post-coital musings: “It took him a long time.

He becomes involved with Justine, 20 years his junior (who has previously been the lover of Peter Wingate), finding with her both oblivion and ecstasy. So in this novel she has focused on the after-effects of war in Sarajevo and Afghanistan, studying the inarticulate semi-friendship between Stephen Sharkey, a war reporter, and Ben Frobisher, a war photographer, Kate’s former husband, who has been shot dead on an assignment.Stephen, who is the main narrator for the novel, meditates on the morality of photographing dead rape victims, on how to live with his dreadful memories, on how to mend himself No counselling for him Sex does pretty well as a substitute. Her distinctive handling of the motifs around the return of the repressed has involved moving away from the field of the personal to studying mass trauma, mass regression, in the fields of war and political violence. By concentrating, recently, on male heroes and anti-heroes she has similarly avoided being criticised, as women so often are, for writing about the domestic, the feminine sphere. Finally, having come to terms with pain and grief, the protagonist moves on.This narrative shape has become so hackneyed as to be almost impossible to undertake any more Pat Barker has managed to avoid these pitfalls. Shock or trauma in the present is followed by a regression to the past, where old horrors must be confronted. A pattern of story has been laid down, in our post-Freudian times, which, simplistically perhaps, apes a lay perception of neurosis and healing.