Humanity in the raw

IN 1995 PAT BARKER won the Booker Prize for Ghost Road, the last in a trilogy about the psychological damage of war. It was set to the backdrop of the so-called 'Great War', the one in which the concept of shell-shock was first made explicit.

That book was like a time machine controlled by a skilled but dangerous driver: it slam-braked its readers back eight decades into a world full of unwashed clothes and brute force and bewilderment about what it is that makes a man a man and a woman a mystery.

Border Crossing does not offer us the comfort of being set in the past. Instead it keeps us pinned to the wall of the present, an ugly place where little boys are murderers and psychotherapy is both sophisticated and still in its infancy.

Barker is good at her male protagonists, and once again the world she depicts is peopled most strongly with male characters. The women drift in to, but more often out of, the men's lives.

Tom Seymour is a child psychologist who has for many years been involved in the process of determining whether juvenile criminals should be judged as children or adults. While his marriage falls apart - ironically because he and his wife find they cannot conceive a child - Tom separates himself from his own emotions by writing a book, the fiction based on his own clinical experiences.

Among his many cases was a 10-year-old who had smothered an old woman with a pillow, yet who swore he had not done it.

Ten years before, Tom had testified that the boy, Danny, understood that when people or animals die they stay dead. His evidence had led to the boy being tried for murder and found guilty.

But now, out on one of those walks during which a couple tentatively recognises that their relationship has failed, a man jumps into a cold canal just in front of them. Tom dives in to rescue him and finds it is Danny grown up and needing to talk.

How much do we remember our past? How much do we recreate it and how much do we manipulate it? The adult Danny knows, and yet does not know, that he had murdered Lizzie Parks so long ago. And he knows, and yet does not know, that Tom was right in testifying that he was grown up enough to be tried in an adult court.

Danny, who is beautiful and manipulative and needy at the same time, asks Tom to help him through his own self-interrogation - but in the process he starts to interfere in Tom's own life in subtle ways.

In the character of Danny, Barker draws a powerful, believable picture of somebody who is certainly dangerous and perhaps even evil, at the moment when he is trying to understand his own nature.

The book has no sweet edges and few unnecessary details: it is a study of human psychology in its raw state - and for that it is, and should be, unrepentant.

The aching nostalgia for the time of steam trains and English seaside boarding houses is still there in the background and it is here that Barker's writing becomes most vivid. When, for example, Tom goes to the station to meet his wife, he suddenly steps into another time. 'The smell made him think that somewhere up there, trapped under the glass roof with its colony of golden-eyed pigeons, were the ghost of steam trains of the past: diesel fumes, burning coke, wet coal, smoke clearing slowly from platforms, passengers emerging after long journeys with soot-smudged faces and red veins in the whites of their eyes.'

I preferred Barker's historical stories, perhaps because it is always easier to view the tougher sides of human psychology from a suitable distance. But I admire her unerring instinct for truth, even when it is uncompromising.

This is a book that follows the tradition of The Lord Of The Flies, and Blake Morrison's extraordinary As If, which explored the murder of two-year-old Jamie Bulger by two children, through the kind of soul-searching approach that the news media never got close to.

It may not be nice, it may even be brutal, but it is devastatingly honest.

Border Crossing

by Pat Barker

Viking $288