And then you die. Barker, Pat. 1999. Another World. Penguin Books Ltd.
Barker, Pat. 1999. Another World. London: Penguin.
This novel was recommended to me by ChatGPT as a possible parallel or model for my draft novel, Once We Were Heroes (quondam Glamour Boys), on the grounds that it explores how a wartime crime or traumatic event reverberates long after the war has ended.
At one level, this description is accurate. In Barker’s novel, the originating trauma is the death of Harry, the older brother of Geordie, a dying World War I veteran. Geordie, who is the grandfather of Nick, the main male character in the novel, has been haunted throughout his life by his brother’s death and suffers from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder—though the novel, set in a period roughly contemporaneous with its publication, notes that this would once have been described as shell shock or simply ignored. After the war, Geordie develops a stutter, has nightmares, wets the bed, and refuses to speak about his experiences. Later, the acute symptoms recede, and by the time the novel is set he has become, largely through longevity, a kind of informal spokesperson for the First World War generation.
So ChatGPT was right—more or less—that the novel concerns the long-term ramifications of wartime trauma and that it involves the uncovering of a mystery. At one point, Geordie says that he “killed” his brother, a statement we eventually learn is literally true. Harry was badly wounded in no man’s land; Geordie broke the rules to reach him and, realising that Harry could not survive and that his cries would draw German artillery, kills him quickly with a knife. Whether this act constitutes murder is left unresolved, however. On the one hand, Geordie idolised his brother and his brother was in mortal pain and danger; on the other, he was deeply jealous of him, both for his success and for his status as their mother’s favourite—a preference she makes brutally explicit after the war by insisting that “it should have been him” who died.
The revelation is also handled quite oddly from a structural point of view: we hear earlier on that there are tapes of Geordie giving an interview with a friend of his grandson, including one that he asked to be destroyed; the interviewer knows what is in these, and, just before the novel ends, plays them for the grandson (they had not been destroyed after all). But nothing is really done with the information: Nick goes to the funeral knowing what Geordie said he’d done, and that’s pretty much it. It all seems very — perhaps deliberately — anti-climactic, something heightened by the novel’s closing paragraph, in which the main character reflects on how time, in essence, makes everything unimportant:
[Nick] wanders off down the path that leads round the outer perimeter of the churchyard, taking the long route back to Geordie. Some of the graves, here under the trees, are so old the names are hidden by moss. They’re forgotten, and the people who stood beside their graves and mourned for them are dead and forgotten in their turn. He remembers the trip to France with Geordie, the rows upon rows upon rows of white headstones, ageless graves for those who were never permitted to grow old. He’d walked round them with Geordie, marvelling at the carefully tended grass, the devotion that kept the graves young. But now, looking round this churchyard, at the gently decaying stones that line the path, he sees that there’s wisdom too in this: to let the innocent and the guilty, the murderers and the victims, lie together beneath their half-erased names, side by side, under the obliterating grass.
Heightening this sense of anti-climax is the fact that — to me at least — the Geordie story did not seem at all like the novel’s main concern until these last couple of pages (in fact, I hadn’t realised the novel was actually over until it turned out there were no more pages to turn in my e-book following this last paragraph). For most of the book, the story of Geordie’s illness seems to function much more as a sub-plot, something that provides some tension and complication to what seems until the very end to be the real story: the attempts of Nick and his partner Nora to integrate members of their blended family as they move into a large Victorian house they have recently bought in Newcastle.
That story, however, comes from a different genre: the gothic family thriller. Nick is the father of Miranda, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old daughter from hist first marriage, to Barbara, a woman he divorced after she was involuntarily committed for chronic and profound depression. Nora, his new partner, is the moth of Gareth, an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy who was conceived through a brief fling early on in Nora’s adulthood. Nick and Nora also have a two-or-three-year old son Jasper in common with another child on the way.
As the story opens, the new family is preparing to move into Lobb Hill, a Victorian mansion that had been built by the Fanshawe family, original owners of an armaments factory that had been the area’s main employer for most of the previous century. Almost immediately trouble appears. Miranda and Gareth — who is anti-social and, we discover over time, shows what are probably psychopathic tendencies — do not get on at all. Miranda is also angry at her father for abandoning Barbara, while Gareth is scared of Nick and jealous of Jasper. Nora is angry at Nick because Gareth is not close to him. And Nick feels harassed by Nora. Everybody quarrels with everybody all the time, and nothing is made better by the fact that Nick has to step out every so often to take care of his dying grandfather Geordie.
Things take a turn for the bizarre, however, when the family pull down some wallpaper, only to discover a hidden mural portraying the Fanshawe family: teenage son and daughter, younger child, mother, and father. The family is arranged in a classic family portrait style (children grouped around the parents), except that the father has a large exposed erect penis, and the mother has her breasts hanging out over the top of her dress. After a brief discussion of who could have painted it (they decide it was probably the son), Nick and Nora decide to cover it back up.
Meanwhile, relations among the modern children devolve: Gareth hurts Jasper deliberately in a parking lot, and Miranda and Gareth fight. Towards the end of the novel, Gareth may or may not attempt to harm Jasper by hitting him with a large stone (he says he was throwing pebbles and it isn’t clear whether he or Miranda or somebody else actually threw the rock). After Jasper comes home from the hospital after this last incident, Miranda shows up in his nursery in a sleepwalk, possibly attempting to suffocate him with a pillow.
In the middle of all of this, Nick discovers that the Fanshawes left Lobb Hill after a family tragedy: the two older children were accused (and acquitted) of drowning the youngest child. This ties-in to stories Gareth had heard about a ghost on the property and a young girl dressed in white that he, and possibly Miranda and Jasper, see at various points — unless of course the girl in white is actually Miranda, who seems to wear similar clothes at various points (again, it isn’t fully clear, and at one point Miranda also seems to see the ghost).
But then Geordie dies and the story ends. The murder mystery story (sort of) wins out, and all the plot lines from the multi-generational gothic family psycho-horror are left unresolved.
So what’s going on? Well one possibility is irrational exuberance: while Pat Barker is an exceptionally clear writer with what is usually a very light touch, she occasionally wears the research she did for this book the opposite of lightly. There are all sorts of bits of northern lore and dialect here that she is delighting in telling us about, including a very long section where we, in essence, read a book of famous Northern murders over Nick’s shoulder. If we assume that the issues with this novel are not deliberate, then the book reads like somebody who had a large number of great, but incompatible, ideas for how this book could be a horror story, a war story, a historical drama, and a family drama.
If the issues are the result of deliberate planning, however, then I guess the best way to read the novel is as a critique of the comforts offered by genre: in this book, as in real life, murders may not be murders, ghosts are probably not ghosts, and family quarrels tend to cycle on without neat resolutions… until everybody dies and all is ultimately forgotten.
A very cold comfort, however: in this book, as well as in life!
