Volume 48, Number 8 · May 17, 2001
Shock Treatment
By Gabriele Annan
Border Crossing
by Pat Barker
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 215pp., $22.00
Pat Barker is a professional historian, but her last five novels have concentrated on psychiatry, with the psychiatrist not only on the couch alongside his patients, but also in the narrator's chair: it is through his eyes that we observe the tale unfolding, even though the narrative is in the third, not the first, person. Crudely put, the purpose of analysis or therapy is to take the conflict, and therefore the thrill, out of the patient's predicament; and also inevitably though possibly regretfully, the afflatus, the make-believe, the poetry. So Barker's is an extraordinary achievement because she manages to be down to earth, poetic, and thrilling, all in the same paragraph. Her new novel, Border Crossing, in fact is thrilling to the point of being a thriller. One of the two main characters is an inscrutable young murderer out on parole: Hannibal junior, maybe. A frisson of danger runs through the text.
Review, 1946 words
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