Pat Barker Meet the Author

Pat Barker's two war trilogies take take us from the Western Front

in 1917 through to the blitz and London

to the Second World War with characters that carry

Noonday, the book that completes the second trilogy, a story

of loss and relationships, delayed by a world that sometimes

seems to be collapsing in rubble all around.

I will be talking to Pat Barker about her contribution

to the literature of war. Welcome.

You are writing about characters who have two adapt to life in London

while bombs are falling. What do you think life was like? Exhausting more

than anything else I think, nobody was getting much sleep at night.

Even the people who were just being bombed, the people in the emergency

services were awake all night. Then you had to go to work and do more

less a normal day's work and people who were there to talk about the

exhaustion, virtual impossibility of getting through an afternoon.

Getting up in the morning, walking down the familiar street and seeing

that a school or shop or pub had simply disappeared overnight. Yes,

and the people who disappeared overnight as well, the people you

were used to seeing on the tube or in the corner shop. They would be

one face missing and you would never know whether they had got a bad cold

and stayed in bed or whether they were under a pile of rubble at the

end of the street. Without giving away the plot line, which are very

touching and quite thrilling, it is that sense of complete uncertainty,

that you play on in the book, what will happen next? Is this night

going to be our last? Yes, on the basis that this night might very

well be your last, do you behave differently? One of the very minor

characters says, who are you going out with tonight? Is it somebody you

would want to die with? That was literally the situation they were

in. The story revolves around the characters, their relationships,

some of whom we know from the first two books in the trilogy, the blitz

then arrives as a kind of lumbering war machine into their lives. So it

is not so much about men and women of action, who are on the front, but

people affected by it. Do you think we must apologise the London of the

Blitz? I think we do but increasingly, I think the myths are

being challenged. People who lived through it, they spoke about it at

the time, tell one story, they tell stories about a bomb dropped on

their house but what really hurt was that their next-door neighbour

nipped in and stole the child's birthday presents which they had

hidden in the cupboard under the stairs. That is what really hurt,

the betrayal. At 20 years later, the same person interviewed says, in a

way, it was a wonderful time, we all pull together. The crimewave in the

Blitz, which I have not read much about, but there were an awful lot

of burglars in the Fire Service. Because you had unrestricted access.

They had the time of their lives. Absolutely. The first trilogy took

us from the Western Front to a hospital where characters are

incarcerated, to the aftermath of the First World War way now, in

noonday, the last book in the second trilogy, in the Blitz. We see that

whole period being inextricably connected, the characters bound

together in the shadow of the First World War even as they were caught

up in the second. I am writing primarily about people middle-aged

in the Second World War or older and they are faced with this shock that

the war they fought was the war to end all wars and people really

believe that, in 1917 and 18, it was the only thing worth fighting for,

the idea that this was the last war. 20 years later, there they are and

their sons and daughters or nieces and nephews are doing exactly the

same thing all over again. They felt they had failed. That is the emotion

that interests me. Within a year of commemoration for various Centenary

's, the Battle of the Somme centenary is coming up, one of the

things that people think of is whether people behave differently?

You have said in the book about people facing different choices,

whether they would still be there tomorrow or next week. What do you

think it does to our nature? Does it left us, does it enhance life or is

it something...? I think it certainly enhances life. The problem

is with writing about it. It is a fascinating field for a novelist but

yet as a human being, I deplore it. But there it is. I am I living on

something I deplore. Ella and Paul who appeared in earlier volumes,

they married and they were trained as artists. They have an artistic

view of the world. That is something that is often caricatured. What do

you think that means that that is their sensibility, what does it mean

for the way they behave under the pressure and brutality and shock of

war? First of all, I think they feel the enormous guilt of looking at

this scene of total destruction and death and torment and finding it

beautiful. Several people have found it beautiful, journalists as well as

artists. I think they are mesmerised by it. They are in a strict sense

bird-brain. They react to the visual impact, they don't necessarily think

very hard about it or find it easy to articulate their thoughts and

emotions. When you explore the relationships between characters,

with the generation that went before Eleanor's mother and Rachel's mother

who dies in the book, you take a couple of lines from lake which are

terribly haunting. Reminders what they are. -- Blake. Reminders what

they say to you because they clearly mean something powerful. The

caterpillar on the leaf repeats to the, thy mother's grief. It fits in

with what Eleanor is feeling about her mother. I like that it is very

powerful, it is completely meaningless in a sense. We don't

know what the caterpillar on the leaf repeating your mother's grief

to you, means and yet we all know it is absolutely true. And that is the

genius of a great writer, to distil something... Yes. It cannot be

deconstructed or translated into simpler terms, it simply is and that

is what makes a great writer. Finally, it is a book in a way about

haunting. A haunting feeling. Yes, Eleanor's brother to be from the

First World War, but also a sense that London and the Blitz, in total

darkness, became a place where the dead of previous generations... You

could walk past them in the, in the darkness, how would you know? That

is what interests me. Pat Barker, thank you very much for talking

about noonday, the third book in the second war trilogy.

It has been another cold day and for some of us, some fine sunshine but

for others, wintry showers. More to