Ben W. Pesta, Attorney at Law - About Ben W. Pesta

THE BOOK REVIEW: "Books you might like, reviewed as often as I can get around to it."

Liza’s England by Pat Barker, Picador USA, 1986, 284 pp., $14

Like most of her American readers, I think, I first became aware of Pat Barker when her 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize. I read it, and then the other two novels, Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, that comprise her Regeneration Trilogy. Since then, I’ve eagerly read each of her novels as they’ve appeared in this country.

Barker’s novels are chiefly concerned with two themes. One is her characters’ response to catastrophe, especially war. The catastrophe at the heart of the Regeneration Trilogy is the Great War, World War I, the crucible in which the twentieth century was shaped. Her other Big Theme is the defining experiences that women, typically working-class women in the north of England, have in common.

Liza’s England (published in the U.K. as The Century’s Daughter) combines both themes. Liza Jarrett is the first child born in her northern town in the new (i.e., twentieth) century. Her mother cleans house for Mr. Wynyard, the town capitalist; Barker’s own mother and grandmother were cleaners. As a child, Liza accompanies her mother to the Wynyard mansion and scurries to keep out of the way of its lordly inhabitants. "I'm aware of the poetry of marching miners,” Barker told The Guardian, “but also of them as the aristocrats of the working class: you don't have equivalent poetic imagery of women who are cleaners bringing up their kids alone; the Labour movement frequently ignored them. No one's ever made a banner out of what they do."

Liza endures a large and emblematic portion of the century’s rigors. As a young woman during the Great War, she works in the Wynyard munitions factory. She loses her beloved brother in that war, and marries a tortured veteran who becomes, as Barker’s grandfather did, a medium, channeling the war’s dead for grieving survivors. She survives the Blitz, and her son is killed in World War II. Liza raises her granddaughter after her daughter leaves the child with her. (Barker’s grandparents raised her after her mother left to marry her stepfather.) She becomes involved in labor politics. She sees the granddaughter off to college, and reflects that the girl’s journey would have been impossible for a working-class woman of her own generation. Her spirit is indomitable and her loyalty is unfailing. She is a tough cookie, made so by adversity, without ever having intended to be one.

Barker’s eye and ear for class distinction is by no means inferior to Hardy’s, but (relief!) her prose is much more direct. She uses very little metaphor. Critics have described her style as “tight” and “spare.” Her writing is powerful and fluent, and in Liza’s England she is illuminating her own life and that of her family.

Earlier in her career, critics variously regarded Pat Barker as a social realist or a working-class novelist or a woman’s novelist. The Regeneration Trilogy cleared away all these stereotypes for good. (The categorization didn’t apply in the U.S., because the earlier novels appeared only after the success of The Ghost Road.) I think she is the last major novelist to emerge in the twentieth century. Her new book, Double Vision, was published in the U.K. in September. I very much look forward to reading it.