Pat Barker
Rosie Blau of the Financial Times interviewed Pat Barker about her new book, Life Class.
Part of the article reporting their conversation:
Life Class returns to the subject Barker is best known for: the first world war. Her Regeneration trilogy was a bestseller - she won the Booker prize in 1995 for the final volume, The Ghost Road. The books were based around the wartime experiences of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and the neurologist who treated them for shellshock, William Rivers.
Barker’s novels have covered many subjects: working-class poverty, war in Bosnia and Afghanistan, child psychology. But this book will inevitably be seen as a return to her “home territory”. So how does she feel about that? She pauses. “Rotten, really, in lots of ways, I think it’s a bit of a caricature. I’ve not thought about it [the first world war] all that much in the intervening years.”
--Marshal Zeringue
