This is by Pat Barker, and it was published in 1998. That means it came after her well-known Regeneration trilogy (1991-95), and after her Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the third volume of that trio. I didn't get to those until 2013-14. I loved the first and second (Regeneration and The Eye in the Door), the third one not so much.

I bought Another World because I found it in the big second-hand book fair that comes to Kuching once a year, and I thought, "Pat Barker... Yeah, it's been a long time."

It's immensely readable. Barker is very observant and good at dialogue.

But three narrative threads are being woven within its fairly narrow confines, and I think it would have been a much better book if there had been only two.



1.

The most powerful story by far -- by a country mile -- is that of Geordie, a veteran of World War I, and now 101 years old. When we meet him, he's dying. He has cancer. Nothing more can really be done. His daughter, Frieda, is on hand to help. But mostly we see Geordie through the eyes of his grandson, Nick, a 40-something university lecturer.

Even if there were nothing else to the book, Geordie's end-of-life experience would have you looking on in awe and dread. As these things go -- and remember I'm writing at a time when people are living and dying in truly horrible conditions in Gaza and Ukraine and Myanmar (to pick just three) -- I suppose Geordie's end could be much worse. He's old already. He has family with him. He has a roof over his head. He has medical care. But I don't think anyone exactly goes easily. Death is a bastard, and the path into its jaws is lined with indignities.

What's torturing Geordie, though, is his memories.

We learn piecemeal of his war experiences -- through Nick's recollections of his stories, through flashbacks to a trip to the war graves that grandfather and grandson undertook earlier in the year, and via the interviews Geordie recorded with Helen, a researcher.

He returned from the war, like so many others, terribly traumatized. It took him years to recover his mental equilibrium. He then became more eager to talk, as though he had a sense of mission: "His message was simple: It happened once, therefore it can happen again. Take care." But recently his nightmares have returned. And he attributes to his wartime bayonet wound the pain that he's experiencing now.


Norfolk, 2020

Constantly in the background is the figure of his brother, Harry, who served in the same company as Geordie, but died in 1916, just before the Somme offensive.

There are two things about Harry. Firstly, he was the preferred son. Nick explains at one point: "When he came back from the war they had a memorial service for his brother, who was killed. And as they were leaving the church his mother, my great-grandmother, turned to him and said, 'It should have been you.'"

Researcher Helen doesn't quite trust this memory. She has heard it many times, and thinks it's a communal myth. Yet when Nick goes through his grandfather's papers at the very end of his life, he sees that after Harry's death, Geordie's mother never wrote to the son who survived.

This memorial story is all part of Another World's most interesting theme: The making and recalling of memories. (It reminded me of The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes, another book about the problem of recollection.)

Helen's research focuses on "the interaction between the individual veteran's memories of his combat experience, and the changing public perception of the war". For her, memories are malleable. They respond to societal expectation. Nick disagrees with Helen's approach: "I don't believe in public memory," he says. "A memory's a biochemical change in an individual brain, and that's all there is." He thinks she got Geordie all wrong: "Geordie's memories aren't malleable: they don't change to fit other people's perceptions of the war. On the contrary, Geordie's tragedy is that his memories are carved in granite." This idea is repeated later: "Geordie's past isn't over. It isn't even the past." The formulation channels William Faulkner, but Barker's characters illustrate the point very effectively. Nick is haunted by his grandfather's last meaningful words: "I am in hell."



Which takes us back to Harry, and the second thing we need to know, which is that Geordie killed him... This is a spoiler, technically. But I saw it coming a long way off; it's announced fairly early (the bald fact, anyway, if not the particulars); and knowing doesn't stop you appreciating the drama of the story.

Harry is injured, screaming in pain from a shell-hole in No Man's Land. Geordie, defying the convention of the day (which is to leave the wounded), slithers out to where he's lying. And he kills him. Of course, we don't really understand -- and HE doesn't really understand, because he cannot trust his memory of the nature of Harry's injuries -- exactly what went into that moment. Was he putting his brother out of his misery -- in the way that Alfa, in David Diop's Soul Brother, can't bring himself to do? Or was he silencing a danger to the rest of his comrades? Or was he acting out one of the oldest stories in the world -- Cain and Abel, brother on hated brother? His problem now, decades later, is that he can't totally remember what he saw when he dropped into that shell-hole. Was what he did an act of moral courage? Or was it murder? If he had loved his brother, would this all have been clearer?

When Helen, after Geordie's death, plays Nick the tape recounting this incident, we have this exchange:

"And he was alone with that. There was never anybody to say, 'You did the right thing.'
"No, all he had to go on was his own memory. And it let him down."

Nick sits at the funeral, musing. The well-known hymn tells us: "Time, like an ever rolling stream, / Bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, as a dream / Dies at the opening day." And he thinks: "But suppose... time can slow down. Suppose it's not an ever rolling stream, but something altogether more viscous and unpredictable, like blood. Suppose it coagulates around terrible events, clots over them, stops the flow. Suppose Geordie experienced time differently, because, for him, time was different?... It would be a far more terrible truth than anything the passage of time can deliver. Recovery, rehabilitation, regeneration, redemption, resurrection, remembrance itself, all meaningless, because they all depend on that constantly flowing stream. But then Geordie's truth had been terrible. Ultimately, for him, all those big words had meant nothing. Neither speech nor silence had saved him. I AM IN HELL."



2.

These are such formidable themes, and so well done, that they would have borne the book alone, I believe.

But we have a parallel tale, also illustrating sibling-on-sibling violence, and the way memories are formed.

Nick is the somewhat ineffectual, never-quite-in-control guy in the middle of a complex blended family. He has a daughter from a first relationship. She's Miranda. She's 13, and rather more reserved and self-contained than is perhaps good for her. Nick also has a son from a second relationship, with Fran. This is Jasper, and even by toddler standard, this one is extraordinarily annoying. And there's another child on the way. Fran also has a son from a previous relationship. That's Gareth, who's not yet 12. He's a troubled boy. More at home with computer games than relationships, he's at odds with his peers. He's a bully to younger children when the opportunity arises, but he's also the target of bullying by others, so that he's dreading starting out at his new school.

We see an act of violence towards Jasper. A story is told about this incident, both by Gareth, the perpetrator, and by Miranda, who is (probably) a witness, and who could have intervened but didn't. And we see the way the story shifts, changes, and then gradually congeals around a version that is actually not the "truth".

Having formed and re-formed their memories, they then move on with their lives. But you wonder what's in store for them, many decades down the track, when the doubts about what they "remember" start to surface. Will they too end up "in hell"?

The dysfunctional family is very believably recounted -- so much so that you wince at times -- and as a sort of descant to the main theme, this thread makes a useful contribution.



3.

But then we have the Fanshawes...

This is the family that used to live in the house to which Nick and his tribe have just moved.

Enriched by profits from WWI (William Fanshawe is in the armaments business), the family then moves into Fleete House, a stately home. These days it's like a theme park. You can visit the house, but there's also a ballet of activities taking place in the grounds.

It's here that Nick learns of the murder of James Fanshawe, the only child of William's second marriage. The children of the first marriage, Robert and Muriel, are suspected, although nothing is ever proved. Robert dies in the war (1 July 1916, the first day of the Somme); Muriel is shunned all her life.

The Gareth-Miranda-Jasper story suggests what could have happened in this old unsolved crime.

But that is the only real advantage of this third thread... Otherwise, it's all too tidily coincidental -- the similarities of the two marriages, and the three children, and the boy who's attacked. Plus, this strand is larded with suggestions of ghosts, and a mysterious painting that is unearthed when the wallpaper is scraped off one of the walls of Nick's new house, and hints that the Fanshawe experience, in another instance of coagulated time, is affecting the new family. But nothing is really resolved either way.

After the sheer gravitas of the first theme, and the secondary depiction of the contemporary messed-up family (a lighter but still very resonant complement), this third element just felt superficial and unfinished.



*_*_*

The epigraph -- "Remember: the past won't fit into memory without something left over; it must have a future" -- is a quote from Joseph Brodsky.

Another World very effectively illustrates that point. We don't need any ghosts to help.