- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Open market ed edition (1 July 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140282939
- ISBN-13: 978-0140282931
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,547,887 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Another World
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Award-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker has established her reputation as one of the most powerful and versatile novelists writing today. Her eighth novel, Another World, sustains and extends her scope, telling a powerful and complex tale of family, memory, illness and war. Haunted by memories of the First World War, Geordie is dying of cancer; haunted by the violence of families past (and present) his grandson Nick struggles with his thoroughly modern marriage: angry stepchildren, exhausting toddler, miserably pregnant wife. Wracked by guilt, Geordie relives his brother's death in the trenches, and his mother's grieving verdict: "It should have been you." Uncovering the intimate and public reach of Geordie's history, Nick is forced up against the "power of old wounds to leak into the present" and the paradoxical fragility--or pliancy--of personal memory. Weaving into her fictional worlds some of the most disturbing images of contemporary Britain--Peter Sutcliffe, Cromwell Street, "an older boy taking a toddler by the hand while his companion strides ahead, eager for the atrocity to come"--Barker draws her themes together into a remarkable, sometimes ruthless, study of family life and death. --Vicky Lebeau
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
""Another World" demonstrates the extraordinary immediacy and vigor of expression we have come to expect from Barker . . . A powerful and moving and deeply humane study of the tyranny of the past and the quandaries of the present."--Barry Unsworth, "The New York Times Book Review"
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday"
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--""The Boston Sunday Globe"
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion"
"This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving." --Ruth Rendell, author of" Harm Done"
"A remarkable novel, stark but human at the center." --"The Sunday Star-Ledger"
"[Barker's] remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century's often bleak and undignified human record." --"The Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"Barker's writing is brilliant; the thoughtful, inventively composed sentences are a joy to read."
--"The Austin American Statesman"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"[Pat Barker] is the natural successor to George Orwell, like him a keen and passionate defender of humiliated children, foot soldiers and what's become of the British working class."--"Newsday"
"One of Pat Barker's gifts is her mix of compassion and bleak realism . . . Barker's confidence as a stripped-down, elegant stylist is evenly matched by her moral depth.""--""The Boston Sunday Globe"
"Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony."--"The New Criterion"
"This old-fashioned novel in a modern idiom remains one of the best things she has ever done, surely the most moving." --Ruth Rendell, author of" Harm Done"
"A remarkable novel, stark but human at the center." --"The Sunday Star-Ledger"
"[Barker's] remarkable visits to the past help replenish the emptying containers of memory by substituting storytelling for forgetting. With her novels, she adds dignity to this century's often bleak and undignified human record." --"The Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"Barker's writing is brilliant; the thoughtful, inventively composed sentences are a joy to read."
--"The Austin American Statesman"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Cars queue bumper to bumper, edge forward, stop, edge forward again. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Barker might have entitled this novel Still Another World, so many overlapping worlds does she present here. On the surface it is the story of Nick and the complex life he now shares with his second wife and new son, his ex-wife and daughter, and his strange stepson. It is the story, too, of the Fanshawe family, a much earlier, and also troubled, family that once inhabited the house Nick is now restoring.
But it is especially the story of Geordie, Nick's 101-year-old grandfather and the worlds he has known, including the world of war. Although Nick learned as a child that "You had to be two people, one in each world [of family and of school]," he has always believed that his grandfather "never changed; belonged to only one world." Now that Geordie is dying, however, Nick learns of Geordie's other worlds: his family life, his difficulties after World War I, his marriage, his war nightmares, the haunting death of his brother in battle, and his mother's comment that the wrong son died. And we see the tyranny of memory as Geordie relives his brother Harry's dying moments. Geordie himself says, "I know that what I remember seeing is false. It can't have been like that, and so the one thing I need to remember clearly, I can't ....It's as clear as this hand...only it's wrong."
These vividly depicted battles, real and symbolic, all raise questions of responsibility and blame as each character assesses the accuracy of his own memory. Even the supernatural is evoked, peripherally, as characters consider whether they have really seen what they think they have seen. As Nick gains knowledge through his time spent with Geordie, he recalls their visit to the "ageless graves" of Thiepval, which keep perpetually alive the traumas of a terrible war, and he recognizes the contrast to the graves of the tiny churchyard in which Geordie will lie, with names hidden by moss, old mourners dead and forgotten, and gently decaying stones. And he and the reader recognize that "there's wisdom too in this."
Barker's tightly constructed plots and themes, her vividly drawn characters, her evocation of atmosphere, her deft use of settings to enhance the drama, and her ability to communicate new visions, all testify to the brilliance of this novel, one which may, itself, escape the erosions of time and its "obliterating grass."
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is simply stunning; for the first time in ages I forgot where I was reading this book, I was completely hooked and couldn't stop reading well into the early hours of the next day. The writing is breathtaking. I would recommend this book to anyone, just to be left with the same feeling I had by the time I'd finished the book. More please!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Pat Barker has described this book as the most difficult to write of all her novels. Unfortunately, it rather reads that way. Barker seems to be trying to write several novels at once: a ghost story (with shadows of the Constance Kent killings, as it involves two children doing away with their stepbrother), a historical novel about the last days of a World War I veteran, and a novel of modern dysfunctional family life. Every strand of the novel (apart from perhaps the bits about Geordie, the World War I veteran) feels rushed over. The portrayal of modern family life is also unremittingly bleak. There is no sense that the family ever enjoy spending time together, or doing anything other than bickering or watching rubbish movies. Fran is such a petulant wife and useless mother that one wonders how she and Nick, the main character, ever got together in the first place. Fran's autistic son, Gareth, is a straightforwardly loathsome character, nothing like as sensitively handled as Adam, the Aspergers boy in 'Double Vision', and I couldn't help wishing by the end that something terrible would happen to him, just to get him out of the story. The whole 'ghost story' side of the novel never really comes to life as Barker doesn't allow herself enough time to explore it. Some of the more interesting characters, such as Helen the historian, and Miranda, Nick's withdrawn daughter by his first marriage, are seriously underdeveloped - a pity, as I'd have liked more time spent on these and less on whiny Fran or horrible Gareth. I'll give this novel three stars as the sections on Geordie the war veteran and his memories of the trenches are very powerful - but it's really not one of Barker's best.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Good, but could have been still better
Nick and Fran are married with one small son and another child due to be born soon. Each has a child from an earlier relationship; both these children have problems, especially... Read more
Published 25 days ago by James
A book of deceptive power and insight
With "Another World", the excellent Pat Barker shows real skill at weaving a contemporary story that also tackles the theme of memory, the impact of the past, and the consequences... Read more
Published 11 months ago by Jl Adcock
Grim and fascinating
I haven't yet read her Regeneration Trilogy but after this book I look forward to it. This is a very moving and disturbing book about a somewhat dysfunctional family coping with... Read more
Published on 6 Mar 2006 by bookpike
Good in parts...
Most of this novel is very well written such as the relationship between Geordie and Nick, and the death of Geordie which really grabbed me and it felt as if Pat Barker was there... Read more
Published on 5 April 2005 by primitivegrrl
Not quite up to "Regeneration" - but a damned good read.
Pat Barker's "Regeneration" trilogy were very fine works - which helped set the events of the Great War in a new light. Read more
Published on 17 April 2001 by Simon Malia
Not all good, not all bad.
A disappointment after the greatness of the regeneration trilogy. The characters seem shallow and cliched, there's no plot to speak of, and the whole thing seems very underwritten. Read more
Published on 4 Dec 2000
A striking and rather chilling book. Well worth reading.
Pat Barker has again produced a superb piece of literature. Following her harrowing, moving and utterly brilliant 'Regeneration Trilogy', Barker returns with this novel of a... Read more
Published on 19 Nov 1999 by "drambuster"
Pat Barker's new book is a winner
This was really excellent. It is the story of a step-family, recently moved, and the often sinister dynamics between them. Read more
Published on 8 Oct 1999
I found the book haunting.
I am a fan of Pat Barker's work. In this novel I feel the author has blended the realities of life with the hidden hold the past has over us all. Read more
Published on 16 Mar 1999
Haunted by Memory
This is excellent. A narrative that never loses it's hold and serious themes like family dynamics and the uncertainties of memory. Read more
Published on 5 Mar 1999
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