Border Crossing (Unabridged) [Audio Download]

Which is not to say Barker’s novel is a comedy. Far from it. It is a tight, discomforting, sometimes thrilling novel that investigates an important idea that is so often discussed in newspapers, though rarely with the degree of cool intelligence that Barker shows here. If you like Ian McKewan, I imagine you will also like Barker. She writes concisely, never wasting an idea, a thought, a plot shift, or a nuance in the telling of this inquisitively psychological novel.

Danny is a young man who was convicted of murder as a child. He is now free, living under an different name, trying to find a way to exist in a world that would see him lynched, if the images in newspapers like the 'Mail' told the full story. Tom Seymour is the psychologist who interviewed Danny at the time of the murder and crucially gave the evidence that saw him convicted under the disturbing categorisation of having full cognisance of what he was doing. Though not a teenager, Danny was well aware that killing was wrong, Seymour posits, and this is something that Danny has had to come to terms with while locked away.

The story begins with Seymour walking by a river in the winter and spotting a young man fall in. This young man, who he dives in to rescue, turns out to be Danny, and the meeting precipitates a renewal of their relationship.

It would be a shame to give away what happens from then on. The taut plot perfectly marries with Barker’s psychological and philosophical investigation into what society thinks of children such as Danny. It raises searching questions and drags your mind kicking and screaming into territory it would most often prefer to avoid. And this makes it a brilliant book. Though perhaps not the easiest book to enjoy. In short, almost terse prose, such an enormous subject is treated with chilling intelligence.

Barker has written a thriller, but one that does so much more than expected. It is a novel of ideas, and difficult ideas at that. The only hesitation I have in recommending 'Border Crossing', is that it leaves the reader coated with a sickening sensation. Whether it is fear brought about by the unfolding dread of the story, or whether it is the reader’s own sense of pusillanimous intellectual rigour when addressing such dark concerns, is a question I will have to leave up to you.