ABSTRACT
The resurgence of the historical novel in Britain in the later decades of the twentieth century took readers into just about every phase of the past, from the Stone Age to periods within recent memory. But for some writers, including Pat Barker, the sweep of the twentieth century itself exerted a particular pull, and this is very evident in the four novels she published in the 1990s. Her acclaimed First World War trilogy, Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (1991-5), was followed by Another World (1998) in which a 101-year-old veteran of the Somme shares the fictional space with the family of his middle-aged grandson, who has just moved into a house built in 1898. But Barker’s first exploration of this twentieth-century timespan came a little earlier, as she followed the memories and experiences of another long-lived character in Liza’s England (Barker 1996). It is in this novel that we encounter the phrase ‘vanishing boundaries’ – a phrase that encapsulates some key features of Barker’s writing. It occurs in a telling passage set towards the end of the Second World War, in a bomb-ravaged northern city, as Liza waits for her daughter Eileen to give birth:
The sky darkened; night closed in around the woman and the labouring girl. As the hours passed, Liza felt herself merge into the girl on the bed. She had laboured to give birth like this, in this room, this bed. She became afraid of the vanishing boundaries and turned to the fire, only to feel it strip the flesh from her face and reveal her mother’s bones. Eileen was not Eileen, Liza was not Liza, but both were links in a chain of women stretching back through the centuries, into the wombs of women whose names they didn’t know.
