Another World

by Pat Barker

Book Overview

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word' Mail on Sunday 'Utterly compelling... She is a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312203977
• ISBN13: 9780312203979
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

You've come a long way, Baby. You have, haven't you?

Barker's popularity and respected position guarantee that one of the comments in any discussion of this work will be: so there is no direct line of amelioration of a woman's lot from Richardson's Pamela to Barker's Fran. Perhaps, we saw the best of it in Eliot. Perhaps, democracy is not what the myth of democracy claims it to be. Too, the frank and coarse language used in this modern effort haven't made Plato's basic questions any easier to answer. So, spacing the novel from the bowdlerizers apparently hasn't added to clarity. Further, Barker and David Chase (The Sopranos) must have, at some point, agreed on endings. This story's non resolutions are the novel's version of fade to black, a realistic, if not comforting, ending. Additionally, Geordie is dead and leaves a legacy that suggests that extremely long life without dementia is not necessarily a blessing, at least for the long living. Why a five star? It was a very good read written by a great writer. I'd have said something about the ghosts, but I haven't figure them out.

?Apple white it says on the tin. Alzheimer white.?

Pat Barker is yet another tremendous discovery for this reader. Added to my introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald several months ago, 2000 has been a great year.The accolades she has earned include, The Guardian Fiction Prize, and the highest award in Great Britain, The Booker Prize, for the final installment of her trilogy, "The Ghost Road". I have begun the first book of the three, "Regeneration", and I look forward to finding the words to express how remarkable a work it is."Another World" is a tremendous piece of writing containing complex characters, multiple plot lines that are distinct but not independent, and primary players that are uniformly disliked with ease. Secondary players don't quite rise above dysfunctional, save perhaps the very youngest in this tale.The initial stage of the book seems a bit slow, however it still communicates the misery that will underlie the book. And when the writer introduces, or perhaps allows the cover to be taken from past terror, the pace indeed was never slow. Ms. Parker just lulls the reader into a false sense of security. Comfort may be a better word, for it is a rare book that truly disturbs a reader, I suggest this is just such a book.The truth of what happened in this story is never completely clear. Reasonable conclusions can be drawn, and careful attention to detail makes all the difference. However much of the time A truth, as opposed to The truth, is what we are offered.A 101-year-old man, a veteran of World War I and all the horror that entails complains of a scar and the pain it inflicts. The problem is he chooses the scar that is 80 years old, and not the days old incision that physically is the site that should cause the pain. A Grandson who tends to this man, who wants to know what personal horror tortures the old man, the horror that pains him more than his failing health. Eventually some information is shared, but I don't believe it is The information.The Grandson has his own Family, most charitably called eclectic, as each parent has brought children from a first marriage, and a life they have created is en route. When the cover I mentioned earlier invades this family, they face an obscene result, a visual dementia, which immediately threatens them. And this initial shock is only the beginning.An act of violence from the past that can be argued as humane is followed by the most nightmarish atrocity. The past does not repeat, or has the outcome just been delayed? I had written of another novel "she did not hand this one to you". I feel the comment here is equally valid. The Writer does bring closure to some issues, she leaves at least on event suspended, not ambiguous, but specifically left in abeyance. I don't know what her intent is, but this issue, combined with one other that can easily be missed by the reader, and perhaps the key players in the book, would make for a great continuation if Ms. Barker chose.I really look forward to the balance of this lady's work. Her work is sophistic

The Moral Responsibility of a Person

The new novel of Pat Barker has all the traits that distinguish her widely acclaimed and highly awarded Regeneration Trilogy - excellent language, brilliant and psychologically exact depiction of characters, several intertwined lines of the narrative and profound exposition of the problems of human existence. The author takes traditionally sentimental elements of the plot, extirpates even a tinge of schmaltz and forms edifice of the novel. She tells us about the moral responsibility of a person whose rash decisions can destroy a previous marriage in ephemeral hope to attain happiness in a new one and mold some fly-by-night alliance, externally resembling a firm family but internally demolishing (sometimes even physically) by ghosts of hate and intolerance that were begotten by these indiscreet decisions. Masterly synthesis of different time layers, description of remorse of an old man who took part in the First World War in Europe, thoughts about atonement and perdition give this problem, give this novel a timeless Biblical aspect.

Another World is my best read of the summer.

Another World is a step up from tne Trilogy series. I recommend the book for discussion groups. There are some serious family issues that my be difficult to discuss, but should be stimulating. I lived in Newcastle and see both the loving and rough Geordie life style reflected in Another World. A must read if you liked the Trilogy or know the north of England.

A vivid and powerful depiction of the tyranny of memory.

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."