A Double Billing: Double Vision and Border Crossing

Pat Barker is an author some of whose books I read in the early days of my Godalming book group.   We started with Regeneration, the first of her First World War trilogy.  It was the second book we read as a group.  Regeneration is a historical and anti-war novel first published in 1991. The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.  The novel explores the experience of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.  Inspired by her grandfather's experience of World War I, Barker draws extensively on first person narratives from the period. Using these sources, she created characters based on historical individuals present at the hospital including poets and patients, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, who pioneered treatments of posttraumatic stress disorder during and after WWI. The novel explores several themes around the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure.


I stumbled upon Double Vision and Border Crossing in a charity bookshop. Whilst war, atrocities
and war-reporting feature in Double Vision it is more a novel dealing with social issues such as stalking, the exploitation of a widow by her handyman, and the questionable relationship between a young woman in her late teens or early twenties and a man twice her age.  The text flows and the novel is discrete and contained.  I enjoyed it.

Border Crossing deals with other themes:  the novel explores the controversial issue of children who have committed murder, in particular the aftermath after their sentence is served out. A tense psychological thriller, Border Crossing investigates the crimes of a particularly violent boy and the possibility of redemption.  When the protagonist, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from suicide, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he had hoped to forget. The rescuer, Tom, already knows the young man as Danny Miller. When Danny was ten, Tom presented evidence that helped commit him to prison for the murder of an elderly woman. Danny, full of suppressed memory and now free from prison, turns to Tom to help him recount what really happened, and discover the truth.  The Border Crossing in the story takes place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt are blurred and confused.

Whilst reading Border Crossing my memory of a similar case of

murder by minors is triggered.  The events in Barker's novel are possibly inspired by the tragic murder of James Bulger in 1993.  Then a the two-year-old boy was taken from his mother's side whilst in a shopping centre, and suffered ten skull fractures as a result of an iron bar striking his head. His body was then placed on railway tracks and covered with stones. The two murderers were found to be Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both ten years old.  The case caused considerable controversy both in Britain and worldwide. Just like Danny in Border Crossing, Thompson and Venables were tried and sentenced as adults, served a sentence then were released under new identities.  Again this was a book that read itself: structured and with an almost unambiguous ending.  With his cover blown once you are not sure whether Danny will manage to escape the grip of his past.