‘It’s one long typo, the first draft. It’s part of the need to surprise yourself.’ Pat Barker is telling me how quickly she writes the first drafts of her novels. ‘If you write tremendously fast, you sometimes realise you’ve written down something you didn’t know you knew. And that’s a moment to be treasured. That’s the only reason for doing it!’

The technique works for Barker: her 16 novels have been widely acclaimed and, in 1995, she won the Booker Prize for her First World War novel The Ghost Road, the final book in her Regeneration trilogy. Thirty years on from her Booker win, we’re talking over Zoom, Barker joining me from her home in County Durham. 

To put The Ghost Road in context, we need to go back to the beginning of Barker’s career, in the 1980s. She made her name with her later novels about war, but their themes of violence and suffering, I suggest to her, are not very far from where she started out. Her early novels described the lives of working-class women in the north of England, circumscribed by society – and there was plenty of violence and suffering there, too. 

Her debut, Union Street, published in 1982, features the rape of a teenage girl. Her second novel, Blow Your House Down (1984), is about sex workers living with the threat of a serial killer and includes one of the most unflinching scenes of sexual violence I’ve ever read. Even in these early books, I say, she was a writer who didn’t turn away from distress.

‘Well, I do turn away sometimes,’ she says. ‘For example, one thing I was asked about Union Street was “How could you write that rape scene?”’ She pauses. ‘I didn’t. There is no rape scene. There’s a section break. Everyone imagines they’ve read it. And I like that because it’s a very good example of making the reader’s imagination do the work for you, which is the most powerful thing you can do.’ 

Barker can be a harsh critic of her own work, but agrees that those early novels are ‘quite vigorous’. This is a wild understatement: there is a huge energy to the books, I say. ‘Terrific energy,’ she acknowledges, ‘not always used to the best advantage, though!’  

Before she was published, Barker agrees that it took her a while to find – and trust – her voice. ‘It took me ages, actually. And meeting Angela Carter [at a writing course run by the Arvon Foundation] was quite decisive.’ Before then Barker had tried writing what she once called ‘sensitive middle-class lady novels’, but Carter encouraged her to follow her own vision. ‘I was ready to take that step,’ she says. ‘And it had only taken me about 20 years!’ 

Soon after Union Street was published, Barker featured on Granta’s first ever ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ list in 1983. She was listed alongside other writers who have dominated the decades and Booker shortlists since, including Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. 

But there was perhaps still a sense for Barker of being an outsider. ‘I read an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro recently where he said he thought we all fitted quite neatly into preceding literary traditions. I never felt like that! I always felt what I was writing about was so un-literary as to be almost unacceptable.’ (It’s true that one or two readers thought this, too. Somebody in a supermarket came up to Barker and said, ‘You’re such a nice lady. Why do you write such mucky books?’) 

The idea of writing about ‘unacceptable’ things has certainly been a thread through Barker’s career. Her 2003 novel Double Vision opens with a quote from the painter Goya: ‘One cannot look at this. I saw it. This is the truth.’ This might be a manifesto for Barker’s work, I suggest, with its focus on drawing into the light things we may not wish to think about.  

‘Yes, it’s about trauma and memory, I suppose, a lot of the time.’ But, she adds, ‘it’s very awkward to be able to come up with a list of your themes.’ It’s part, she says, of writers’ need to surprise themselves. ‘You’ve only got to read your Wikipedia entry – which I did recently for the first time – and you’ll never surprise yourself again.’ 

Trauma and memory bring us to The Ghost Road and its predecessors in the trilogy, Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). Did Barker know she was writing the first book in a trilogy with Regeneration? ‘Not when I set out to write it. I thought it was one book.’ But she realised at the end of the novel that the key characters were ‘not in a stable place’, that their stories were unfinished.  

The trilogy is unlike many war novels in that there are almost no scenes of fighting or sequences set on the front line. The books instead take a step back and show the effect of war on both individuals and society, mostly through the experiences of two men. The first is Billy Prior, a soldier who at the beginning of the trilogy is suffering from mutism due to the ‘shell shock’ of his experiences in the war; the second is William Rivers, the psychiatrist treating Prior and others at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. 

Rivers was based on a real person, like many of the characters in trilogy, including soldiers and war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Lewis Carroll even makes an appearance in The Ghost Road, as a friend of the Rivers family.

‘I realised that all these physical transformations that Alice undergoes [in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland] are pure hysteria. And what is happening to some of Rivers’ patients is surprisingly similar. It’s a way of getting slightly deeper into Rivers, who was an intensely private man.’ 

Does writing about real people bring a challenge, I wonder – of maintaining responsibility to the facts but also providing the different kind of truth a novel requires? 

‘Yes. I did the opposite of what biographers tend to do. I left them at the bedroom door – it’s the one thing you don’t learn about them. I just decided I didn’t want to go there. Which is one reason Billy Prior’ – an entirely fictional creation – ‘is the way he is.’ Prior is sexually omnivorous throughout the trilogy, sleeping with women and men enthusiastically, even needfully. ‘He’s having everybody else’s sex life as well as his own.’ 

Regeneration spawned its sequels when Barker realised that Rivers’ story was not over at the end of the first book – he was ‘increasingly doubting what he was doing, of getting men recovered enough to go back into what had destroyed them in the first place.’ His story had to continue – for Barker, Rivers is the heart of the trilogy – yet it took her some time to work out who should represent the soldier’s story in the next book. 

‘I wasted an awful lot of time inventing this character who suffered from dissociation, and I wanted the dissociation to reflect all the various divisions there were in wartime society. And I worked and worked at this character, and it never worked, and then I thought, why don’t I use Billy Prior? He’s dissociated, he’s full of internal divisions. So at that point Prior took over, and everything went much more quickly.’ 

The first two books in the trilogy were well-received. Does that matter when you’re in the middle of a sequence of novels? 

‘Not really. I would have gone on and written the next one anyway. They might not have been published, of course, if they hadn’t been well received. It’s the gatekeepers who look at the reviews – and look at the Booker talk, whether you’re mentioned in connection [with the Booker Prize]. Regeneration certainly wasn’t. Apart from one or two very favourable reviews, it came close to sinking without trace. The Eye in the Door got more attention, and that was spoken of in connection with the Booker.’ (Rumour has it that The Eye in the Door narrowly missed the 1993 shortlist.) 

‘My current agent was my editor at the time – Clare Alexander,’ Barker explains. ‘I owe a great deal to Clare’s faith in me. Regeneration was ignored by a lot of people. It certainly wasn’t saying to any publisher, “Buy the second and third volumes in the trilogy”, and yet she did. She kept her faith in me. And I’m not sure to what extent in the current publishing scene that would be possible.’ Now, she says, ‘you’ve got to be the next big thing, and prove it by the second book. Which seems to me an impossible demand. The entire industry is and always has been a great squanderer of talent.’ 

To digress on this point for a moment: does Barker think it would be easier or harder now to establish herself, as a woman and a working-class writer, than it was 40 years ago? ‘Easier for women, harder for working class, I think. It’s the under-representation of working class that really needs looking at. Because we’ve split off into little identity groups – women, who are the majority but are seen as a little identity group; gay people; trans people; various ethnic minorities. And what you need to see is that a lot of these people are working class, and it’s the working class that are under-represented.’

For a reader of The Ghost Road, there are two aspects which diverge from the path of the first two books in the trilogy. First, Barker takes us into William Rivers’ past. ‘The mere fact of writing a trilogy means that you have to uncover something new about your central character. And after two books that is quite difficult.’ 

Barker solved this by writing about Rivers’ experiences working as an anthropologist with a tribe of people he calls ‘head-hunters’, on Eddystone Island in Oceania. These scenes provide parallels with Rivers’ later wartime work: on how a patient might use their mind to help heal their body; on a society’s investment in warfare. (The tribe have been stopped from pursuing their practices by the British colonial powers.)

For the first time in the trilogy, we also hear Billy Prior’s voice directly, through extracts from his diary. Previously, the scenes from Billy’s point of view were in the third person: close, but distanced. ‘And what a nightmare that is!’ says Barker of the diary sections. ‘He’s so chaotic. Rivers and Prior’s alternating [chapters], all you could safely say about them is whatever person you’d been spending time with, you were so relieved to get back to the other.’ As a writer, you mean? ‘Oh yes, definitely. After three or four chapters of Prior, [I was] very glad to get back into the sanity of Rivers.’ 

But writing Rivers presented challenges, too. ‘Everybody was asking me, because I’d written previously about women, “Do you find it difficult to write about men?” And what I found difficult about Rivers was not the fact that he was a man, but that he had no mind’s eye. If you’re away from home, you can imagine your kitchen at home and see it quite vividly – he couldn’t do that. There was no visual memory there at all. Except when he was feverish – which I added, unscrupulously! So I gave him Spanish flu, and suddenly he can remember visually, and I’m thinking, “Thank God”. So I got deeper into him by taking him back into his other life, as an anthropologist.’ 

Prior’s first-person diary is a clever approach by Barker, because it brings to his story a new level of intensity. As the story moves through October 1918, there’s tension as the reader knows the war will end soon and hopes for Prior to make it. ‘It’s playing with the idea that somebody who is telling their own narrative feels secure – because first-person narrators don’t die. And we’re all first-person narrators, aren’t we?’  

The Ghost Road was the first time Barker had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. ‘I’ve never been shortlisted for it [and not won], which I’m rather pleased about, because from what I can make out I don’t think being shortlisted and not winning is a particularly pleasant experience.’ 

It was a short shortlist in 1995, featuring just five books – with Barker the only woman. (‘I hope that the best woman wins,’ said former Booker judge Victoria Glendinning wryly before the ceremony.) What does Barker remember about the award ceremony? ‘Very, very high security of course, because Salman Rushdie was there for his first novel since the fatwa. So there were lots of men with bulging armpits standing round.’ 

Was she surprised to win? ‘No,’ she says simply. Why? ‘I thought I was going to, and it wasn’t because anybody had leaked.’ Most commentators agreed it was a two-horse race between Barker and Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. But, says Barker, her agent told her that ‘Rushdie said, “I can’t see myself on the podium receiving the prize”. I did see it, and it was as simple as that, really. Reading the mood, as much as anything.’  

What was Barker’s experience of winning the Booker? ‘I didn’t like it at all. I don’t think it did any good for my self-confidence. I didn’t go around saying, “Oh, I’ve made it!” It was more a matter of, “Oh my God, I’ve got to do it again!” It can be quite frightening. Success can be a lot more challenging than failure. I was used to failure, like most writers are. I did failure beautifully, believe me. I didn’t do success quite so well.’ 

There is also the point that recent winners have made, that the welcome attention that accompanies winning the Booker Prize can take you away from writing. ‘Even in my day it was, I think, a year out. It’s like Miss World! You’re not free until you’ve crowned your successor.’ 

But the success of winning the Booker meant more readers. ‘I do very much like meeting readers, or I came to like meeting them. To begin with I was so terrified, it was sheer agony. I love talking to readers, because otherwise you might as well be sending postcards to Mars. It’s a peculiarly isolating profession, writing. Even a group of writers together, they’re not really talking about writing, they’re not letting each other into that private space. They’re typically talking about money and agents and publishers.’ 

Does she agree then with Martin Amis, who said that writers are most alive when alone? ‘Well… most at ease, or happiest when the book is going well. But on the other hand, if a book is consistently making trouble, it’s one of the most miserable things on earth. Turning up at the cliff face. [Writing] is both the best and the worst, the highest and the lowest of what you experience. It’s a relief to get out and talk to readers. And it reminds you that you have managed to finish a book! Because they’ve read it.’ 

Finally, then, when is the best time for an author to win the Booker Prize? Barker won with her seventh novel, when she was established but still in the early to middle part of her career. ‘Mid-career, that’s when you’re going to get the most benefit from it,’ she agrees. But then, she adds, ‘One of the things about writers is that they are almost incapable of [being] satisfied when it comes to the amount of attention their work gets.’ 

‘And I’ve always wondered,’ she adds, ‘if anyone has ever stopped in the middle of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and thought, “My work never gets the attention it deserves!” I bet somebody has.’