Union Street by Pat Barker

First published: 1982

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: Winter, 1973

Locale: A depressed inner-city neighborhood in the northeast of England

Principal Characters:

• Kelly Brown, an eleven-year-old schoolgirl
• Joanne Wilson, an eighteen-year-old bakery worker
• Lisa Goddard, a young married woman who has two small boys
• Muriel Scaife, an elderly married woman who has two teenage children
• Iris King, the dominant figure on the street, who is middle-aged, married, and has four daughters
• Blonde Dinah, a sixty-year-old prostitute
• Alice Bell, an elderly widow, terminally ill

The Novel

In Union Street, Pat Barker builds a grimly realistic picture of daily drudgery and hardship among women living on a run-down street of cramped, substandard houses in one of the most depressed neighborhoods of an industrial city in northeastern England. The book has seven interrelated parts, each of which is centered on the story of a girl or woman during a major crisis in her life.

Eleven-year-old Kelly Brown and her teenage sister Linda come from the poorest, dirtiest, and most gossiped-about family in the street. Their father has left home. Their slatternly mother goes out drinking most evenings, and at various times she has brought home different men to live with them.

Kelly meets a stranger in the park. Although she is suspicious of his advances, she is also sympathetic to him; she associates him in her mind with her father, whom she sorely misses. On a subsequent meeting, the stranger traps her in a blind alley and rapes her. Despite her pain and shock, Kelly blackmails him into taking her to a fish-and-chips shop for supper. She is devastated when he breaks down and cries. After bottling up her emotions for three weeks, she has a sudden fit of screaming which alerts her mother to her sufferings.

In an attempt to cope with her enforced sexual maturity, Kelly wanders around the streets at night, talking to the most wretched and downtrodden women, and defiantly indulges in minor acts of vandalism. An encounter in the park with an elderly woman who is desperately ill helps her to come to terms with herself.

Joanne Wilson, an eighteen-year-old bakery worker, is pregnant. Her mother is furious, and she dreads having to tell her boyfriend, Ken, who is temporarily away. She wants more out of life than that promised by a hasty marriage. Her emotional stress is heightened by some trouble at the bakery; Elaine Watson, who works alongside her, is actively hostile to Bertha, the only black woman on the assembly line. In one of the few comic episodes in the book, after Bertha wins a moral victory over Elaine, Elaine vents her spleen on Lilian, who is mentally retarded.

When Ken returns, he grudgingly offers to “do the right thing.” Neither he nor Joanne wants to get married, but the pregnancy dictates their future. Joanne feels trapped.

Lisa Goddard is trapped in the kind of situation Joanne had hoped to avoid. She is already bringing up two small boys on state handouts, and now she is pregnant again. Her unemployed husband, Brian Goddard, drinks heavily and subjects her to frequent beatings. Her patience with him snaps when she discovers that he has taken her carefully hoarded savings to buy beer. When she confronts him with the empty money jar, he beats her again. In the hospital, she rejects her newborn daughter, but after several days of bitterness she begins to respond to her.

Muriel Scaife is the breadwinner of her family. Her husband, John Scaife, is seriously ill but refuses to see a doctor. Muriel and John are very close to each other, but it is difficult for Muriel to balance her attention to her husband with the needs of her thirteen-year-old son, Richard, who is showing promise at school but is disoriented by the traumas of illness and, eventually, death in the house.

Iris King is enraged when she learns that her daughter, fourteen-year-old Brenda, is in the midterm of pregnancy. She takes the girl to a back-street abortionist. At home, Brenda aborts the baby in great pain. Iris wraps the still-breathing body in newspaper and buries it later that night in the yard of an empty house. The memory of this death haunts her, but she derives some solace from caring for the baby of her married daughter, Sheila.

Blonde Dinah, an aging prostitute, is still plying her trade. Her story belongs more properly to George Harrison, a retired steelworker with a cold and unyielding wife, who meets Blonde Dinah by chance and finds himself allowing her to take him home to her room. After spending a night with her, he feels better able to cope with his loneliness.

Alice Bell is dying. Everyone, including her son, urges her to go to the hospital. Terrified of the pauper’s death which she associates with hospitalization, she crawls out of bed on a bitterly cold afternoon and makes her way to the park, determined to meet death in her own way. The last person she talks to is little Kelly Brown; the narration has come full circle.

The Characters

Most of the people living on Union Street are poorly educated and not very articulate. Pat Barker’s gift is her ability to bring them vibrantly to life through gusts of earthy dialogue in the authentic vernacular of the region.

The seven protagonists can be seen as representing the seven ages of womanhood—seven dark ages, concentrating on the tragic rather than the joyous. Each of the women has her own strong individuality, but they share a common perception of the inevitability of hardship and a sense of stoical endurance. Because they are woven in and out of one another’s stories, their characters are not one-dimensional but are built up through several different points of view.

Iris is the dominant—and the toughest—woman on the street; she is highly respected and turns up in most of the stories to offer help and advice. She comes from an even poorer area than Union Street, had an excessively hard childhood, and has had to fight every inch of the way to achieve her present status. It is partly because of her determination to hold on to her hard-won respectability that she handles her daughter’s abortion with such ruthlessness and single-mindedness.

Iris’ recollections of her brutalized childhood echo Kelly’s experience. Kelly’s crisis is not only the rape itself but also her loss of confidence in the adult world when she sees first the rapist and then her mother (after her latest lover has abandoned her) break down and cry. Her street wanderings and her experiments with vandalism are an attempt to find a new personality to correspond to the violation of her innocence.

Joanne is perhaps the most self-aware woman in the street—more conscious than the rest that life could be different. Her story represents the crushing of youthful aspiration.

Lisa is an example of a young mother who appears to collude in her own fate. She is constantly finding excuses for her husband’s brutality, and it is only when he steals her savings—her ultimate symbol of security—that her patience snaps.

Muriel, representing the middle age of womanhood and motherhood, has the only satisfactory marital relationship in the street. The author, however, stresses the transient nature of personal happiness in her description of Muriel’s psychological makeup: “She had never been able to take happiness for granted, perhaps because she had lost her father while she was still a child.... Love, security and order; those were achievements wrested from a chaos that was always threatening to take them back.”

The character of Blonde Dinah, representing the declining years, is only lightly sketched in. Alice, facing death, recalls a different upbringing from the others on the street. She has come down in the world and recalls with pleasure her vigorous campaigning for the Labour Party when she lived in a council house during the Depression of the 1930’s.

The men are mainly characterized through the perceptions of the women. George Harrison, who features sympathetically in Blonde Dinah’s story, is placed in a different light by his wife, Gladys Harrison, who recalls his cruelty to her in the early stages of their marriage. Lisa remembers with yearning that Brian was far less aggressive before he became unemployed.

The most clearly defined and attractive male character is Joss, a midget, who shelters Joanne when she is afraid to go home and who acts as her confidant. His attempts at concealing his love for her, because he understands that she cannot accept his handicap, provide a particularly poignant moment in the book.

Critical Context

The roots of Union Street, Barker’s first novel, can be traced to two important trends in British postwar literature: the social realism of the late 1950’s and the 1960’s, with its regional working-class settings, and the feminist writings of the 1970’s and early 1980’s.

The social-realism trend, however, was heavily dominated by male authors and male protagonists, while the feminist novels that came later tended to concentrate on the growing self-awareness of middle-class women. With Union Street, Barker brought the two trends together, but, in place of their characteristic undercurrents of political, social, or personal protest, she emphasized the apparent inevitability of suffering.

The author was hailed as a new voice in British fiction; she was named among the twenty Best Young British Novelists by the Guardian and won the 1983 Fawcett Prize for Fiction. She has continued her exploration of the lives of downtrodden women in Blow Your House Down (1983), a novel about prostitutes living in fear of a notorious rapist and murderer, and The Century’s Daughter (1986).

Bibliography

Barker, Pat. “Going Home Again: An Interview with Pat Barker.” Interview by Donna Perry. Literary Review 34 (Winter, 1991): 235-244. The occasion for the interview was the publication of Barker’s novel The Man Who Wasn’t There. Other subjects include Barker’s political themes, her process of writing, and her attitudes toward feminist writing.

Fairweather, Eileen. “The Voices of Women.” New Statesman 103 (May 14, 1982): 21-23. The author provides insights into the genesis of Union Street and suggests ways in which Barker’s work is a major revision of the tradition of British working-class novels. She notes relevant details of Barker’s childhood environment, family life, and early attempts at writing fiction.

Gorra, Michael. “Laughter and Bloodshed.” Hudson Review 37 (Spring, 1984): 151-159. The article includes reviews of six new works of fiction. Two pages are devoted to a response to Union Street. Gorra believes that the achievement of the novel is greater than its label as a working-class masterpiece would lead one to believe. He comments on the ways in which sex and violence form the basis of the characters’ experiences.

Harper’s Magazine. XXVI, November, 1983, p. 67.

Library Journal. CVIII, September 1, 1983, p. 1719.

Ms. XII, January, 1984, p. 12.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, October 28, 1983, p. 9.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, July 22, 1983, p. 116.

Pykett, Lyn. “The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History.” Critical Quarterly 29 (Autumn, 1987): 71-77. Pykett evaluates Barker’s third novel, The Century’s Daughter (1986), as a significant example of women’s perspective on history and compares the novel to a similar contemporary work. She considers some of the themes in Barker’s work, including social realism, feminism, and class conflicts.

Stone, Les, and Jean W. Ross. “Pat Barker.” In Contemporary Authors, edited by H. May and S. M. Trosky. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. A bibliographical essay that surveys critical response to Barker’s early novels. In an interview, Barker explains how her writing style evolved and notes the concept of a “communal voice,” which is used in two of her novels. She also discusses her reputation as a “regional writer.” A listing of reviews of Barker’s work is appended.