PAT BARKER, LIZA’S ENGLAND

I’ve just read this novel for the second time after more than thirty years. If you don’t know the storyline, it’s grounded on the life of Liza, a baby born into a battler family in a gritty industrial city in northern England at the start of the twentieth century. We follow Liza’s life up to the years of Margaret Thatcher.
     Pat Barker shows a world of working class people who have to keep their wits sharp to cope with too much work and not enough money in the first decades of the century, and then not enough work – except for the women! – and not enough money in the later decades of the century. She shifts backwards and forwards between straightforward realism and lyrical wondering. She shows the terse humour of her characters as they sling words at one another in quick comments and backchat.
    It’s a world I recognise intimately from my own mother’s family in South Christchurch – the world I wrote about in Oracles and Miracles. Liza’s England has its occasional longueurs. And at times it feels hasty as it sprints through the decades.
     Yet it’s a little masterpiece: warm, strong, clever, drily droll.


​Stevan Eldred-Grigg