Product Description

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller - when Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #284498 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Border Crossing is haunted by one of the most disturbing figures in contemporary English culture: the child who kills. The award-winning Regeneration trilogy established Pat Barker's reputation as a novelist able to revive the traumas of war at the beginning of the 20th century. But her most recent fiction (Another World and, now, Border Crossing) revisits the terrain of her first novels (Union Street, Blow Your House Down). The dismal, if commonplace, violence of family life, violence between husbands and wives, fathers and children, children and children is explored alongside the more sensational story of a young man, Danny, whom, tracking down the psychologist who helped to convict him for the murder he committed as a child, wants to "talk about how impossible it was to leave the past behind". A tense, and seductive, relation develops between Danny and Tom Seymour, a professional forced to make his own return to a past in which he has played a defining part in someone else's life. As the brutal details of Danny's crime emerge, Barker confronts the possibilities of cure through time, through speech, through the attention given by one man to another. Danny is a man who is "very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border", a character who draws attention to the pain, and helplessness, of having been a child. But Border Crossing also refuses to lose sight of his victim. The mutilated body of Lizzie Parks makes a claim on Danny, on Barker and on her readers as this novel probes the relation between Danny and Tom for the "only possible good outcome" of an irreparable act. --Vicky Lebeau

About the Author
Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her previous novels include the REGENERATION trilogy - REGENERATION, THE EYE IN THE DOOR (winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize) and THE GHOST ROAD (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize) - and ANOTHER WORLD. She lives inDurham.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful, disturbing book
This is the only one of Pat Barker's modern day books that I've really loved - not quite as much as the regeneration trilogy, but almost. One of her great talents is to draw characters who are wholly sympathetic without being wholly, or perhaps even slightly, admirable. Barker manipulates the reader's opinion of Danny, the child-murderer, cleverly, so that he is experienced as distressed and suicidal adult, abused child, cold and manipulative teenager. We experience Danny in the same way many of the book's characters do; knowing that he is an expert at drawing people in and winning their sympathy, yet being drawn in anyway. This keeps you off-balance, at one moment frightened for Danny and at the next frightened of him. The narrative has a wonderful simplicity and lightness of touch, so that the potentially lurid subject matter comes across as low-key and quietly disturbing. I read it in a couple of hours, and have been rereading parts of it ever since. Highly recommended.

"Regeneration" revamped
When child psychologist Tom Seymour pulls a would-be suicide from a river, he recognises the young man as Danny Miller, the child whom Tom's assessment had helped imprison for the brutal murder of an old woman thirteen years ago. Now out of prison and supposedly starting a new life, Danny has hunted Tom down in the hope that he might be able to help him understand the killing. With his own life troubled and his marriage collapsing, Tom succumbs to the temptation to travel into Danny's past.

The problem is that what he finds there is not particularly riveting, and certainly not unusual enough to account for an act which society regards with horror as completely beyond the boundaries of “normality”. Unlike, say, Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”, when Danny finally remembers the murder there is little depth, no sense of climax, no sense of a mystery unravelled, not even much horror. The novel sets up the idea of a journey into the mind of an outcast, the child who kills, but never lives up to what it promises.

The second problem is the characterisation. Danny Miller is a pale reworking of Billy Prior, Barker’s brilliant creation in “Regeneration”, complete with Prior’s unpleasant father, manipulative charm and “wintry smile”, but nowhere near as interesting (especially once you recognise him as Prior). Tom isn’t even a shadow of “Regeneration”’s Dr Rivers, and there is even less substance to the supporting cast, his wife, his colleagues, and the people whose lives Danny has passed through. Although there are hints that there will be trouble between Tom and Danny, since Danny seems to blame Tom for his imprisonment and is renowned for getting people who deal with him to “cross the invisible line”, the relationship barely develops, again being a lack-lustre echo of the intense but still professional relationship between Rivers and Prior.

Barker is capable of extraordinary writing, as evidenced in her superb “Regeneration” trilogy, a remarkable exploration of people who kill and what it does to their psyches. It’s a pity that she seems to have been rewriting it ever since.

Very matter of fact
This was a great book to read and quite chilling but in a very calm manner. Tom Seymour unthinkily pulls a suicide victim out of the river; it turns out he is a child murderer who he gave evidence against. Danny Miller was 10 years old when he murdered Lizzy, a 78 year old who lived with her cats.

Tom is a child psychologist working in the north of England. He is increasingly unhappy about the evidence he gave at the trial and it's unclear whether Danny set up his suicide attempt in order to meet up again with Tom.

Although Danny is now out of prison he wants time with Tom, just to talk, not official sessions. He has a new name and a new identity but the past always has a way of coming back to haunt those involved.

Good writing, convincing characters and a chilling (but very real) plot.