Pat Barker: ‘When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I hated it’ | Pat Barker

My earliest reading memory
Four years old, teaching myself to read with a girls’ school annual my grandad brought back from a jumble sale. One of the stories involved a lacrosse match between two girls’ boarding schools. I pestered the adults to give me words, marking my progress in thick green crayon, and by the time I got to the end of the book, I could read, more or less.

My favourite book growing up
Biggles Flies West by WE Johns. Or north, or south, or east. Biggles got around a lot and, wherever he went, I followed. I can’t remember anything about the books, but I do remember the excitement I felt when I looked along the library shelf and found one I hadn’t read.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I’m not sure any book did that. The last thing an embryo writer needs is somebody else’s full-term story. Lies, secrets, silences make a writer. The constant bafflement, the itch you never quite manage to scratch. But it helps to encounter a writer who in some respects resembles you. For me, that was Tony Harrison, particularly The School of Eloquence collection, with its dazzling fusion of Yorkshire dialect speech and the structure of the sonnet.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Like many people of my generation, I found the gap between my home and the grammar school difficult to negotiate. At home, there was grandad getting washed at the kitchen sink, his bayonet wound clearly visible. As a little girl I asked him what it was. Later, I knew better than to ask. At the same time, in English lessons, I was reading the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Their words, and his silence, formed a bridge between the worlds of school and home.

The book I came back to
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Read at school, aged 14. I hated it. All that fuss about matchmaking. Give me Emily Brontë any day. I was just too young to appreciate either the delicacy of Austen’s work, or its ferocity.

The book I reread
The love sonnets of John Donne. That voice, so vibrant across the intervening centuries, so disconcertingly modern. So sexy.

The book I discovered later in life
The Iliad by Homer. I remember reading the opening and being carried away by the grandeur of the conception, by the eloquence of the speeches, but alienated, too, by the silence of the girls that Achilles and Agamemnon are arguing about. It’s a powerful silence. I couldn’t forget it and it brought me back eventually to the squalor of the Greek camp and the task of giving those girls a voice.

The books I am currently reading
Negotiating With the Dead by Margaret Atwood. Atwood claims that not just some but all writing of the narrative kind, perhaps all writing of any kind, is motivated by a preoccupation, whether conscious or not, with mortality and by a willingness to take dangerous trips to the underworld to bring something or someone back from the dead. Writers are like Orpheus, perhaps. Or Burke and Hare. I find this a much more persuasive hypothesis than might appear at first sight.

Also The Butterfly House by Kathryn Bevis, one of the best poetry collections of recent years. The Egg, to name only one of these poems, will stay with me for the rest of my life. A major talent taken away from us far too soon.

My comfort read
Pride and Prejudice. We live and learn.