Having left his wife and daughter, Nick is now living with a pregnant partner, their toddler and her son, who is proving a most hostile stepson for our hero. The Victorian house they have moved into also has its own ghosts. Added to this is the slow death of Nick's grandfather, a survivor of the Somme, who has outlived everyone and now seems set to die. Barker is an unusual writer in that absolutely nothing about her first four novels prepared readers for Regeneration in 1991. That novel, which became the first and strongest volume in her powerful first World War trilogy, established her as a major writer. History had given her a dramatic story, and Barker's controlled, determinedly unsentimental prose did the rest. This new novel, aside from being solid and thoughtful, has little to offer.
Although the atmosphere of domestic tension is carefully sustained, the prose is laboured, while the force of Barker's intelligence frequently underlines the narrative's artistic limitations.
Admittedly the portrait of Geordie, the old soldier, haunted by his ambivalent attitude to death, is memorable, yet Another World merely confirms that the war continues to dominate Barker's fiction.
