Wednesday, April 21, 2010

A.L. Barker -- Great Novelist

“Who needs fiction with the sort of truth we’re up against?”

“This story is about you.”

– A.L. Barker, The Haunt

Born in 1918, A.L. Barker was seven when my mother came into the world. She won the first-ever Somerset Maugham prize in 1947 for Innocents, a collection of stories, and her novel John Brown’s Body was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1969. I first heard of her in April, 2010, when, reading the Wikipedia entry on Rebecca West, I came across a quote: “I love the novels of A.L. Barker.” Unfortunately, the only one of A.L. Barker’s books in the wonderful Mid-Hudson library system is The Haunt – which I immediately ordered up from the Mahopac Library. Published in 1999, The Haunt is written in a brilliantly pointilist style, with rather a large cast of characters and several interweaving plot lines, all loosely focused by the location — in Cornwall, near a hotel, the Bellechasse (‘French for ‘good hunting.’”I can’t wait to read more. With Sybille Bedford, A.L. Barker is now one of two female novelists I did not discover until I was in my sixties. Probably I should wonder how many more there might be.

“Who needs fiction with the sort of truth we’re up against?”

“This story is about you.”

– A.L. Barker, The Haunt