SOURCE: "Growing Up," in London Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 8, April 20, 1989, pp. 20-2.

In the following excerpt, Birch favorably assesses Barker's use of language and insights into her characters' lives in The Man Who Wasn't There.

[Pat Barker's] novels have all been versions of the same intense story: working-class families or, more specifically, the women of such families, contending with the inequities of poverty and ignorance. Men have always existed on the margins of her narratives. Etiolated and ineffective, they are seen only in relation to the lives of sturdier mothers, wives, sisters or daughters. As a rule they die or disappear, fading out of the story rather like the absent father in [Penelope] Lively's Passing On. Now Pat Barker has both confronted and reversed this attribute of her fiction. Her latest novel, The Man Who Wasn't There, focuses on a boy's relation with the father he has...