Barker has the rare ability to communicate the physical, to make one feel her characters living, feel "the blood squeezing through [their] veins" in the way that Lawrence wanted for his own characters. Her first book [Union Street] is an almost hellish cycle of seven stories about the working-class women who live along the Union Street of the title, in an unnamed city in the North of England. But sex is more important than class here. Barker writes about a crucial stage in the life of a different woman in each story. But she uses the woman's experience to embody a segment of the collective experience of the sex as a whole, from childhood to old age, producing a feminine version of Marcel Marceau's pantomime in the process, whose effect is intensified by the fact that each of the women knows the other six, and appears in their stories as well as her own. Barker's characters are dominated by biology, by the sheer fact of being female. Their relations with men are essentially violent, for both men and women in Union Street lack an adequate emotional language and so despise one another, turning physical life into an indignity in the process. (p. 154)
Barker's sense of physical violence at the core of everyday life seems to me too strong, too obsessive to proceed from any political position. It is so honestly come by that for me the inextricability of sex and violence in Union Street is harrowing rather than morbid. Union Street is too relentless for one to be "happy" while reading it. But something in me both likes and admires Barker's ability to move and appall me…. (p. 155)
Michael Gorra, "Laughter and Bloodshed," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 151-64.
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