Place and Community in Pat Barker’s Union Street

Contemporary British writer Pat Barker’s first novel Union Street (1982) opens with the “Kelly Brown” episode, the story of a schoolgirl assaulted by an old man whom she mistakenly takes as her father trying to reconnect with her lost home. Following Kelly’s steps through the derelict streets and houses of the post-industrial northeast England, the narration ends with the set of words: “She was going home” (Barker, 1982, p. 69). Through this final remark, what unfolds is a question relating to whether there is ever “a place called home” or this is simply “a longing for a place … a yearning for a different time” (Boym, 2011, p. xv). Union Street is often categorised as a social realist narrative, as in the post-war British fiction, due to its representation and celebration of the working-class home, its values and its struggles. However, Barker’s depiction of people and place in Union Street goes beyond conventional portrayals of the working-class communities as romanticized and mythicized. Rather than succumbing to nostalgia or drawing any sentimental conclusions, Barker concentrates on transcribing the actual experience of women in Union Street and their relation to place. This nuanced realism, as this study argues, is significant in its engagement with space and place and its treatment of the spatial trope of “home” which, both as a place and idea, is shattered, and un-homely evoking rather an impossible nostos or an absence of nostalgia. For all these reasons, this study examines how Pat Barker defies nostalgic imagination of community and place in Union Street, mainly in the first episode Kelly Brown, through various ways but specifically challenging fixed notions of home and community as sites of belonging and unity.