Tag: AL Barker

‘Last Journey’ by A. L. Barker

Not to be confused with A. L. Kennedy or Pat Barker, A. L. Barker was one of those authors who can find consolation for mediocre sales in the admiration of their peers. Auberon Waugh and Rebecca West both considered her exceptional. She published eleven novels, one of which earned her a place on the 1969 Booker shortlist, yet she was also a prolific writer of short stories. Many of these engage with horror and the supernatural. Though far from callous towards her characters, she tends to view them and their motives with scepticism. In ‘Lost Journey’, her young narrator falls for the sexy sidekick of a seemingly demented and impossibly ancient woman, Gerda Charles, who claims to the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite, Robert Dudley. Like the ‘strange stories’ of her contemporary, Robert Aickman, ‘Lost Journey’ follows a hapless protagonist drawn by erotic yearnings to the edge of disaster. But there is more overt comedy here than in Aickman, as the supernatural and the everyday converge. A.L. Barker liked to think of her shorty stories as ‘dark explosions’, and this is one of the best of them.

First published in Element of Doubt, Vintage, London, 1992. Reissued as a standalone title by Galley Beggar, Norwich, 2014

‘The Iconoclasts’ by A.L. Barker

Towards the end of the second world war, a five-year-old boy, Marcus, with a small and fearful growing awareness of the world around him, spends the afternoon with Neil, five years older, full of his knowledge, scathing of Marcus’s childishness, and possessed of a kind of fanaticism, “an ardour so extreme, so pitiless that it chilled and almost repelled”. Neil lives by the airfield, wants the war to go on long enough for him to be a pilot; he sees a decayed windmill over the fields and sets off, accompanied by Marcus, to explore it, and decides to test his nerve by swinging down on one of the sails and jumping off at the botttom, making a “four-point landing”. Unfortunately, the sails won’t turn, and eventually Neil falls to his death. The story, focalised through Marcus’s consciousness draws its force from the limits of his vision, almost like an allegory of short story form itself.

First published in Innocents, Hogarth Press, 1947 and collected in Submerged: Selected Stories, Virago, 2020