Benjamin Myers first came across the Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker when he was seven or eight and, though he didn’t read her till much later, she made an impression, even then. “I was on holiday with my parents and found a copy of Union Street, Pat’s first novel,” he recalls. “I asked my mum about it and she said: ‘Oh, not only is that set round our way but the author is from Yorkshire.’ I was so struck by that. It’s partly what made me want to be a writer.”
A decade ago the two became acquainted, brought together by an old friend of Myers who was seeing Barker’s daughter. By then, Myers was establishing himself as one of the most electrifying voices in British fiction, setting most of his work, such as the 2013 Gordon Burn prize-winning novel Pig Iron, in his native north-east. Barker, who has published 15 books over a stellar 40-year career, including the Regeneration trilogy and more recently a series of novels reimagining the Iliad from a female perspective, continues to be an inspiration for him.
Ahead of the publication of his new novel, Rare Singles, a meditation on grief, love and the redemptive power of music, and Barker’s return to ancient Greece in The Voyage Home, the two friends met up over Zoom to discuss what it means to be “northern writers”, the perils of inhabiting characters of a different race or gender, and the authors and books they love.
Have you ever felt the need to resist the “northern writer” label [Myers lives in Hebden Bridge, Barker in Durham]?
Pat Barker Being a northern writer, even now – or perhaps especially now – requires a kind of courage or bloody-mindedness, because we are so deeply unfashionable. I remember Hilary Mantel saying that because she had a northern accent, she just had to accept that everybody who listened to her thought she was a bit thick. I think that prejudice still exists. And there’s you [Ben] – male, pale, northern – how do you even get into print? Apart from your gigantic talent, of course.
Benjamin Myers It’s weird, because being a fortysomething white male, it’s a position of privilege …
PB Not in the literary world, it’s not.
BM No. And as soon as you open your mouth and say you’re from a comprehensive school in the north-east of England… Last year, I was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Recently I was talking to another writer who’s female and Asian and she said: “Oh, you know we were brought in to up the diversity quota.” And I was like: “Me, why?” And she said: “Well, you’re from the north of England.” I was quite flabbergasted and embarrassed to hear that.
So you react against it?
PB Oh, I think I violently reacted against it at one point. I began by writing “middle-class lady novelist” novels. They weren’t published, they didn’t deserve to be. I said to myself: “Look, you are a northern, working-class, female bastard, get on and write about it.”
In Rare Singles, Ben, you write about Yorkshire through the eyes of a complete outsider. Did that give you a fresh perspective?
BM I think so yeah. It’s a novel about an old American guy who comes to perform at a northern soul weekender in Scarborough. I just thought, post-Brexit, we in England have been taking a long, hard look at ourselves – or some of us have been.
PB Not anybody in power, I’m afraid.
BM No. But I thought I need some fresh eyes on the north of England. I went to Scarborough on a few occasions and thought: pretend you’ve never been here, or to England. Look at what people are eating, how they dress, how they’re talking. But the big difference is the character is of a different race to me, he’s black …
PB You are actually a very brave writer, and that’s what I admire about you.
I was going to ask about writing so far outside your experience. It’s probably quite an anxiety-inducing thing to do.
PB It’s a terribly brave thing to do. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
BM Well, there were advanced discussions about it. Someone suggested it wouldn’t get published.
PB And the other character is a woman; even that is problematical these days.
BM But one of the main criticisms that I’ve had for my writing is that I write about men.
PB Brilliantly. They need writing about for goodness sake, who’s the problem in all this?
BM Yeah. So [the main characters are] a black man and a woman, neither of which I am. But without being too reductive, people are people and we generally, for the most part, have the same fears and desires and needs. Rare Singles is a book about grief and trauma, and that goes beyond age, wealth, race, nationality… For the first time, one of my novels has been through a sensitivity reader.
PB How was it?
BM It was fine. Some comments came back that I didn’t necessarily agree with.
Such as?
BM It was suggested that I mention skin colour more, and I don’t mention skin colour at all in the book, because it’s not about skin colour, it’s about lived experience, grief, connection. And readers aren’t stupid. They know who they’re reading about and what they’re experiencing.
Pat, would you agree to a sensitivity read?
PB I would have to, and I may have to, because I got very sick recently of writing about bronze age women. I want to write a modern novel with a male protagonist about the divisiveness in our society, set in the recent past in England. We are in a honeymoon period at the moment when it looks as if the divisions will be less prominent, but I do think that a year on from the election, people’s teeth will be at each other’s throats with even more enthusiasm.
Pat, you said in the past that you weren’t temperamentally equipped to being a writer, whereas Ben, you seem to love the process.
PB I sometimes love the process, and I’m absolutely intolerable when I’m not writing. So from everybody else’s point of view, it’s quite clear I have to do it.
BM It’s the same for me. I would say that writing is the only time that I’m not anxious about the world, because I’m in control of it. But the downside is, it’s compulsive for me. Sometimes an idea comes that is so strong and difficult to ignore that everything in my life gets put on hold while I do it.
PB What happens when you stop?
BM Complete mental and physical exhaustion. Last month, I decided I would have June off because I was so tired, but then I wrote 25,000 words of a novella.
PB You just cheat and start again so you don’t have to face up to being you without the writing!
BM Yeah, writing is a perpetual attempt to avoid the real world. I don’t fully live in the real world.
PB You should talk to [Barker’s daughter] Anna about this. She’s just been trying to sort out my financial affairs, which have got into a muddle simply because I don’t open things. I think they’ll go away if I ignore them, but it really doesn’t work like that.
What books have you enjoyed recently?
BM The new Kevin Barry novel, The Heart in Winter, is brilliant. It’s more about the language than the plot with him, but every line made me feel like giving up writing.
PB Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. I was just blown away by it.
BM Irish fiction is the stuff that’s given me some of the most excitement – Kevin Barry, Sebastian Barry, Colin Barrett, Rob Doyle. On a different note, the comedy duo the Krankies wrote a very good book that is really vulgar and bawdy and a brilliant insight into the world of light entertainment and the club scene of the 70s and 80s. That wasn’t the book I was intending to mention, but it did give me a lot of pleasure.
Pat, tell me about The Voyage Home. You say you’ve reached the end of your time writing about bronze age women?
PB I think there is another book there but I’m not sure I want it to be the next book. The Voyage Home is about revenge – the necessity of revenge, the pointlessness of it. It wasn’t an easy book to write, but that was largely for personal reasons – things like the pandemic and moving house and being ill. It changes your attitude to a book if you’ve had to really battle your way through it, and this one was forged in a furnace.
BM Pat, what would you be doing if you hadn’t got published – if Union Street had never been pulled out of the bin and passed on to Virago?
PB I’d still be writing, I think, because it does seem essential for my equilibrium. Otherwise, I might have become a therapist. It’s the same focus on language, and listening carefully, and trouble, and that’s the kind of novel I write. But I’m glad my husband fished Union Street out of the bin, and that Virago thought it was worth publishing. It’s not a bad career. One of the benefits of being a writer, of course, is that you could go on until you fall off your perch. There’s no retirement at 65.
BM I just feel really lucky to have a career in writing at all. And I know it can end at any point. I think all writers live in fear of the rug being pulled. The possibility of having to enter the workplace now is unthinkable to me, because I’m not even fully socialised. I’m the opposite of institutionalised, whatever that is.
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20) on 22 August. To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Rare Singles by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
