A L Barker – författare

First published in 1987, The Gooseboy is a tale that is both elegant and grotesque, funny and appalling. Doug and Dulcie Bysshe are twins. Doug - or Bysshe - is now a successful film star living in the south of France and contemplating a new part as a saintly doctor in an African leper colony. Dulcie, busy and energetic, is fighting to retrieve her husband, the mournful and ineffective Pike, who has absconded to Nice with the adolescent Cherrimay Pugh. At the centre of events, is the Gooseboy, a creature with a double face, half faun, half deformed horror...The Gooseboy questions the relations between flesh and spirit, the ridiculous and the terrible. A. L. Barker watches shrewdly and judges from a distance, her pithy and particular prose shining through. 'She writes with a precision and an economy of words which had me gasping.' Auberon Waugh

A. L. Barker's engrossing novel looks at the life of a middle-aged storyteller, her fictional world and the individuals who inhabit it. Characters such as Mrs McSweeny and her husband Murdo who receive hallucinatory information about the Second Coming; or Elinor Dunphy, an elegant older woman visited by a beautiful and free-spirited young man who makes veiled sexual overtures to her; or Lalla, a divorcee, who falls in love with her son's form-master, only to learn that his apparent advances to her are just a cover for his passion for her son. These humorous yet tragic vignettes are all concerned with unfulfilled and usually perverted sexual relations - but how do they relate to the narrator's own successful marriage?

A. L. Barker's debut story collection appeared in 1947 and won the inaugural Somerset Maugham prize, instantly marking her out as a remarkable new talent. Each story describes a crisis in life; each reveals the impact of experience upon innocence, or vice versa.'[Barker's] remarkable descriptive powers, her feeling for the exact word and the right combination of adjectives are most satisfyingly applied to the evocation of landscape... Barker writes with a subtlety and precision which are as delightful as they are rare.' Times Literary Supplement'This collection of eight short stories... introduces an already assured and subtle stylist... There is little pity here, but - if restrained - considerable terror and tragedy, and a precision of observation and treatment which qualify this collection for a critical, fastidious audience.' Kirkus Reviews

Originally published in 1999, The Haunt, set in a seedy, decaying hotel on the Cornish coast, was to be the final entry in A. L. Barker's brilliant fifty-year writing career. 'The Haunt is the novel that A. L. Barker had just finished [in 1998] when she was struck down by a disabling illness... [It] is probably her best... It is an examination of what being haunted means, and whether we can do anything about it. Auden once said that there is nothing to be done about it. We must sit it out. This is grim advice. But if A. L. Barker is saying this too - and I think she is - she doesn't say it grimly. She says it lightly, not cynically but hilariously. She understands that there can be pleasure alongside unease: the delicious first stirrings of infidelity, the comforts of offered love to the old and ridiculous. She knows us all.' Jane Gardam, Spectator

The Joy-Ride and After was A.L. Barker's third collection of shorter pieces, first published in 1963. It offers three novellas, linked by certain recurrent characters and by their variations on the themes of loneliness and insecurity. The first tells of what has led to a young garage-hand 'borrowing' his employer's car, and of the disastrous consequences that ensue. In the second, a betrayed wife loses her memory after an accident, and finds herself on a barge with an old reprobate. The third concerns the tribulations of a canteen manager who has an inscrutable boss and an extravagant wife. Whether they live in slum tenement or suburban semi-detached, these 'ordinary' people become alive and phenomenal to us through the force and sympathy of Barker's imagination.

'An extraordinary achievement.' A. S. ByattJohn Brown's Body, first published in 1969, was A.L. Barker's fourth novel and was shortlisted for the second annual Booker Prize in 1970.Marise Tomelty is the young wife of a travelling salesman, who dislikes sex and is terrified of open spaces. Ralph Shilling, a dealer in pesticides, lives in the flat above the Tomeltys'. One day Marise's husband casually mentions that he recognises Ralph as John Brown: a man acquitted, for lack of evidence, of the gruesome double murder of two sisters. Nevertheless, Marise encourages Ralph's attentions, intoxicated by a heady mix of passion and fear.'She is formidable, and from a bare corner of human relations gathers a rich harvest.' Adam Mars-Jones'It would be hard to find anyone who chooses words more exactly or constructs with more precision.' Penelope Fitzgerald