Pat Barker

Border Crossing is a novel written by English author Pat Barker, and first published in 2001. The novel explores the controversial issue of children who have committed murder, investigating the aftermath of a ten-year-old-boy's suffocation of an elderly woman.

About Danny

• "You didn't know who or what he was."
• "Danny didn't do feelings."
• "He was an arrogant little bastard."
• "The forensic evidence for Danny's guilt was overwhelming, but he was a good liar."
• "Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained."
• "I think he hated anything he couldn't control."
• "...the horror of the images impossible to connect with the child he'd just left."
• "I thought he was one of the most dangerous boys we've ever had through the school." (Mrs. Greene)

Tom and Lauren's Marriage

• "But he [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments."
• "He [Tom] denies her [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life."
• "He'd [Tom] learnt to value detachment: the clinician's splinter of ice in the heart."
• "When we got married, you didn't even want kids. It was... you and me." (Tom)
• "He [Tom] was fed up to the back teeth with being a walking, talking sperm bank."

Crossing Borders

• "It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience."
• "...Tom was aware of a line being crossed."
• "[Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter."

Death

• "You wring a chicken's neck, you don't expect to find it running round the yard next morning, do you?" (Danny)
• "Do you think it's different, killing a rabbit and killing a person?"

Mist/Fog

• "They'd awoken that morning to a curious stillness. Clouds sagged over the river, and there was mist like sweat over the mudflats."
• "[Tom] was less than halfway across the causeway when the mist thickened."

Smoke/Fire

• "The fired burnt furiously, piled high with logs. Danny had dragged the log basket onto the hearth rug and was kneeling beside it, a log in each hand, watching the fire burn."
• "A rasp and flare as [Danny] struck the match. A doubled reflection of the flame appeared in his eyes, whose pupils had not contracted, as one would have expected, but grown large, as if starved for light."
• "Danny's face was veiled in smoke."

Death/Birth/Rebirth

• "A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice."
• "[Tom] was staring at his own death."
• "The boy [Danny] looked like a baby: purple faced, wet hair, that drowned look of a newborn, cast up on to its mother's suddenly creased and spongy belly."
• "...he'd seen the boy's [Danny's] body hang suspended... an umbilical cord of silver bubbles linking his slack mouth to the air."
• "[Lauren's] eyes were glazed, inward-looking. Like labour, Tom thought, the irony as sour as the mud on his tongue."

Redemption

• "Do you think confession's the only route to redemption?"
• "You see the real question is: can people change?"

External links

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