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

• 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.
• ...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
• I don't know why I killed her, I didn't know then and I don't know now. And I don't know how to live with it.
  • Danny to Tom

Tom and Lauren's Marriage

• But [Tom] was used to switching off, to living his life in separate compartments.
• [Tom] denies [Lauren] his attention in memory, as he did in life.
• [Tom had] 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
• [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.
• [Danny] was very, very good at getting people to step across that invisible border. Lambs to the slaughter.

Murder

• 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.

Death/Birth/Rebirth

• A second later, the water enclosed him in a coffin of ice.
• 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?

External links

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