Rating: 
Summary: Bland
Review: Barker's WWI saga was fantastic. The characters were real and their problems intense. By contrast this book was bland. I never really cared about them, and even though the book was just 200 pages, I could barely finish it. I never really got a grip on Danny, the child criminal. Was he evil? Or just a troubled kid? What was I supposed to conclude?The book is told from the point of view of Tom, the therapist. I have a real problem with four or five pages in the middle of the book when the reader is suddenly in the head of a different character. How come? Was this an editing mistake? It contributes nothing to the book. I simply don't understand what it's doing there.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Border Crossing is the latest in a long line of psychological thrillers to have hit the high-street bookshelves recently and adds
further weight to the opinion that British writers are in the prime of their literary careers. Having already produced 9 books, Pat Barker demonstrates the rich variety of narratives available with this dangerously realistic tale of a child psychologist and his encounters with one of his former patients. Tom Seymour is the psychologist, recently separated from his wife, who rescues Danny Miller, a notorious child-killer, after he tries to commit suicide by jumping into a river. As their relationship begins to develop and Danny takes Tom further into his confidence, it is apparent that there is something dangerous at work within Miller's mind. When Seymour gave evidence at
Danny's trial he declared him highly disturbed but years later he begins to question this decision, realising there is a fine line
between calculating genius and outright madness. As Tom becomes further entwined into the 'confessional' Danny is determined to give him the local news agencies are informed
that a child-murderer is living in the local area. With the media creating an intense witch-hunt and vigilantes prowling the streets,Miller must flee but Seymour is left with a decision that could affect far more than his professional status. A simply sensational novel, Border Crossing captures the scenes of fear, anger and bewilderment immaculately, maintaining a
breath-taking tempo and capturing the reader's attention, refusing to release it before the final page is turned.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping thriller
Review: Danny Miller commits murder at age 10 and was convicted by the help of the man that saves his life 13 years later. Therapist Tomy Seymour, who testified at Miller's trial, saves Miller from drowning in the opening scenes and spends the rest of the novel figuring out what exactly happened so many years ago. Barker paints a stunning portrait inside the mind of a child murderer, who manipulates every person who tries to help him, especially Seymour. The shirnk re-interviews those close to Miller immediately after he is sent to prison, and the tension builds in a series of therapy sessions he has with Miller. While the climax and the ending were deflating and seem to make the whole exercise a sham and setup by Miller, Barker's writing carries the day and makes this a sensational read.
Rating: 
Summary: I Don't Get It
Review: I read the synopsis for this book in a "Best of.." book list for 2001. It's described as a psychological thriller about a psychiatrist who saves a man from drowning. The catch is the man he saves was once a client of his who he inadvertently helped send away to a correctional institute because of damaging testimony.
Sounds good right? I missed it. I didn't find the book tense at all. Every time it started to work towards something I thought was going to be remotely suspenseful, it petered out. I was really disappointed. In fact about the highest praise I can give it is that at just over two hundred pages it reads like a halfway decent short story. A not terribly exciting short story, but a short story never the less.
Rating:
Summary: Two person play as a novel
Review: I will admit that I listened to this Audio Book on drive to and from Las Angeles to Los Vegas. I thought it a good chance to be introduced to Pat Barker who seems to get such rave reviews. This is basically a two person character study in the guise of a psychological thriller that is not all that thrilling. I found the store interesting enough and the writing crisp, but the
secondary plot of Tom Seymour and his wife seems lost as she walks out of his life just when he is consumed with this former child patient who returns to extract his revenge. Or does he? I will give this a marginal thumbs up because the two main characters are well written and vivid, with Danny Miller the tormented child murderer an excellent character. But in the end I did not find this very satisfying to listen to and doubt I would have finished it if I had picked it up as a book.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprising page-turner!
Review: Pat Barker has won many awards for her fiction & here it's easy to see why. It's the story of a psychiatrist who accidentally meets a young man he once evaluated...evaluated to say whether he could stand trial. The patient has grown up and wants to talk about his childhood. Meanwhile, the therapist's personal life is falling to pieces. American bestsellers in the genre of your choice are fun reads. Reading a book by an excellent storyteller and writer like Barker points up just how flimsy, vapid, and bland many of those NYT bestsellers are. She has an amazing facillity with language and story construction. Her World War 2 "Regeneration" trilogy won all the awards and got press (mostly in Britain) but try this page turner or "Blow Your House Down." I had to read the latter in one sitting!
Rating:
Summary: Psychological thriller
Review: The only other Pat Barker novels I've read were those of the Regeneration trilogy, and it's easy to recognize her style in "Border Crossing", once again the reader is taken into the intimate relationship between a psychologist and his patient. This one does not have the same scope as the trilogy, really just a novella or extra long short story with only 216 pages, a page turning psychological thriller that's easy to read in a night..
One day while walking by a river Tom witnesses an accident and rescues a man from drowning. Coincidentally this man turns out to be Danny, a child murderer now released who once was evaluated by Tom to judge if he was fit to stand trial in an adult court. Tom decides to begin therapy sessions with Danny to help him understand his past, and more questions are raised than answered. Readers that like nice clear cut endings might be disappointed with this, what is good and what is evil are very ambiguous in this story; and certainly will give pause for thought about child criminals, especially children who kill.
I gave this a 4 star rating because of the plot line involving his wife - while interesting this was somewhat disconnected from the story. The ending has been left wide open for a sequel and I wouldn't mind hearing what becomes of Danny Miller.
Rating:
Summary: A Psychologically Engaging Novel
Review: This engaging and very readable novel explores the inner life of a psychologist, Tom Seymour. Tom is trying to cope with the possible break-up of his marriage when he is visited by a figure from his past, Danny Miller. More than a decade earlier, Tom testified in court that Danny understood the difference between right and wrong and therefore was fit to stand trial as an adult. In the electrifying opening chapter, Tom meets the adult Danny, and is subsequently forced to consider the extent to which he may have contributed to Danny's problems. The book explores themes including trust, betrayal, what we owe to other human beings, and the consequences of our actions. The title has multiple layers of meaning, but clearly one of the borders that fascinates Barker here, as it did in the _Regeneration_ trilogy, is the border between psychologist and patient. How much of a barrier should Tom draw between himself and Danny? What are the consequences if Danny crosses that border? Is there a danger in being too close to someone like Danny, even if one has the best of intentions? Finally, how different is Tom from Danny? Is there a little bit of cruelty in all children, all people? Although this novel touches on a hot button issue--children and punishment--it steadfastly resists plot cliches. Danny Miller is a complex, enigmatic, intelligent, untrustworthy, yet at times movingly vulnerable character. The novel is all the stronger for refusing to reduce him to the role of either victim or monster.
Rating:
Summary: Shades of the Past
Review: To be haunted by the ghost of someone dead is a disconcerting enough experience, but the ramifications of a haunting by the living are far more immediate and potentially devastating. Tom Seymour, the protaganist of Pat Barker's nuanced novel "Border Crossing" is a renowned psychologist with a failing marriage whose past comes back to him when he rescues a former patient from a possible suicide attempt. But even as he drags the young man half-dead from the ocean, the questions bubble to the surface. Was this a chance meeting? Or had the patient, whom Tom had treated a decade before as part of the legal team prosecuting a young boy for a brutal murder, come back into his life with some kind of sinister purpose? Answers are elusive as the Tom relives his past, and examines his own culpability in the unravelling of the boy's life. His search for the truth about Danny, a boy who grew to manhood with the shadow of a murder conviction over his head, plays out over the backdrop of Tom's divorce and the questioning of many of the fundamental beliefs of his life. The facts he uncovers, and those he doesn't, give him insight into his own life that seems more necessary than welcome. If mysteries are the most compelling stories, and people the most complex mysteries, than Pat Barker has created a small masterpiece here. The author puts forward Tom's frustration and obsession with subtle skill, as the puzzle of Danny's persona eludes a solution like a Rubik's cube. Each approach to the truth thwarted starts Tom down a different road, one with new, and possibly more dangerous, consequences. For such a small book there's much substance here. The writing is gentle and accessible, evenly paced, graced with subtle and thoughtful innuendo. Barker gives us just enough about Danny in the end, not to think we've answered every question, but to imagine we're asking the right ones.
Rating:
Summary: "Regeneration" revamped
Review: When child psychologist Tom Seymour pulls a would-be suicide from a river, he recognises the young man as Danny Miller, the child whom Tom's assessment had helped imprison for the brutal murder of an old woman thirteen years ago. Now out of prison and supposedly starting a new life, Danny has hunted Tom down in the hope that he might be able to help him understand the killing. With his own life troubled and his marriage collapsing, Tom succumbs to the temptation to travel into Danny's past. The problem is that what he finds there is not particularly riveting, and certainly not unusual enough to account for an act which society regards with horror as completely beyond the boundaries of "normality". Unlike, say, Peter Shaffer's "Equus", when Danny finally remembers the murder there is little depth, no sense of climax, no sense of a mystery unravelled, not even much horror. The novel sets up the idea of a journey into the mind of an outcast, the child who kills, but never lives up to what it promises. The second problem is the characterisation. Danny Miller is a pale reworking of Billy Prior, Barker's brilliant creation in "Regeneration", complete with Prior's unpleasant father, manipulative charm and "wintry smile", but nowhere near as interesting (especially once you recognise him as Prior). Tom isn't even a shadow of "Regeneration"'s Dr Rivers, and there is even less substance to the supporting cast, his wife, his colleagues, and the people whose lives Danny has passed through. Although there are hints that there will be trouble between Tom and Danny, since Danny seems to blame Tom for his imprisonment and is renowned for getting people who deal with him to "cross the invisible line", the relationship barely develops, again being a lack-lustre echo of the intense but still professional relationship between Rivers and Prior. Barker is capable of extraordinary writing, as evidenced in her superb "Regeneration" trilogy, a remarkable exploration of people who kill and what it does to their psyches. It's a pity that she seems to have been rewriting it ever since.
| 
