The last couple of decades have produced a lot of loose talk about the “dysfunctional family,” whatever that might be. Every time a definition is attempted, its vagueness and generality point to the inevitable conclusion that there really is no such thing as a family that is not dysfunctional. Some families, to be sure, get along passably; but only permanent citizens of Cloud-Cuckooland would contend that love unalloyed by rage or jealousy can exist between any two family members.

Still, some clans are definitely more dysfunctional than others, and when emotions build to a crescendo there can develop a situation that amounts to a sort of war, whether it be declared outright or merely a cold one. It is fitting, therefore, that Pat Barker, who has written perhaps the best war novels of her generation, should now turn her attention to the subtler hostilities of family life.

With her Regeneration trilogy—Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1996)—Barker established herself as one of the foremost novelists in Britain. But those who are strongest at showing us the gore of the battlefield are not necessarily those best equipped to chronicle the repressed, unspectacular skirmishes of the domestic front. Another World, though, Barker’s first novel since the trilogy, is resounding testimony to the breadth and durability of her fictional powers.

Nick’s family has reached a crisis point, one that will sound familiar to a good many modern parents. It is a cobbled-together family unit: Nick and Fran have both been married before, and have brought their children—as well as the unhappy histories of their previous, failed unions—into the new household. They also have a two-year-old of their own, Jasper, and still another bun in the oven.

The center is not holding. Nick’s adolescent daughter Miranda is silent, affectless, withholding. Her mother, Nick’s ex-wife, has been hospitalized with a depression brought on by the breakup of her marriage two or three years ago. What Miranda feels about it all, whom she blames, is something she will never disclose. She allows her father a little love, but doesn’t give an inch to her step-family or her baby brother.

Fran’s eleven-year-old son Gareth seems to be in even deeper trouble. With no friends, no focus, he spends most of his time playing grotesque computer games: “Crash, Fighting Force, Mortal Kombat, Shock Riot, Alien Trilogy, Rage, Streetfighter.” He throws violent temper tantrums in public places, uncontrolled displays of rage that his mother has neither the time nor the strength to deal with properly. She lets it slide, mostly out of guilt for having messed things up with Gareth’s father: “She’s failed, at any rate, in what seems to be a woman’s chief duty to her son: to equip him with a father who’s more than a bipedal sperm bank.” In the back of her mind she knows that Gareth’s behavior is not normal, but she can’t put in the effort that this acknowledgment would demand for between them little Jasper and the unborn baby are “eating her alive.”

Nick knows he ought to help ease the tension, but, as is so often the case with stepparents, there is no clear path for him. As Nick sees it, Fran continually goads him “into acting like Gareth’s father—his ‘real’ father, whatever that means—and [he is] then choked off the moment he attempts it.” He feels neutered; she is furious and resentful.

Nick has distractions of his own that keep him from pulling his weight at the moment, for he is caught up in the final, fatal illness of his grandfather, Geordie, a reserved centenarian whose odd emotional bond with Nick has always made him seem more father than grandfather. As he approaches his end, Geordie, a veteran of World War I, is increasingly haunted by his war experiences and by the death of his brother in the trenches. Nick spends many hours and even nights at Geordie’s bedside, knowing that he is needed at home but unable to pull himself away.

At the opening of the novel things have reached such a pitch that the family members seem quite literally to hate each other. Nick is repelled by Fran, with her “drained face, the huge belly, the skinny, sharp-boned cat-with-too-many-litters look.” Fran gloats whenever she can make Nick feel really guilty about some dereliction of duty. The children silently simmer.

Then, while the family is scraping off wallpaper in preparation for repainting the living room, they discover a hidden mural. It is a group portrait, a hostile and sinister representation of the Victorian Fanshawe family who built the house. Paterfamilias, with an erect penis emerging from undone fly. Sour-faced mother, breasts exposed. Elder son and daughter. Small boy. “Even without the exposed penis, the meticulously delineated and hated breasts, you’d have sensed the tension in this family, with the golden-haired toddler at its dark centre.” It is Miranda who finally says what they are all thinking: “It’s us.”

The Fanshawe family, Nick discovers, had as tragic a story as their portrait implies. William Fanshawe was a local munitions magnate whose youngest child, the little boy of the portrait, was gruesomely and mysteriously murdered at the age of two. The only suspects were the two older children, and although a court of law found them innocent for lack of evidence, they were always thought to have committed the crime. Years later the son, Robert, was killed on the first day of the Somme; his sister Muriel lived into old age, avoided by the neighbors and used as a bogey to frighten local children. A letter from Robert to his sister, written shortly before he died, urged her, cryptically, to “Remember how young we were.” Nick keeps his discoveries secret from his family, but the message of the portrait is strong enough for them, like the reader, to get the analogy.

It is at this point that the seemingly disparate threads of Barker’s plot—Geordie’s agony over the memory of his brother Harry, the Fanshawes’ dreadful story, Gareth’s furtive, vicious attacks on little Jasper—come together into a single theme: sibling rivalry. Siblings do not just get annoyed with one another; they hate one another. Frequently, they would like to kill one another. Geordie says as much in an interview with a historian friend, who resists his dark vision: “But that’s a child’s hatred, Geordie. Kids are always saying they hate people, they wish they were dead, but they don’t mean it. They don’t act on it.” Geordie disagrees. “They don’t get the chance, do they, most of the time?”

The analogies become more insistent. On a family trip to the beach one day, Gareth looks at Miranda and, for the first time, intuits her real feelings. “Something about her expression startles him. He understands suddenly that if Miranda did what she wanted she’d knock the sand castle over and jump up and down on the ruin. She’d scream and shout and kick sand into all their faces… . [H]e backs away. She’s no right to feel like that. He’s the one who wants to smash things.”

As the afternoon wears on, the adults doze and the children are left to their own devices. Jasper squats by a little stream, playing boats. Gareth watches him, nearly distraught. Part of him would like to join Jasper’s game; but the other part wins, and, thinking himself unobserved, he begins to hurl rocks at his brother.

Another World is written with all the suspense of a thriller, and so to reveal whether or not Jasper is killed would be unfair to both readers and author. In any case, by the end of the novel the reader is confronted with many more questions than answers. Was Gareth’s intent, and that of Robert and Muriel Fanshawe, truly murderous? Was the girl Gareth saw standing silently above him as he threw the stones his sister Miranda, or a trick of the sun conjured up by his own wish for a partner in crime—or Muriel Fanshawe’s ghost? How does one weigh the evident good in both Miranda and Gareth against their violent impulses? Is it true, as Geordie insists, that all siblings would kill if they had a chance? So far as family life goes, do really bad times, when spouses actively dislike each other, in fact make up a normal and even inevitable part of marriage?

In her subtle combination of Nick’s family story with those of Geordie and of the Fanshawes, Barker links impulse with history, the sins of the fathers against their children with the sins of the fatherland against its sons. William Fanshawe made his fortune in the war industry, the same industry that would eventually kill his son Robert—a son who murdered his brother but whom, nevertheless, the father helplessly loved. He honors both boys in the same memorial, engraving it with Kipling’s verse, “If any question why we died,/ Tell them, because our fathers lied.” “A bitter epitaph,” as Nick reflects, “though there’s nothing surprising about that. Fanshawe had lost two sons, why wouldn’t he be bitter? What’s strange is the determined linking of the two deaths, the conviction of guilt for both.”

Like Robert, Geordie, it turns out, is both victim and potential villain: he gave the final blow to his brother Harry, who had just been mortally wounded in the trenches for the sake of a worthless cause. A mercy killing, obviously. But Geordie, who alone knew how much he hated the brother his mother had always favored, sees it differently. After eighty years, he is still the ghostly remnant of an unresolved past, as is Harry’s son Geoffrey, now “a frail old man, leaning on a stick,” once a little boy who had never known his own father and who looked up to his Uncle Geordie as a hero.

Pat Barker is capable of getting across a powerful message with the absolute minimum of rhetoric, one of the rarest gifts a writer can be blessed with. The surface simplicity of her method conceals, then slowly reveals, a narrative with all the richness and complexity of a symphony. Another World is pure pleasure—and pain—to read.