Union Street

Who wants to read a book about working class women and girls who live in squalor in the back avenues of an industrial city north east of London?

Well, I do.

See, my hand is raised?

Still I'm not everybody.

Hollywood couldn't handle what British author Pat Barker was trying to convey in the pages of this book because in 1990 they released it as a sweet romance story called Stanley & Iris, starring Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro. In the film Fonda and De Niro play two working class individuals who are at a standstill in their lives, with Fonda's character later on teaching De Niro’s how to read and write, the two of them falling in love during the process. I admit, it's an excellent film, and one of my favorite romance stories, Fonda is fun to watch and De Niro pulls out one of his best performances in it --- but the film isn't Baker's 1982 debut Union Street. Fonda's Iris King, the cake factory, a pregnant teen, and a man who can't read are the only elements that have any sort of association to this book, and these elements are still sprinkled with sugar crystals on it when they made it to screen.

Book publishers couldn't handle what realism Barker had written as she had a difficult time trying to find a publisher for the book. Nobody wanted to give Union Street the time of day because it isn't a pretty book. It just isn't a book that goes down easy. It's a book about worn-out, hard-working women and young girls, but it's not in the Norma Rae-rah-rah spirit, or wraps itself in warm camaraderie like Gloria Naylor's classic Women of Brewster Place. Baker wrote a book that is a stark and unsettling contrast to the usual working-class woman narrative.


Barker is definitely a realist. Within in the pages of Union Street she offers zero solutions. Life is as it is and it will screw you over, time and time again, the end. No room to breathe, no room to dream. Seven inter-locking vignettes of claustrophobic hopelessness is how Union Street is mapped out, with each character from the young to old attempting to either break away or face their abysmal fates.

The images that unfold are raw. Women are raped. Women are beaten. Women make the hard choices when the men around them are drunk and directionless. Women give themselves over to men so food can be put on the table. Women are dying. Women are living in filth. You can feel the grime, smell the stench, understand the dejection. Sometimes things are too real, too harrowing, you want to look away, but can't. The only sliver of hope these women have is their persistence to hope that one day it will change and live life on their own terms, not paycheck to paycheck and by the rigid class system there are barred in.

Barker is an exceptional writer. She's not patronizing in her prose as these characters come into focus, and she writes them not really as victims, but as survivors, and in some flickers of familiarity you might find yourself or someone you know in these characters.

Union Street is bleak and depressing, and you'll need to knock back a drink and read a sugary and spongy bite of pastel colored chick-lit to get the taste out of your mouth when you're close the last chapter. Still this shouldn't dissuade one away from reading it. I personally found this a compelling read and far from being the type of "misery porn" that gets produced these days in contemporary literature just so the author can appear "deep" or "aware of their privilege". Union Street is authentic, as it wears its reality tattered and dingy, but sincere.

////

from the margins

• Rating: ****
• 265 Pages
• Published 1982 by Little Brown and Company
• Version Read: Union Street & Blow Your House Down // Published March 15th 1999 by Picador

////

This review was previously published on March 24, 2017. It was edited for format, spelling, and syntax errors --- because I'm a perfectionist like that.