Life Class - Pat Barker

 Life Class is the first of Barker's second World War I trilogy, as far as I know unnamed, the follow-up or complement of the award-winning Regeneration Trilogy.   Regeneration told us things we really didn't know about the war, in particular the never-discussed subject of the jitters, shell-shock, or PTSD as it is called today.   It had its real-life heroes - Owen and Sassoon - mixed with fictional characters.   It also gave us a meaningful woman's take on the situation through the nurses at Craigavon Hospital where traumatized soldiers were given ground-breaking experimental treatment.

The second trilogy is about art students at London's Slade School.   Here some of the real-life people are flimsily disguised.   You don't need a post-graduate degree from the Courtauld to recognise Kit Neville as the flawed and brilliant Christopher Nevin.   In fact you don't need much background knowledge to know all this stuff.   It's common knowledge, entry-level stuff.   I quite liked Toby's Room, the second in the trilogy, because the loss of a young life was beautifully and insightfully done.   I'm afraid Life Class is more cliched than insightful.   The real people were much more interesting, though it's far too early in the war to get too involved with the one who interests me most, the surgeon-turned-art-tutor Henry Tonks.

The thing about World War I is that it was a complete waste of time.   Hundreds of thousands of young lives were squandered in horrific circumstances.   Barker tries to describe the horror by setting all of the war action in a field hospital.   Unfortunately her key character, Paul Tarrant, just isn't interesting enough to take us into the heart of darkness.   He blocks it out and so, I'm afraid, do we.

Nothing by Pat Barker can ever be bad.   She is a magnificent writer but not always the best deviser of stories.   Regeneration was brilliant and terrifying.   The Silence of the Girls is, to my mind, far and away the best of the recent feminist takes on Greek myth.   Life Class is not quite as good.

The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

I was a big fan of the Regeneration Trilogy, not quite so keen on the Life Class Trilogy, although I still enjoyed it. Neither prepared me for this. The Silence of the Girls is a masterpiece - it's as simple as that. Barker takes the exact same episode of the Trojan War that Homer does, the 'wrath of Achilles', and does it from the woman's point of view. Given that Agamemnon's depriving Achilles of his prize slave Briseis, the captured queen of Trojan Lyrnessus, prompted the long sulk, this is an even better concept than Homer's. We see everything from all sides, Greek, Trojan, man, woman. And the change that Briseis brings about in Achilles, after the death of Patrocolus, is beautifully done by Barker and utterly convincing. I also loved the way she depicted the hero's eerie mother, the sea-nymph Thetis. That said, all her characterisations worked for me: the aged Priam, the simple Ajax, the individual enslaved women, and best of all, ever-patient Patrocolus. There is nothing more I can say. The best book I have read this year. A true work of art. I relished every single word.

Toby's Room - Pat Barker

It's a follow-up to Life Class, apparently, but it is, inescapably, an offshoot of the magnificent Regeneration Trilogy which made Barker's name and won her the Booker Prize.

The trilogy was about World War I, poetry and mental illness.  Toby's Room is about World War I, painting, and facial disfigurement.  The art school chums who met at the Slade in Life Class are now exposed to the full horror of mechanised warfare.  Kit Neville, the Christopher Nevinson clone, has his face blown off in France and is brought home to Queen Mary's Hospital in Sidcup where the plastic surgery pioneer Harold Gillies does his best to make the facially disfigured acceptable and 'Harry' Tonks, professor at the Slade, draws meticulous records of the process.  Gillies and Tonks are obviously real whereas the 'students' are thinly fictionalised.  The Bloomsbury Set make a brief cameo appearance - notably and memorably Lady Ottoline Morrell.

The titular Toby is Toby Brooke, brother of the artist Elinor.  They are very close - too close, indeed. Toby goes to war as a doctor and is posted missing, presumed dead.  Elinor feels compelled to find out the truth.  Neville was a stretcher bearer in Toby's unit.  Elinor contacts him through fellow student Paul Tarrant, himself invalided out of the front line.  They visit Neville at St Mary's where Elinor is recruited by Tonks to assist with his "Rogue's Gallery".

The problem is, the book is in two distinct halves - pre-war and towards the end of the war.  It may well be that Life Class forced this structure onto Toby's Room.  I don't know but will certainly find out. It makes Toby's Room, as a standalone novel, clumsy and disjointed.  The characterisation is, nevertheless, excellent, especially with Neville himself, who is far more interesting than our apparent heroine.  And the writing, as always with Barker, is exquisite.

Not perfect, then, but a fascinating addition to the canon.