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.

Noonday - Pat Barker

Noonday is the concluding part of Barker's second wartime trilogy (unlike the Regeneration Trilogy, it doesn't seem to have a name), which interestingly carries the characters forward from WWI to WW2, specifically 1940 and the London Blitz.


I have said before, in my review of Toby's Room, that this trilogy is not as good as Regeneration, albeit the premise is much the same - artists at war are subjected to pioneering medical treatments. The difference is that Regeneration is about poets, many of whom we have heard of, having their traumatised souls put back together in a North Country sanatorium; this second sequence is about painters and plastic surgery and is set primarily in bohemian London, which makes it all a bit precious. Another shortcoming is that the characters are not real people but heavily and obviously based on real people, which is distracting for those of us who can guess. And, unfortunately, the central character in the latter is a woman, Elinor. In Toby's Room, therefore, credibility is stretched to get her into the hospital where Kit Neville is having his face restored.The truth is, society women played virtually no meaningful role in WWI. Some indeed did a bit of nursing but mostly it was just good works and posturing. Things were different in WWII and that makes Noonday a much better book than Toby's Room. Elinor, her husband Paul, and the disfigured Kit Neville are all actively engaged on the Home Front, Paul an ARP warden, Elinor and Kit both driving ambulances. They are all now in their Forties, facing the same middleaged crises we all face, only heightened by the very real prospect of being blown to smithereens at any moment.

Barker is a fantastic writer and there are moments of great beauty here. There is a moment towards the end when Kit and Elinor wave to one another across a firestorm which is truly heartbreaking. I also really enjoyed the skewering of Kenneth Clark, long before his Civilisation fame, recruiting war artists from his personal coterie and chasing after young girls.

[Also reviewed on this blog]

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.