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PAT BARKER (ELLEN WARNER) |
Life Class
By Pat Barker
Doubleday, 311 pp., $23.95
History itself, particularly modern English history, often seems like some beloved tapestry for Pat Barker - a vast, intricate repository of tragic truths to which she returns again and again. Certainly war occupies the central position on this landscape: Her "Regeneration" trilogy so brilliantly depicted the casualties of the First World War, from its trenches to its psychiatric wards, that the novels belong to the permanent archive of war literature. But it was the first of the three, "Regeneration," that borrowed its story from real figures and facts and thus set the tone for the two novels that followed. Drawing on the war journals of the famous neurologist William H. R. Rivers and the poetry and biographies of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Barker created a fictional tableau as searing in its intimacy as it was convincing.
Opening in London in the spring of 1914, "Life Class," too, returns to the front, and to the primary sources of both the war and the artists who graced (or languished in) the studios and salons of London during those blue-lit years. Barker's acknowledgments include nursing diaries, medical histories, and artists' biographies, as well as a nod to the real-life surgeon and artist Henry Tonks, who appears in the novel as the formidable instructor at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College (where Tonks actually taught). His acolytes are the principal characters of "Life Class": three passionate young students who wish to capture the world, and then, when the world becomes a place of fear and ruin, to transcend or escape it altogether. So: the old truth-and-beauty conundrum, with the first, illuminated by the realities of combat, almost guaranteeing the obliteration of the second.
As with her previous fiction, Barker achieves an authenticity in style and point of view, so that "Life Class" contains confident echoes of Waugh and Forster. If the novel lacks the brooding resonance of the "Regeneration" books, it's a failure that belongs to its characters rather than its territory; only in the second half of the book, which takes place in the midst of the war, do the characters rise to the dimension their narrative demands. Paul Tarrant, the brooding, semi-heroic protagonist of the novel, has come to Slade full of the lust and Sturm und Drang that define (or so he assumes) an artistic temperament; he is proficient in technique, but, Tonks tells him, his landscapes haven't much soul or feeling. He takes up with a melodramatic class model, though his real attention is reserved for Elinor Brooke, a Bloomsbury type who trumpets art for art's sake over the horrifying, tedious realism of what is happening outside her window. And because Elinor's chief subject is herself, she manages to engage Paul's heart in direct competition with the affections of Kit Neville, a talented painter whose success hasn't softened his dyspeptic personality.
And then, as the world will always have it, everything changes. More than half of "Life Class" takes place in life rather than in class, though we don't realize until most of the way through the book that the battlefield where Paul has gone to drive an ambulance is Ypres, a name synonymous with the agonies of the First World War. As ever, Barker's portrayal of the landscape of war - its bloodstained field hospitals and antlike lines of men walking toward death, its cruel emotional dissociation - is all the more affecting for its stripped-down prose. She limns the incalculable tragedy of battle in its individual costs: a surgeon's efforts to save an attempted suicide who will be accused of deserting, a mother's last attempt to comfort her dying boy. Throughout this glorified mess Paul moves, trancelike, as he watches the endless changing of the guard - "an irrigation system," as he writes Elinor, "full buckets going one way, empty buckets the other."
What is art's duty in such a world - to render the grimness of reality, or to eschew it altogether? Barker raises this classic concern of the modernists in the letters between Paul and Elinor and in the choices they make. It's a bit heavy-handed - Tonks might praise her for soul but not technique - and using her young artists as mouthpieces for such ponderous issues sometimes feels artificial. Less cumbersome and more moving is the young Quaker Paul is forced to share his living quarters with at Ypres. A conscientious objector who played the piano in peacetime and who, in the carnage of the operating theater, feels shock but not fear, Richard Lewis is a dreamy, evocative character whom Paul - and we, for that matter - cannot help but love. He's the personification of the fallen innocent, like the young Billy Prior of the "Regeneration" books, and his tender valor makes the surrounds of combat all the more horrific.
And yet the very concept of tender valor is one that belonged to the Great War - to "limbs, so dear-achieved," as Owen put it in "Futility." That gray landscape of wire and mud and sorrow is Barker's eternal province, so it's little wonder that her characters drop lines from Whitman and Marvell to make their point. Paul's man is Shakespeare. "Not so wide as a church door, nor so deep as a well, but t'will serve," he thinks, paraphrasing from "Romeo and Juliet." He's referring to the cut he gave himself with an ill-placed scalpel. But in the no man's land of Barker's war-torn world, the image calls to mind a trench as well as a grave.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe, and can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. She begins a book leave from the Globe with this review, and will return in spring 2009.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
