Daniel Williams reviews Pat Barker's "Life Class"
Daniel J. Williams
Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: Arts
The task fell on poet soldiers to convey the Great War in vibrant words, and so to warn callow bands of Britons eagerly donning uniforms.
"Verse wails," mourned Wilfred Owen in his vivid little "1914." "Now begin famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin."
If Pat Barker needed poetry to introduce her newest novel, that could have been it. To call "Life Class" a romance ignores its emotional distance. Neither is it wholly a war story, an intentional duality. It is rather about individuals struggling to find love, lust, justice and meaning in a war-torn world. Young men returning home from the trenches often faced a different country, one sympathetic to their cause yet distant from their suffering. Barker - who wrote the Regeneration Trilogy novels and won a Booker Prize - tackles this theme and, in the process, yields a picture stark and cold in its depiction of humanity at war.
Three young Britons - Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville - share an artistic passion, at various times for each a source of frustration. Art reminds them of their pre-war existences, a time before fate handed each of them a new canvas on which to paint. For the war, despite its gray and muddy dreariness, splashes its own color on their lives. And Barker depicts it poignantly. If drawing is the explication of the human form, as the art instructor tells his students, then Barker has certainly attained its literary equivalent. Her forte for depicting characters yields an engaging cast.
Wilfred Owen likened the Great War to a foul tornado whirling the width of Europe. A fitting image, for as storms often do, the one that broke in 1914 came on the heels of relative calm. The summer of 1914 was the end of an epoch, close enough to the past to feel the leisurely refulgence of the previous few glorious summers, yet close enough to the future to feel the mounting tension of the Balkan affair. The novel begins in the quiet months before Europe and the world changed. Paul, Elinor and Kit are studying art in London. Those were carefree days. While vestiges of Victorian restraint fell away, young Britons found exhilaration in slackened social standards. Restlessness too, for the world was now theirs.
"Verse wails," mourned Wilfred Owen in his vivid little "1914." "Now begin famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin."
If Pat Barker needed poetry to introduce her newest novel, that could have been it. To call "Life Class" a romance ignores its emotional distance. Neither is it wholly a war story, an intentional duality. It is rather about individuals struggling to find love, lust, justice and meaning in a war-torn world. Young men returning home from the trenches often faced a different country, one sympathetic to their cause yet distant from their suffering. Barker - who wrote the Regeneration Trilogy novels and won a Booker Prize - tackles this theme and, in the process, yields a picture stark and cold in its depiction of humanity at war.
Three young Britons - Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville - share an artistic passion, at various times for each a source of frustration. Art reminds them of their pre-war existences, a time before fate handed each of them a new canvas on which to paint. For the war, despite its gray and muddy dreariness, splashes its own color on their lives. And Barker depicts it poignantly. If drawing is the explication of the human form, as the art instructor tells his students, then Barker has certainly attained its literary equivalent. Her forte for depicting characters yields an engaging cast.
Wilfred Owen likened the Great War to a foul tornado whirling the width of Europe. A fitting image, for as storms often do, the one that broke in 1914 came on the heels of relative calm. The summer of 1914 was the end of an epoch, close enough to the past to feel the leisurely refulgence of the previous few glorious summers, yet close enough to the future to feel the mounting tension of the Balkan affair. The novel begins in the quiet months before Europe and the world changed. Paul, Elinor and Kit are studying art in London. Those were carefree days. While vestiges of Victorian restraint fell away, young Britons found exhilaration in slackened social standards. Restlessness too, for the world was now theirs.
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