With her new novel, Life Class, Pat Barker returns to the subject of World War I - a subject that earned her immense acclaim in the 1990s with her Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road), an artful improvisation on the lives of the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and their compatriots, which unfurled into a fierce meditation on the horrors of war and its psychological aftermath.
After several intriguing but lumpy novels set in the present or near-present, it becomes clear to the reader that World War I resonates with Barker with special force, for Life Class possesses the organic power and narrative sweep that her recent books with more contemporary settings lack.
Perhaps it's that Barker's tactile ability to conjure the fetid horror of the trenches and the field hospitals has little applicable use in describing daily life in modern-day Britain. Perhaps it's that her narrative abilities are spurred by the sort of galvanic changes ushered in by the Great War - a social and cultural earthquake that helped midwife an era of modernism and irony and doubt. Perhaps it's that historical research (more than a dozen works are listed as source material at the end of this volume) and the use of historical characters somehow lend ballast and gravitational weight to her imaginings.
In any case, Life Class represents her best work since The Ghost Road, for which she received the 1995 Booker Prize.
The three central characters in Life Class are students at the Slade School of Art in London, studying under the tutelage of the famous Henry Tonks. Elinor, the charismatic center of the love triangle, seems loosely based on Dora Carrington, the talented painter who would become a Bloomsbury acolyte. Her suitor Neville seems loosely based on Christopher Nevinson, an art student who served with the medical corps and who later became known for his paintings of the war. Elinor's other suitor, Paul, in contrast, seems more like a full-blown fictional creation - a sort of Everyman, like Billy Prior in the Regeneration novels, representative of the many Englishmen of his generation who found their lives and expectations turned upside down by the Great War.
When we first meet these three young artists, war is still just a distant rumor on the Continent, and they and their fellow students are pursuing a bohemian life in London. There are lots of late nights out, lots of flirting and romantic intrigue, lots of ruminating about art and aesthetics and the meaning of Beauty and Truth. Paul has a brief affair with a model named Teresa and an unpleasant encounter with her estranged husband, who has been stalking her.
After Teresa leaves town, Paul finds himself increasingly drawn to her friend Elinor, one of the Slade's more gifted students, who is being pursued by Neville, a former Slade student who has started to establish a reputation as an up-and-coming painter in London. The three hang out together as friends, but Paul and Neville vie for Elinor's attentions. Neville worries that Paul might have more in common with Elinor than he does.
Paul worries that Elinor won't sleep with him and that he might not have enough talent to make it as an artist. And Elinor worries that all the independence she's established in London as a woman and an artist count for nothing with her relatives, who regard painting as little but a pleasant hobby.
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