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Summary
Summary
From the Booker Prizewinning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, an acknowledged masterpiece of modern fiction,Life Classis an exceptional new novel of artists and lovers caught in the maelstrom of the Great War. It is the spring of 1914 and a group of young students have gathered in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two parts of an intriguing love triangle and, in the first days of war, they turn to each other. As spring turns to summer, Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross and tends to wounded, dying soldiers from the front line. By the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life and love will never be the same for him again. InLife Class,Pat Barker returns to her most renowned subject: the human devastation and psychic damage wrought by World War One on all levels of British society. Her skill in relaying the harrowing experience of modern warfare is matched by the depth of insight she brings to the experience of love and the morality of art in a time of war.Life Classis one of her genuine masterpieces.
Author Notes
Pat Barker's most recent novel is Another World (FSG, 1999). She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1996 Booker Prize. She lives in England.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set initially in 1914 before the start of WWI, Barker's first novel since 2004's Double Vision tells the story of two students at London's Slade School of Fine Art, Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke, along with that of Kit Neville, a promising young painter. Paul begins an affair with Teresa Halliday, a troubled artist's model, and Kit woos Elinor, but both men rush off to the Continent at the outset of hostilities to work with the wounded. The author's unflinching eye for detail and her supple prose create an undeniably powerful narrative, but her skills cannot compensate for a weak plot. What appear to be critical story lines (Paul's affair with Teresa, Kit's painting career) are almost abandoned once Paul and Elinor become lovers. And the book's main theme-war's impact on art and love-pales in comparison with the tragic experiences of those who fight and die in the conflict. Despite riveting passages depicting the waste and horror of WWI, this effort falls short of the standard set by Barker's magisterial Regeneration trilogy, the last of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Barker secured a high literary and popular reputation as the author of the well-regarded Regeneration trilogy of novels (Regeneration, 1991; The Eye in the Door, 1994; The Ghost Road, 1995) about Britain in World War I. As subsequent novels have demonstrated, that marvelous sequence certainly didn't deplete her reserve of talent. Her new novel returns her fans to the Britain of World War I; like the novels of the trilogy, it is about suffering, setbacks, and sacrifice on a personal level, at a time when the national fabric is under considerable stress. The book opens in a London art academy, where we meet the chief characters, who are embroiled in their little battles as artists and lovers. The bigger war soon unavoidably impacts their lives, however, especially as the main protagonist, Paul Tarrant, volunteers for the Red Cross and goes to the front. The point of the novel is the lesson that the war teaches these young men and women: quick, deep personal change is inescapable and probably beneficial in times of dire national change. Some readers may find Barker slow moving; others will appreciate the care she takes in her rich, deliberate character building.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHEN German gunners flattened the city of Ypres in World War I, they destroyed, along with thousands of innocent lives, the famous Cloth Hall, a landmark of medieval Flemish architecture. That ruined masterpiece, as Paul Fussell wrote in "The Great War and Modern Memory," served as an "eloquent emblem of what happens when war collides with art." That same collision is central to Pat Barker's new novel, "Life Class," which follows a group of British artists - loosely based on gifted figures like Paul Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Dora Carrington - from the comfortable confines of the Slade School of Fine Art in London to the carnage of the Western Front. While the novel covers some of the same ground - including battleground - as Barker's superb Regeneration Trilogy, with historical figures again mingling with invented ones and artists substituted for the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, "Life Class" is lighter fare. Concentrating more on the turmoil of love than the trauma of war, it is rendered with the quick hand of a sketch rather than the textured layering of an oil painting. "Life Class" opens with two temper tantrums. Paul Tarrant, a Slade student raised "in the shadow of the ironworks" for whom "Art had always been Somewhere Else," storms out of Henry Tonks's life drawing class. Tonks, a formidable teacher (and a historical figure who trained as a surgeon before becoming an artist), is disappointed with Paul's skilled but emotionally detached sketches of nude women. "I don't get any feeling that they're yours," he tells him. "You seem to have nothing to say." Blowing off steam in Hyde Park, Paul comes across a drunken, disheveled girl being stalked by an older man. "All Paul's long frustration in the life class - a frustration which could never be vented on Professor Tonks ... boiled over into hatred of this man with his florid cheeks and his expensive suit and his silver-topped cane." Stray themes sounded in these opening scenes - the quest for authentic artistic expression, the tensions of social class and erotic triangles based on the rescue of vulnerable women - resonate throughout "Life Class." Paul first falls in love with Teresa Halliday, a hard-luck artist's model, herself victimized by a creepy estranged husband. Then he is drawn to a fellow student, Elinor Brooke, a doctor's daughter, who is partly in love with a successful Slade dropout named Kit Neville, who in turn is attracted to Paul. The upper-middle-class Neville slums in Paul's old neighborhood, introducing into his paintings "the same smoking terraces and looming ironworks that Paul had turned his back on every Sunday, cycling off into the countryside in search of 'Art.'" The ensuing complications among the mismatched lovers - "No, it was impossible. He couldn't still be attracted to Elinor, not now, when all his thoughts were focused on Teresa" - sometimes sound like an episode of "Friends" set in 1914. War interrupts this hothouse vie de boheme. Always the rescuer, Paul, rejected by the army, joins the Belgian Red Cross and is stationed at a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Ypres. Elinor, who will eventually quit the Slade to become a decorator of teapots at Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, drifts into the pacifist Bloomsbury circle - "I've been to tea with Lady Ottoline Morrell!" - where Sassoon, in Barker's "Regeneration," found confirmation for his own disgust with the war. Disguised as a nurse, Elinor travels to Ypres, only to find that Paul has become emotionally involved with a fellow medic. In the aftermath, Neville drunkenly attempts to make Paul understand why he calls Elinor "Our Lady of Triangles." For her, as Neville puts it, "men come in twos. ... she wouldn't fancy either of us if it wasn't for the other." As she did in the Regeneration Trilogy, Barker documents the way the war cut through Britain's genteel propriety, releasing something visceral in British culture and society. But here she also tries to feel her way into the perceptions of visual artists. Elinor, newly arrived in Ypres, rides through cobblestone streets filled with soldiers: "For a time the cab ran along by the side of a canal with tethered barges and tall spindly trees that had begun to strip for the winter, their bright yellow leaves twirling down to lie on the brown, smooth, reflecting surface of the water." Later she watches as "the white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup." Once the shelling starts, however, Barker falls back on stereotyped images - a screaming horse straight out of "Guernica"; boarded-up buildings "like black teeth in a smile." She wants her Bloomsbury-inflected romance to carry both emotional and historical heft. At least twice we hear of artists making a "Faustian pact," sacrificing ordinary happiness for the claims of art. There is much talk of the proper function of art in wartime, "painting while Rome burns." While a subplot follows a London dentist's family that's been ostracized for its German background, for the most part the plotting is too light, too airy. I also kept imagining Emma Thompson playing the tomboy Elinor, just as she played the tomboy Carrington, another, more tragic, lady of triangles. The shelling of Ypres sends Elinor back to London; Paul, meanwhile, finally finishes a picture he's proud of. The painting (perhaps partly based on Stanley Spencer's "Travoys Arriving With Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol, Macedonia") "had an authority that he didn't associate with his stumbling, uncertain, inadequate self." Its subject is an orderly applying hydrogen peroxide to a gangrenous wound: "No ministering angel, this. A white-swaddled mummy intent on causing pain." At this intersection of medicine and art, Barker might have constructed a narrative comparable in emotional and aesthetic complexity to that of William Rivers, the real-life neurologist who treated Siegfried Sassoon in the Regeneration Trilogy. We learn from her acknowledgments that Henry Tonks worked closely with a pioneering plastic surgeon, making drawings "before, during and after surgery" had been performed on the mutilated faces of war victims. Tonks also produced, Barker notes, "a series of 69 portraits of facially mutilated men which are among the most moving images to have come out of any war." Almost none of this disturbing material has made its way into "Life Class," where romance ultimately outweighs both the claims of art and the horrors of war. As they bicker about what "art should be about," we are left wondering whether Elinor and Paul will get back together, not whether either will paint anything enduring. Henry Tonks makes a late appearance, "thinner, gloomier, snappier," merely to express approval of Paul's breakthrough work, along with a warning, "I don't see how you could ever show that anywhere." When will we get Tonks's story? In a sequel, perhaps? Pat Barker's new novel covers some of the same ground including battleground - as her Regeneration Trilogy. Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His new book, "A Summer of Hummingbirds," about writers and artists in Gilded Age America, will be published in April.
Kirkus Review
The Booker Prize-winning British author (Double Vision, 2003, etc.) returns to the subject of World War I, treated so memorably in her celebrated Regeneration trilogy. This is a story of hopeful ambitions and relationships redirected and reshaped by a climate of catastrophic change. Early chapters set in London chart the experiences of Paul Tarrant, in flight from his youth spent in the working-class north and his family's unhappiness, studying at the Slade Gallery, where--a demanding professor harshly implies--Paul will not transform himself into an artist. Parallel disappointments and rejections accumulate quickly. In a scene reminiscent of Dostoevsky, Paul attempts to protect a drunken teenaged girl from a well-dressed older man who appears to be stalking her--and cannot tell whether he succeeds. Paul fails to connect romantically with his virginal classmate Elinor Brooke, and a brief sexual relationship with artist's model Teresa Halliday, the victim of her abusive estranged husband, also goes awry. Then, the War--hitherto a threatening presence rumbling in the background--takes Paul and another Slade classmate, wealthy, supremely confident Kit Neville, to Belgium, where Paul labors as an orderly in a battlefield "hospital" in Ypres, two miles from the front. Exchanges of letters between Paul and Elinor, as well as her harrowing "visit" to Ypres during which she surrenders her closely guarded virginity, and barely escapes a violent bombing attack, render the horrors of combat with (Barker's trademark) meticulously researched detail and piercing clarity. Secondary characters' experiences likewise amplify into lucid microcosms of the global cataclysm that shadows every individual life. And Barker pulls strings expertly, leading to a heart-wrenching anti-resolution perfectly expressed by Elinor's guilty, self-lacerating rejection of Paul's commitment to serve and sacrifice. Mature, unsentimental and searching. One of this excellent writer's finest books. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1914 Britain, three students discover love at a life-drawing class and war when they volunteer for the Red Cross at the outbreak of hostilities. With a reading group guide. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 They'd been drawing for over half an hour. There was no sound except for the slurring of pencils on Michelet paper or the barely perceptible squeak of charcoal. At the center of the circle of students, close to the dais, a stove cast a barred red light onto the floor. The smell of burning coke mingled with other smells: sweat, hot cloth, cigar and tobacco smoke. Now and again you could hear the soft pop of lips inhaling and another plume of blue smoke would rise to join the pall that hung over the whole room. Nobody spoke. You were not allowed to talk in the life class. In the Antiques Room, where they spent the mornings copying from casts of Classical and Renaissance sculpture, talking was permitted, and the students--a few of the women, in particular--chattered nonstop. Here, apart from the naked woman on the dais, the atmosphere was not unlike a men's club. The women students had their own separate life class somewhere on the lower floor. Even the Slade, scandalously modern in most respects, segregated the sexes when the naked human body was on display. Paul Tarrant, sitting on the back row, as far away from the stove as he could get, coughed discreetly into his handkerchief. He was still struggling to throw off the bronchitis that had plagued him all winter and the fumes irritated his lungs. He'd finished his drawing, or at least he'd reached the point where he knew that further work would only make matters worse. He leaned back and contemplated the page. Not one of his better efforts. He knew, without turning to look, that Professor Tonks had entered the room. It was always like this with Tonks, the quiet entry. He seemed to insinuate himself into the room. You knew he'd arrived only when you saw the students sitting opposite straighten their shoulders or bend more anxiously over their drawings. Tonks was a dark planet whose presence could be deduced only by a deviation in the orbit of other bodies. Paul risked a sidelong glance. Tonks, bent at the shoulders like a butcher's hook, was scrutinizing a student's drawing. He said something, too low to be heard. The student mumbled a reply and Tonks moved on. Another student, then another. He was working his way along the back row, passing quickly from drawing to drawing. Sugden brought him to a halt. Sugden was hopeless, among the worst in the class. Tonks always spent more time on the weaker students, which indicated a kindly disposition, perhaps, or would have done had he not left so many of them in tatters. So far his progress had been quiet, but now suddenly he raised his voice. "For God's sake, man, look at that arm. It's got no more bones in it than a sausage. Your pencil's blunt, your easel's wobbly, you're working in your own light, and you seem to have no grasp of human anatomy at all. What is the point?" Many of Tonks's strictures related to the students' ignorance of anatomy. "Is it a blancmange?" had been one of his comments on Paul's early efforts. Tonks had trained as a surgeon and taught anatomy to medical students before Professor Browne invited him to join the staff at the Slade. His eye, honed in the dissecting room and the theater, detected every failure to convey what lay beneath the skin. "Look for the line," he would say again and again. "Drawing is an explication of the form." It was one of the catchphrases Slade students sometimes chanted to each other. Along with: "I thy God am a jealous God. Thou shalt have none other Tonks but me." There was no getting round Tonks's opinion of your work. Tonks was the Slade. Paul looked at his drawing. If he'd been dissatisfied before he was dismayed now. As Tonks drew closer, his drawing became mysteriously weaker. Not only had he failed to "explicate the form," but he'd also tried to cover up the failure with all the techniques he'd learned before coming to the Slade: shading, cross-hatching, variations in tone, even, now and then, a little discreet smudging of the line. In the process, he'd produced the kind of drawing that at school--and even, later, in night classes--had evoked oohs and ahs of admiration. Once, not so long ago, he'd have been pleased with this work; now, he saw its deficiencies only too clearly. Not only was the drawing bad, it was bad in exactly the way Tonks most despised. More than just a failure, it was a dishonest failure. He took a deep breath. A second later Tonks's shadow fell across the page, though he immediately moved a little to one side so that the full awfulness could be revealed. A long pause. Then he said conversationally, as if he were really interested in the answer, "Is that really the best you can do?" "Yes." "Then why do it?" Why indeed? Paul made no reply and after a moment Tonks moved on. At last, from somewhere, a rush of anger. "If I knew how to draw I wouldn't need to be here at all, would I?" He'd shouted, though he hadn't meant to. All around people were turning to stare at him. Without giving Tonks a chance to reply, he threw down his pencil and walked out. The corridor, empty between classes, stretched ahead of him. Its walls seemed to throb with his anger. The heat of it kept him going all the way to the main entrance and out into the quad. There he stopped and looked around him. What was he doing, storming out like that in the middle of a session? It was asking for trouble. And yet he knew he couldn't go back. Students were sitting in small circles on the grass, laughing and talking, but they were mainly medical students enjoying a break between lectures, and there was nobody he knew. He threaded his way between the groups and out through the iron gates into Gower Street. At first he started to walk towards Russell Square, the nearest green space, but that wasn't far enough. He needed to get right away, to think about his future in unfamiliar surroundings, because although, in one sense, his spat with Tonks had been relatively trivial, he felt that it marked a crisis in his career. If you could call it a career. * He'd been walking round and round the lake for over an hour. His shadow, hardly visible when he first entered the park, now trotted at his heels like a stunted child. Round and round the problem went: no talent, wasting my time, better leave now and get a job. Or would it be more sensible to wait till the end of the year? He'd always intended to spend two years at the Slade and it seemed a bit feeble to leave before the first year was over, but then what was the point of continuing when his work not only failed to improve but actually seemed to deteriorate from week to week? It wasn't as if he had unlimited money. He had a legacy from his grandmother, a slum landlord of quite astonishing rapacity who, by skimping on repairs and bringing up her large family on bread and scrape, had salted away a great deal of money in the box under her bed. What would her advice have been? -- Have nowt to do with nancy-boy stuff like art, there's no money in that, and if you've got tangled up in it, lad, get out as fast as you can. She'd been horrified when he went to work as an orderly in a hospital; real men earned their living by their own sweat and blood. This was getting him nowhere. He found a bench and sat down, feeling the heat heavy on his shoulder blades. Craning his neck, he looked up at the tops of the trees, dark against the pulsing sun. Everything was flooded in lemony light. After a while he straightened up and looked about him, and it was then that he became aware of the girl on the other side of the lake. A young girl, still with the childish blondeness that rarely survives into adult life, was wandering along the waterside. She was about fifteen, dressed in the shabby, respectable clothes of a maid, her only ornament a bunch of purple velvet violets pinned to the crown of her black straw hat. Sent into service, he guessed, away from her own overcrowded home. Girls that age are not easily accommodated in two-bedroomed houses, parents needing privacy, adolescent brothers curious, younger children sleeping four to a bed. This would be her afternoon off. He tracked her with his eyes. A few paces further on she stopped, standing at the water's edge looking down into the depths. Thinking they were going to be fed, swans, geese, and ducks set off towards her from all parts of the lake, so that the slim, gray figure quickly became the focal point of thirty or more converging lines. There was something odd about her and at first he couldn't think what it was, but then he noticed that the buttons on her blouse had been done up in the wrong sequence. There was a glimpse of what might have been bare flesh between the edge of her blouse and her skirt. He kept expecting her to pull her shawl more closely round her or turn away and put herself to rights. But she did neither. Instead she stumbled a few feet further along, then stopped again, the shadows of rippling water playing over her face and neck. She was swaying on her feet. At first he thought nothing of it, but then it happened again, and again. It came to him in a flash. Incredibly, this fresh-faced, innocent-looking girl was drunk. He looked up and down the path to see if she was alone and there, about twenty yards behind, stood a portly, middle-aged man watching her. Ah, authority. Probably the man was her employer--he was too well-dressed to be her father--but then, if he had a legitimate reason to be interested in her, why did he not approach and take control of the situation? Instead of strolling along at that loitering, predatory pace, his eyes fixed on her back. No, he was nothing to do with her--unless of course he was the man responsible for her condition. That, or he'd noticed the state she was in and recognized easy pickings when he saw them. Bastard. All Paul's long frustration in the life class--a frustration which could never be vented on Professor Tonks because he respected the man too much--boiled over into hatred of this man with his florid cheeks and his expensive suit and his silver-topped cane. He jumped up and began striding along the path, meaning to cut them off before they reached the gate. The sun, past its height, had begun to throw long bluish shadows across the grass. Paul's heels rang out on the pavement as he half walked, half ran round the head of the lake. He felt vigorous, clear. All the disappointments and complexities of the past few months had dropped away. He drew level with the girl, who had once more paused and was gazing out over the lake. A few yards away from her the geese were beginning to come ashore. Big, webbed yellow feet made puddles of wet on the dusty path as they lurched towards her, open beaks hissing. Startled, she took off her shawl and flapped it at them until at last, honking and hissing, they flopped, one by one, into the water again. Now that Paul was closer he could see that her hair had slipped loose from the pins at the nape of her neck and straggled down her back. The blouse was badly torn, it must have been ripped off her back. Looking down, he saw that only one foot had a stocking on; the other was thrust bare into a down-at-heel shoe. He looked at the slim, naked ankle and felt a tweak of lust that hardly broke the surface of his consciousness before it was transmuted into anger. Who had done this to her? She was such a child. He was afraid to startle her by speaking to her and, anyway, she might well misconstrue his intentions. The middle-aged man had stopped a few yards away and was gazing at him with obvious resentment. Paul turned to stare at him. Medium height, heavily built, bulky about the shoulders and chest, but a lot of that was flab. His trouser buttons strained to accommodate his postprandial belly. His eyes kept sliding away from Paul to the girl and back again. At last he stepped to one side, ostentatiously allowing Paul plenty of room to pass. Paul held his ground. Meanwhile, the girl tried to move on, but staggered and almost fell. She seemed disorientated now and after standing for a moment simply flopped down on the path. With a glance at Paul the man moved towards her. Paul stepped forward to cut him off. "What do you want?" the man said. A Yorkshire accent? "Are you responsible for this?" "What?" "This." "I never saw her before in my life." Grayish-green eyes, the color of infected phlegm. "I was going to put her in a cab and send her back to her family." " 'Course you were." "Do you have a better idea?" "We could take her to the police station." "Oh, I doubt if she'd thank you for that." "Let's ask her, shall we?" The man leaned forward in a fug of port-wine breath. "Look, piss off, will you? I saw her first." "I'm not going anywhere." "It's not your business." A hiss the geese would have been proud of. "For God's sake, look at her. Don't you think you're closing the stable door after the horse's bolted?" "And a slice off a cut cake won't be missed. What a fund of homely northern wisdom you are." Gooseberry-green eyes swelled to bursting. A purpling of pendulous cheeks, then Paul caught a flash of silver from the upraised cane. He raised his arm to break the blow and pain jolted from his forearm into his shoulder. Now he had his excuse, his legitimate reason. He twisted the cane out of the other's hand and brought it crashing down onto his shoulders, once, twice, three times, and then he lost count. There was no reason ever to stop, he'd never felt such joy, strength seemed to flow into him from the sky. But a minute later, as the man turned away, presenting only his bowed shoulders to the blows, Paul started to recover himself. In a final burst of exhilaration, he sent the cane whirling in a broad arc over the lake, its silver knob flashing in the sun. "Fetch!" he shouted, feeling his spit fly. "Go on, boy, fetch!" The cane plopped and sank. Concentric rings of ripples laced with foam spread out over the surface of the water. Its owner turned to face Paul, goosegog eyes red veined with rage. "Do you know how much that cost?" "More than the girl, I'll bet." Excerpted from Life Class: A Novel by Pat Barker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
