LIFE CLASS
By Pat Barker
Hamish Hamilton, 247 pages, $35
Pat Barker's acclaimed trilogy of the Great War starts in 1917, with the battle for the mind and soul of British poet Siegfried Sassoon in Regeneration, covers the paranoia against pacifists and homosexuals in Britain during Germany's nearly successful spring 1918 offensive in The Eye and the Door, and details the closing months of the war in The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize in 1995.
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By the time of Regeneration, the war has already become the senseless slaughter for which it is remembered. Sassoon's "madness" in giving voice to dissenting thoughts is actually the sanity of a society beginning to realize to what extent it has sleep-marched into slaughter.
In Life Class, Barker auspiciously returns to the war, but to the beginning, before the calamity, when other outcomes seem possible. Fully half the novel takes place before a shot is fired, and for most of that time the brewing conflict in Europe is not on anyone's mind. The main characters are all young artists associated with the storied Slade School. Like art-school types in any generation, they are wrestling with troubling questions about art and their own abilities while stumbling through the tangled undergrowth of love in their early twenties. In a telling scene, the beautiful Elinor takes her two suitors, Paul and Neville, to a country church, where the three young artists examine a newly restored Doom, a portrayal of Christ overseeing the end of the world. The scene includes wormlike sinners and men like "albino tadpoles" headed for the Abyss.
Paul, who has had his confidence severely shaken by the imposing Professor Henry Tonks, observes that the Doom's artist didn't have a clue about the realistic anatomy Tonks so reveres. Neville, a recent graduate who is already starting to make a name for himself, remarks that the masterpiece is "not relevant to the modern world. You can't learn anything from this."
What they don't realize, of course, is that the Doom is about to become far more relevant than they can possible imagine.
Neville is the unsuitable suitor for Elinor. In a moment of privacy, he makes his move and begins kissing her. "He was aware of a coldness, no more than virginity perhaps, but it was a barrier he had to break through. He shut his eyes. Nothing now except his strong muscular tongue threshing against hers, though she was pulling away."
It's a brilliant description, typical of Barker's ability to succinctly capture a moment and the characters trapped in it. How much more do we need to know of Neville, the bully with the threshing tongue? He will never get the fiercely independent Elinor, no matter how successful his career.
Yet Paul, in the beginning, looks not likely to get her either when he is distracted by a troubled older woman, and the elusive Elinor seems to arrange her men in pairs so that triumph and disaster can never be too far separated.
The prewar section builds toward a beautifully subtle scene in which Elinor wears the wrong dress to dinner. The black low-cut ball gown, borrowed from her elder sister, gives off all the wrong signals. "She'd thought she was doing something rather clever, turning herself into a parody of a young lady dressed for the marriage market, but it hadn't turned out like that. She'd slipped into being the person the dress dictated, and now she was going to have to pay, in hours and hours of embarrassment."
Marriage is the last thing she wants, since it will almost certainly ruin her chances of a serious career. Yet now both men are even more taken with her than ever.
And then comes the war, as we know it must. In so carefully laying the groundwork of these characters' lives, Barker is emphatically and rather heroically trying to balance out the story. For the war is a bully, as Elinor comes to reflect near the end of the novel. It makes everything else seem insignificant. All that happens in the "civilian" part of the novel happens again in the war, but on a different scale, so that we almost forget the earlier scenes. What are the black dress and inviting two men to the country on the same weekend compared to Elinor's extraordinary trip to embattled Ypres in the early days of the war, where Paul has rented a room for them and Neville lurks in the background, stationed somewhere not far away? What is Paul's early beating at the hands of a jealous husband compared with German bombs wreaking havoc on the ambulance convoy in which Paul is driving?
The war does take over this novel, as it comes to dominate the lives of the characters, but Barker's is a disciplined account. Rather than bringing the reader through Paul's tumultuous introduction to life as a medical orderly close to the front lines, for example, she jumps the story ahead and has Paul guiding another green recruit, the Quaker boy Lewis, as he is first confronted with scenes of gushing wounds and mangled body parts. Paul has already learned to sleepwalk through the horror.
The details that Barker gives us are raw and powerful enough, but in telling us the story this way, through Paul's already seasoned eye - and then in shifting the narrative in large part to letters between Paul and Elinor - she is fighting to keep a balance in her narrative between the competing realities of civilian and front-line experiences of the war.
Barker keeps her hard focus on our two young artists who become lovers, one of whom is engulfed by the war and the other who shuns it. If Paul in the beginning is a dull talent with nothing to say in his art, the blast furnace of the war fires him, and he begins to paint with ferocity the horror he sees. If Elinor in the beginning is the prize-winning young thing with a knack for depicting what others will like, she becomes a formidably disciplined painter with a considerable ability to ignore the bullying war, to work all day without eating, to choose the reality she will examine and depict.
Yet the war grinds on. By the end of the story, we are still less than a year into the conflict, the Germans have not even started using gas, but our young lovers have made their choices and it feels as though they have lived lifetimes. How will their art serve them?
Either way, whether they shun or embrace the war, it appears as though their art will deepen. Paul realizes he has made a Faustian bargain: The horror he has witnessed empowers his painting, but his work may never sell, and there is the small matter of his soul.
Elinor's choice seems less cursed. Ironically, she is celebrated around London in certain circles for her daring little trip to Ypres while her lover, and so many others, endures so much more without recognition. Her disciplined indifference to the war might well be seen as heroic once it is all over, but it is still difficult to credit fully the artist who shuts her eyes to the monumental catastrophe unfolding around her.
When Elinor and Paul are at last reunited, these stark differences in their approach to art, and the war, stand between them like the Channel cutting off England from the carnage on the other side. Pat Barker has created another moving, chilling, deeply thoughtful book about the Doom our grandparents faced not so very long ago, the questions about which remain so pertinent, and the aftershocks of which still unsteady the Earth beneath our feet.
Alan Cumyn is the author of two novels about an artist in the Great War, The Sojourn and The Famished Lover.
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