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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Does Life Emulate Art or the Reverse?, Feb 18 2008
Pat Barker takes three shallow English artists and drops them into the turmoil of World War I as a way of capturing the war's full horror. Elinor Brooke shows promise as an art student and wants to pursue painting rather than fulfill the traditional roles of wife and mother. Young men, including Paul Tarrant (a struggling beginner at art school) and Kit Neville (a painter who is beginning to attract notice), are attracted to her as a woman and don't take her artistic future all that seriously (even though they think her work is good).
Prior to the start of the war, Tarrant is trying to decide if he should drop out of school . . . and finds that charms of a married model, Teresa Halliday, who is separated from her husband to be the best part of his life. But being Halliday's lover has its challenges as well.
The war changes everything as pressure is put on men to either join the military to volunteer for noncombatant roles. Neville and Tarrant volunteer to serve in the ambulance corps in Belgium. Tarrant's life there challenges all of his views about his commitment to art and what the role of art is. Through correspondence with Brooke, their relationship develops and we see how the war changes both of them. As Tarrant's and Neville's lives intersect, we see how choices affect the lives we lead. Neville's commitment to his career keeps him from taking the war commitment very seriously. Tarrant finds that the war commitment changes everything.
Brooke finds herself being pressured to play traditional women's roles during the war, and her artistic commitment also protects her from being swallowed up by the war.
The part of the book that rises above the average is where Ms. Barker lets her characters loose in Belgium during the battles. In a sense, the rest of the novel is merely prelude and epilogue. Ms. Barker's writing about the war experience is very fine.
Her antiwar message is simple: Without commitment to civilizing activities and values we will be caught up on the mindless gravity of war and barbarized. Life would be better if it imitated art more often.
I was impressed by her choice of a real character to play a role in the book, Henry Tooks, a surgeon who had become an artist and art teacher. Due to the war, Tooks found a most remarkable way to combine his talents by drawing portraits of how plastic surgery could be used on mutilated soldiers. I suspect that a story about Tooks would have been even more interesting than this one.
I haven't read any of Ms. Barker's other works, but I doubt if she won a Booker Prize for writing at this level. If you haven't read The Regeneration Trilogy, perhaps you would do better to start there. I wish I had.
I thought that her writing was quite good, but her plotting was ponderous. Pretty much everything that happens is predictable. I found myself wondering if I should bother finishing the story after I got the point she wanted to make.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"London and the Front - Out there the war stank of blood and gangrene; back in London, it smelled of new clothes.", Feb 9 2008
In this allegorical reflection on art and war, author Pat Barker centers her novel on the life of young artist Paul Tarrant and his time at London's Slade School of Art. But Barker also brings to life the horrors of World War 1 through Paul's experiences working as an orderly in the Belgian city of Ypres. Ypres foreshadowed how the fighting on the Western Front would play out as the war progressed. The high casualty figures from each participating army were atrociously high as everything and everyone one was drenched in blood and gore as living in trenches would soon come to dominate the stalemate that was the Western Front.
Certainly in the spring of 1914 and carefully ensconced at Slade, Paul never imagined that he would end up working with the military in a field hospital, shielding German bombs and cleaning up the blood of fallen soldiers while also amputating the torn limbs of his English compatriots.
But it is here at Slade that Paul's story begins when he walks out of class one morning after his instructor, real life artist Henry Tonks tells Paul that is work has got "no more bones in it than a sausage," and that he seems to have no grasp of human anatomy at all. Feeling disconsolate to the point of not continuing, Paul becomes convinced that he's not improving as an artist but actually deteriorating from week to week.
Paul doesn't have unlimited money and is constantly haunted by a legacy from his grandmother who feels as though he should be pursuing more manly endeavors. Thus only through the lovely Elinor Brooke, a fellow student can Paul find the support and consolation that he so desires. Elinor is very much a women battling the strictures of her time, forced to accept the reality of her situation, that of a women who is struggling to seek credibility as an artist in her own right.
Paul is well aware of this stir of desire that Elena produces in him and he's somewhat carried away by the air of intimacy that Elinor creates between herself and any man she speaks to. With Elinor all of Paul's disappointments and complexities of the past few months seem to drop away even as they meet up at the smoky Café Royal to talk about their work and ponder on the ramifications of the impending war.
Among the other students is Kit Neville who is just starting to become famous, a circumstance that some people attributed to a talent for painting and others to his talent for self-promotion. Kit has been painting the landscapes of Paul's childhood, the fruit of a trip up north to seek out the same "smoking terraces and looming iron works" that Paul has turned his back on. Kit, however has a crush on Elinor, much to the chagrin of Paul.
But also at the Café Royal is Teresa Haliday, once a Slade model, Teresa hides her cynicism about men and their motives behind a glamorous exterior. She assumes equality with men, a fragile sort of equality, based, ultimately, on sex and Paul senses a capacity for passion in her greater than anything he'd so far experienced. In desperation, Paul drawn to Teresa, meeting for trysts in her basement flat even as Teresa, paranoid, is convinced that her husband is watching over them and prowling around outside at night.
So begins a tantalizing foursome, which suddenly breaks apart with the onset of World War 1. While Teresa suddenly vanishes leaving behind a bitter voice: 'You don't love me, you love Elinor," Elinor stays on in London, drifting into the Bloomsbury literary crowd, while also writing letters to Paul, now stationed on the Western Front. Paul is still attracted to Elinor, and always has been, which makes their separation even harder, but her letters provide the necessary calm and understanding deprived of by the vicious war.
It is in this later half of the novel, mostly written in epistolary form, that Barker is able to document the extraordinary brutality of the Great War with Paul, always the artist, trying desperately to stay grounded in reality, even as all the of the mud, rain, illness and sweat plunges him to a new world where everything stinks: "the creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood and gangrene."
The letters from Paul to Elinor and then from Elinor back to Paul at the front, convey a world fractured on both fronts. She sees the wounded men on Hampstead Heath in their blue uniforms being pushed along the paths in wheelchairs. He sees columns of men in wet, gleaming capes and helmets, the shouting and cries, the explosion of petrol tanks, the crump of shells bursting, the slosh of boots through mud, all smothered, adding to this unreality of shock and fear.
Barker doesn't hesitate to convey the grim realities of war with the convoys of motor ambulances, horse drawn wagons coming back from delivering the rations, columns of men marching to their deaths. Meanwhile, all along the horizon, guns grumble and flicker as Paul with his affable and innocent freckle-faced Quaker friend Lewis are forced to cut men out of their uniforms, the most severely wounded moaning on the edge of consciousness or lying in ominous silence.
Medicine and art are eventually joined together as Paul tries to paint again, renting a beautiful lime washed room, searching for privacy, normality, and his own mind back, and also seeking emotional solace from a war that stinks of blood and gangrene where a generation of innocent young men are being blindly led their deaths. Part love story and part meditation on the high cost of war, Life Class is a beautifully wrought and important novel on how art can serve to help one survive the intolerable. Mike Leonard February 08.
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