Life Class

As usual, on finishing a Pat Barker novel, I am left with a longing to stay with the characters she has created for just a little longer, please. Her prose is so rich in descriptors, feelings, odors, colors, asides, and indsides, that one is given a whole world to mentally inhabit. Her special writing talent gives us a prose that flows so easily through one's mind that the effort of reading is almost unnoticeable. And her special topics: war and the human heart, are dealt with so thoroughly and profoundly that one comes away from the novel grateful for the experience and the enlightenment, joyful to be alive and regretting any waste of our life.

For me, she remains a fascinating author. This is my fourth read of P B. These were interesting characters set in a most interesting time. There's enough there to know them, but not well; unless, as with Hemingway, the reader works hard to fill in the blanks. The protagonist, for example, is an ambiguous hero. But that's the fun of reading Barker, who's most efficient with the language. The epistolary sections were essential to convey how distance from battle didn't lessen the pain of war. It might have been her nod to the beginnings of the English Novel. Her style is particularly effective in letters to move the plot along. As to the plot, yeah, it isn't the strength of this book. But it isn't a weakness either. She takes one down enough blind alleys to hold one's interest. Again, I think the reader is supposed to imagine the outcome in details she implies. There is a touch of immaturity in all the major characters asking for resolution. Yet, that immaturity remains at the finish of the book, if not the end of the story. About the war--- I don't think this book is anti-war. Perhaps it is anti the romance of war. The "hero" seems to have reconciled himself to the need for his service and the good which will result from it, likely inspired by the fate of his Quaker comrade near arms (and legs). As to art and war, I suppose the story could have been about any vocation/avocation, but it was an interesting angle. The feelings put to paper in paint are sad by dint of what the eyes of the artists saw; appropriately sad, not heroic, not romantic. Pat Barker, it seems, rejects the Manichean view of conflict. This work adds to that supposition. It's a very good read that begs you to doubt your conclusions about that which you have read, days after you've put the book in your library of books you're convinced you understand.

Pat Barker is to the Great War what Homer is to the Trojan War. She continues, again and again, to mine it for the most moving, profound, wise stories imaginable. Life Class is in places every bit as good as Regeneration -- which means it is remarkable. There are passages and pages that take your breath away. It's the mark of genius that you have no idea how anybody is able to create what they have. Forget Atonement; this book is the real thing.

LIFE CLASS begins with a glimpse over the shoulder of Paul Tarrant, a student at the famous London art school, the Slade. He is struggling to draw a nude model (you know it's nearly 100 years ago because the women and men have separate sessions), awash in feelings familiar to anybody who attempts art: self-doubt, frustration and a looming fear of professorial comments that nail a wrongness of proportion or clumsiness of line. The professor in this instance is Henry Tonks, who was a real person --- a doctor-turned-artist who, in the wake of World War I, worked with a plastic surgeon to document the repair of soldiers' mutilated faces. Here again is The Great War, the scene of Pat Barker's deservedly famous Regeneration trilogy (one of the volumes won the Man Booker Prize), and here too is her penchant for mixing actual and invented individuals. Other recognizable characters include the extravagant society hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell and the artist Augustus John. But in LIFE CLASS she focuses on the nexus between war and art, and brings an artist's eye to her descriptions of a midnight picnic ("In the moonlight...the poppies looked black and the corn was silver") or the devastation at the Belgian front, where "the land on either side of the road is ruined --- pockmarked, blighted, craters filled with foul water, splintered trees, hedges and fields gouged out...." Barker hadn't planned to go back to World War I, she told the (British) Sunday Times, but she was stirred by the artists of that period (if you saw the film Carrington, you may remember Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington's stormy suitor before she settled on Lytton Strachey as the love of her life). There may have been a proper gender division in life-drawing classes, but outside the studio these iconoclastic circles were known for sexual as well as aesthetic rebellion, and the first part of LIFE CLASS --- while the war is still looming --- is very much occupied with love triangles. Paul has a brief, torrid affair with Teresa Halliday, an artist's model, and is stalked by her abusive husband. He is more profoundly drawn, however, to a fellow student named Elinor Brooke, who apparently wishes to be no more than friends with him or his chief rival, Kit Neville, a privileged chap whose canvases, ironically, focus on scenes of urban industrial life that are straight out of Paul's working-class background. Ah, yes --- class. It stretches through the book like a high-tension wire. Paul's grandmother, an East End slumlord, left him enough money to go to the Slade; becoming an artist is, for him, a way of getting out of "the shadow of the ironworks that gobbled men up at the start of a shift and regurgitated them twelve hours later fit for nothing but booze and sleep." In seeing Teresa he is returning to his "common" origins; with Elinor and Neville he is transgressing them. Entering the Café Royal, a student hangout that isn't exactly Starbucks, he comments on how "sleek and glossy" the patrons a

Reading Life Class, a line from Henri Nouwen kept running through my head: "You can get straight A's in school and still flunk life." Or, in loyalty to the title of Pat Barker's wonderful new novel, perhaps this is more appropriate: "You can do well in the schoolroom, but the real proof of the pudding is how well you do in life class." The lead characters in Barker's novel, whom we meet on the eve of World War I, are all deeply wounded in one way or another: Neville, the bullied boy who grows up to be a bullying man; Teresa, the femme fatale who evokes a destructive passion in her lovers; Elinor, obsessively using her art as a safe harbor from the world; and Paul, the protagonist, so traumatized in his boyhood by the insanity, physical abuse, and suicide of his mother that intimacy is difficult for him. At the novel's outset, each of these characters is associated with the Slade school of art in London (Teresa is a model, the rest are students). They live in the safe bubble of the academy, and judge themselves and one another according to its relatively untroublesome standards. But all of them, as the novel unfolds, are propelled by the outbreak of the war into the much more challenging (and unforgiving) school of life. The upheaval of their world, the demolition of their comfortably reassuring pre-war conventions, offers them ample opportunity to face their own wounds, recognize just how their personal suffering influences their actions and relationships, and do something to heal. This is the test that they--and all humans--must pass or flunk. At novel's end, though, only Paul--a failed student in Slade's classrooms--passes. When war erupts, both he and Neville volunteer as medical orderlies and ambulance drivers. Neville, true to form, manages to avoid danger, but returns to London society with a portmanteau of paintings that are all the rage. Paul, who'd been told by his art professor that he'd never be a decent artist until he felt deeply, is taught by the war to do precisely that. The horrible suffering of the soldiers he nurses, the violent death of his best friend, his own wounding from a fronhtline shelling, force him past the emotional frozenness that fell on him at his mother's suicide. His paintings take on a new vitality, but also a new terribleness. Teresa disappears in the second half of the novel, the implication being that she's so ill-prepared for the school of life that her story is too uninterestingly static to continue. We do know, however, that she continues to be a successful artist's model. Elinor submerges herself more and more deeply into her art, refusing to think about the war, much less allow it to influence her painting. She prefers to live in the pristine and abstract world of the "artiste," symbolized in the novel by her becoming a part of the Bloomsburg set. At novel's end, she's working on a pastoral landscape that's as far removed from what's going on at the front--and from what Paul's