Life Class [Paperback]

Paul Tarrant is a student at art college in London. Struggling to impress his tutors he is wracked by self doubt. He falls in with the seemingly more talented Kit and Elinor. Through them he meets and starts an affair with the myserious Theresa, but is increasingly drawn to Elinor who is in turn resisting the attentions of Kit.

This complex but essentially shallow menage a quatre is blown apart by the first world war, as both Kit and Paul go to the front while Elinor fights to avoid any involvement in hostilities despite the impact on her family.

Paul and Elinor's relationship was deepening as war begun, and is consumated as she visits him in Belgium. However even as they are joined, their relationship is cracking apart as his horrific experiences as a medical orderly and ambulance driver and her detrmination to shut herslf away from the conflict drive them in different directions.

As ever with Pat Barker, Life Class is supremely readable. Her descriptions of place are as evocative as ever and her ability to create sexual tension remains strong.

The book also has some interesting things to say about the place of art in the world, especially at times of great turmoil. It is a valid exploration of differing experiences and circumstances can destroy relationships.

However at the end I just felt a bit disatisfied at the thinness of the story, the essential unpleasant shallowness of some of the main characters (Elinor in particular) and the rather threadbare narrative.

Its a good book, and well worth reading, but not in the same class as the Regeneration trilogy.

I was excited to learn of a new Pat Barker novel set during World War One, a subject she writes about so movingly. Unfortunately, I found "Life Class" only half-great, and the main problem was that I simply didn't care enough about the characters. Barker's extraordinary protrayal of both fictional and real-life characters in the "Regeneration" trilogy was one of the series' undoubted high-points, but it is sadly not replicated in this novel, where the characters just seem too shallow to warrant the reader's empathy. Most of the time they seem, quite frankly, rather annoying.

On the plus side, "Life Class" contains some astonishingly good writing - Barker's wonderful command of language and her ability to paint vivid scenes with a few words remain undiminished. As I read the book, I suspected that the best work would come in the scenes at the Front, and this proved to be the case. Barker's stark conjuring of a hellish world where violence and death are the norm is handled with great elan. It is in these chapters where she comes closest to the whole point of the novel, which is ordinary young people thrust into extraordinary historical circumstances.

So, I found the opening and closing episodes of this novel not as gripping as they might have been, but it is still worth reading if just for Barker's marvellous writing style and her evergreen respect and compassion for that sad, haunting "Lost Generation".

Pat Barker's sensitive exploration of the devastating effects of The Great War on a group of artists from the Slade School of Art complements her similar exploration of the Great War from the point of view of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in her Regeneration Trilogy, for which she won the 1995 Booker Prize. Examining the lives of art students Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke, and Kit Neville as they learn their craft, celebrate life by partying in the days leading up to the war, and eventually make life-altering decisions when war breaks out, Barker creates three worlds, the Before, During, and After of the war.

The superficiality of life Before, the horrors of During, and the disillusionment of After develop here through the interactions of these three characters with each other as the world around them changes--war as a Life Class. When Germany invades Russia and advances on France, Neville and Paul volunteer to drive ambulances for the Belgian Red Cross, and when Richard Lewis, a Quaker recruit becomes Paul's unexpected roommate in Ypres, Paul finds a studio in town where he can draw, and gain a little privacy. Lewis is as appalled as Paul is by the fact that there is no hospital, just a series of huts built around a goods yard, where doctors and nurses have no anesthetics, medications, or disinfectant, and where men lie on straw mats.

When Elinor naively decides to visit Paul, she arrives in Ypres only to have a sudden bombardment send her scurrying back home. In her first letter to Paul after her return home, she urges Paul to take a leave and return to England. "It would be lovely...to go for a meal or [have] toasted crumpets by the fire."

Barker's imagery is vibrant and affecting, and her ability to show the reactions of callow young people to the horrors they see is memorable. Because she shows the same characters at three stages of their lives from 1914 through the war, the reader shares their changes and, in most cases, growth. The limitation of the book, however, may be that some readers will not care about the main characters as much as they want to, simply because the characters are so shallow and so young. The lives they lead in England are superficial lives, and the horrors of Ypres are so horrific that in many ways the young characters do not seem to comprehend them fully. Compartmentalizing is one thing, necessary for survival, but the long-term postwar effects on the characters who return are not examined fully, and those effects might have been the bigger story here. Mary Whipple