Life Class by Pat Barker (Book Review by Jodie Baker)
Life Class
by Pat Barker
Buy from Amazon>>
Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road was recently nominated for the Best of the Booker, a contest to find the absolute pinnacle of previous Booker winners. The Eye in the Door series of which The Ghost Road is the final book, explores the themes of war and sexuality in a supremely eloquent way. In Barker’s trilogy the civilians forced into battle by the First World War are malformed into broken and distressed pieces. Those of Barker’s characters who return from the front still able to function have a desperate need unleashed in them to express their own desires, causing them to try to ignore all the social conformity expected of them. This passionate series certainly deserved to be included in the Best of Booker shortlist.
In her most recent book Life Class Barker returns to the same time period and themes but from a significantly different angle. The main characters Paul, Kit and Elinor are dragged from the world of art into the war, as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were in the previous trilogy, but this time the visual arts are concentrated on rather than literature. In The Ghost Road the majority of characters are civilians transformed into soldiers, Life Class features civilians who participate in the war as ambulance drivers and hospital workers. These slight shifts in focus prevent a similar situation and characters with familiar attitudes from seeming stale.
Paul and Elinor are first shown as students at the prestigious Slade art school. Paul is struggling to improve and impress his drawing master, Elinor has won some prizes and is successful, although only in a “schoolgirl sort of way” as she puts it. They are all seeking approval and some kind of cataclysm to transform their artwork into a source of certainty and pride. For Paul the war eventually provides this change, as it did for Sassoon’s poetry. For Elinor the war is abhorrent and she struggles to achieve artistically without using it as a basis for her paintings. Through these two characters we see Barker explore more separately what she conveyed in Regeneration through Sassoon’s conflicted attempts at pacifism. These two differing attitudes affect their painting. Elinor sees war as a subject that must be excluded from art as it does not fit with her idea of beauty while Paul wearily feels that war can not be kept out of art. Although when he is in a fevered state he becomes afraid of his wartime art, he also expresses quiet pride in it.
Elinor is the kind of woman that men revolve around; beautiful, talented and distant she is a fascinating character for readers to follow. Although Elinor is allowed her own voice in the novel she still never fully discloses her core motivations and internal thoughts. She appears unsure of much in life, a quality that makes her a realistic character. As the war becomes all consuming in the lives of those around her she fights to keep it from her life but the reader can never be sure why she is attempting to ignore the war. She makes many odd, illogical decisions in the eyes of her peers and in the eyes of the readers. Readers may marvel when a woman so opposed to knowing about the war journeys to a war hospital to see the man she loves at work. That she would involve herself with someone so directly affected by the war in the first place seems anomalous. Do all characters have to make logical, sensible decisions to be likeable no matter what situation they are in? Elinor’s confusion and inabilities seems entirely appropriate for a woman coming of age in such a changeable period of history
The shallowness of the characters in the pre-war portion of the novel and their apparent minimal reactions during wartime seem to be of some concern to readers. The reason why Barker’s characters work so well is that they transcend modern certainties about how people acted before and during the war. Before the war intrudes the characters are young, artistic, attractive and British, a certain amount of shallow feeling is bound to result from this position of privilege. As for the characters during war it is refreshing to see people who do not conform to the idea that this generation were ordinary saints who capably dealt with the worst. It is easy to forget that for civilians drafted into the First World War contributing was not their purpose or their job but rather an interruption to their lives; civilians had objectives and dreams separate to the war. Including characters who continue to cherish and pursue their real ambitions despite feeling hopeless at doing so successfully avoids portraying the period with saccharine cliché.
Barker refuses to keep her characters within the boundaries of acceptability. In the Eye in the Door trilogy most of her characters are busy cracking open their society’s ideas about sexuality, cowardice and class. Barker has again created personalities that challenge the normal ideas of their time and encourage readers to think of people in wartime as part of humanity, rather than a separate, noble breed.
