Dec 26, 2012 by Washington Post book reviewers Pat Barker
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385524360
302 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Joanna Scutts, who is associate editor of PEN America and teaches writing at NYU's Gallatin School.
Since "Regeneration" in 1991, which reimagined the lives of the war poets, Pat Barker's most powerful novels have charted the psychic and social reverberations of World War I. In "Toby's Room," the sequel to "Life Class" (2007), Barker revisits the world in which she's most at home: one of hats, horses and handwritten letters, in which a woman could still shock her family by cutting her hair short and enrolling at art school - and into which the war arrives as a slow cataclysm, described without sentiment or grandiosity.
The novel begins in 1912 as the beautiful and talented Elinor Brooke - loosely based on the Bloomsbury painter Dora Carrington - struggles to resist marriage and to be taken seriously as an artist. During a stifling weekend at her childhood home, Elinor suffers two destabilizing shocks: Her brother, Toby, her only respite in a family hostile to her artistic ambition, suddenly violates their close relationship; immediately afterwards, she learns that Toby was a twin, whose female sibling died in the womb. The dual explosion of sex and death within the superficially tranquil home is a familiar theme for Barker, in whose novels the past lays detonating charges along the paths of characters' lives.
Feeling "vulnerable; an animal leaving a trail of blood behind in the snow," Elinor flees back to her studies at London's Slade School of Art. There she meets Paul Tarrant, the central character in "Life Class." She realizes that he hasn't yet adjusted to his new, liberated environment: "She'd noticed before how surprised men were when girls spoke directly or behaved confidently. Almost as if they were so used to simpering and giggling they didn't know how to react." Yet the gender divisions that Elinor wants to break down are so heavily reinforced during the war that she and Paul cannot remain allies. When Paul is injured, the gulf between their experiences strikes her with full force: "And now there he is in hospital with a lump of shrapnel in his leg ... and here I sit in a cozy little bedroom in a borrowed nightie, and ... And none of it is my fault."
While Paul accepts a commission as a war artist, Elinor is determined to keep art and war separate. She is encouraged by the pacifist members of the Bloomsbury Group, who adopt her as a decorative addition to their parties at the country estates of Garsington and Charleston, where Vanessa Bell and her sister, "Mrs. Woolf," hold court. Eventually, however, the "combine harvester" of war cuts too close to be ignored. When her friend and former lover Kit Neville arrives at Queen's Hospital with facial injuries, Elinor is persuaded to work there as a medical illustrator, alongside her former Slade drawing master, Henry Tonks. The real Tonks, a surgeon before he became an artist, also made pastel portraits of the injured men, which he refused to exhibit during his lifetime. Here, Elinor is given a glimpse of the portraits and struggles to understand what she's seeing: "She found her gaze shifting continuously between torn flesh and splintered bone and the eyes of the man who had to suffer it. There was no point of rest; no pleasure in the exploration of a unique individual." The war's effects defy representation.
Kit Neville, however, is no sainted victim. Rejecting a privileged upbringing, he enlists as a private and serves as a stretcher-bearer. His experiences render him uniquely clear-eyed about power and exploitation. Once invalided out, he drinks too much and refuses to behave like a patient, forcing his former acolytes to look at his ruined face. He's the voice of artistic progress, railing that the future lies outside England - "New York. Chicago. We're a nation of ... caryatids. It's squashing us. Can't you feel it?" - although his reference to "caryatids" suggests that the weight of the classics isn't so easy to cast off.
Barker is peerless at evoking the atmosphere of the trenches and of wartime London, with its gray tea and mystery-meat pies, yet that atmosphere hangs heavily on this novel. At one point Elinor observes in her diary "a frenzy of midges around my bare arms, little frantic things, as if the air had turned to glass and they were trying to get out." The description serves as an apt metaphor for the novel's characters, who frequently seem as if they are moving under glass, never quite breaking into life. The story's inconclusive ending - more a suspension in midair - invites a third installment, to round out a new trilogy; until that point, it's a tantalizing, unfinished canvas.
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