Life Class
Pat Barker
ISBN: 9780241142981
Hamish Hamilton
Trade Paperback
R160
Pat Barker is the author of the well-known First World War trilogy Regeneration, which was made into a film of the same name. Clearly that era holds a fascination for the 1995 Booker Prize-winner, as she returns to that war and those times in Life Class.
It’s 1914 as the novel opens in Henry Tonks’s studio at the Slade School of Art. Paul Tarrant is frustrated by his seeming lack of ability as an artist. He feels he is not as talented as his fellow students: Kit Neville, who has already had a solo showing, and the desirable and intriguing Elinor Brooke, who seems far more passionate about painting than he will ever be. He’s attracted to the aloof Elinor and yet too afraid to take it further, all too aware that his friend Kit also has designs on her.
Paul storms out of Tonks’s class, precipitating a crisis in his own mind over whether he has what it takes to be a “true artist”. When he goes to apologise the next day, his teacher suggests that he ask himself what he really wants:
Why don’t you start by asking yourself: Do I want to paint? Or do I want to "be an artist"? Because they’re two very different things. And try to be honest with yourself.
The action centres moves between locales in London, the art school, and the Café Royal, a local watering hole where Paul meets artist model Teresa, with whom he starts an uneasy relationship. Teresa, barely out of her teens, lives in a basement flat and is afraid of her estranged husband breaking in and hurting her. Paul and Teresa’s relationship is punctuated by fear and uncertainty. Paul gets up in the middle of the night to check that the husband isn’t waiting in the shadows, ready to pounce in jealousy and anger, and he also cannot quite get Elinor out of his mind.
The summer progresses, and war – referred to as the “European crisis” – looms. One weekend Elinor invites Kit and Paul back to her country home, and attention shifts from Paul to Elinor at this point. Kit is determined to “get her into bed”, as she puts it in surprisingly modern terms, but she will have none of that. With her parents’ loveless marriage as an example, she is determined not to marry anyone.
She didn’t want to marry him, or anybody. She only had to turn around and look at Rachel (her sister), nodding off in the armchair. Rachel, who before her marriage had been a promising pianist, and now she sat with the baby on her knee, picking out nursery tunes with one finger. ... Marriage changed everything. It had its own logic, its own laws, and they were independent of the desires and intentions of those who entered into it.
The sense of lassitude and aimlessness that has characterised Paul’s mood changes as war is declared. He decides to enlist; it’s perhaps a way out of his lassitude as much as a response to the fervour of patriotism that characterised the mood at the start of the First World War. London has changed as Elinor and Paul take a walk at night:
London at night was more obviously changed than London by day. The lamps had been painted blue and cast a ghastly glow on to the faces of passers-by. The darkened streets directed our attention to the sky, where searchlights stroked the underbelly of the clouds. All around them that burnt, used-up smell of late summer in the city.
It’s in the second half of the story that the novel really takes flight. Up to now you are wrapped up in the lives of this trio and the people who orbit them, but in the second half of the novel, in the war scenes, the pace gathers momentum and scenes become vivid and real. The greyness of a Belgian winter sets the scene and the narrative even shifts to the present tense. Paul is now working in a field hospital as some sort of orderly, tending the sick and the dying, cleaning the infected sores of men who have lost limbs, existing in a state of exhaustion. Painting is the furthest thing from his mind. His absorption in his job, in caring for the wounded soldiers, takes all his energy.
Then he rents a room in town to gain a measure of peace and quiet in order to paint, the horrors of war having inspired him as peace-time could not. The letters flow back and forth between him and Elinor as she describes going to bandaging class with her mother in suburban London, and Paul responds with descriptions of gangrene, “the amputated limbs stacked up outside”. Paul persuades Elinor to visit him in this forbidden zone. By a stroke of coincidence – and one feels that Barker is stretching narrative credulity here – Kit Neville is stationed a few miles away. Paul fears that Kit will find out that Elinor is visiting – the permutations of the love triangle encroach even here. He doesn’t, but that old fear haunts Paul once more.
Still, leaving aside this break in credulity (and sometimes as a reader you have to forgive the writer certain breaches), you are finally rewarded as Paul and Elinor reach a culmination in their friendship. The war, and life, will go on. Elinor starts selling her paintings, and Paul recreates the horror of war in his own works. They will not be popular. But the war continues and Paul describes these in letters to Elinor:
It’s the feeling of an empty, desolate landscape that isn’t empty at all, but teeming with men ... Now and then somebody looks up, and you get the sense of an individual human mind among the bundles of soaked misery.
Barker brings to life the momentum and feel of life on the Front in a way that is measured and yet also delicate – which sounds strange. There’s bombardment and shelling, there’s loss of life, the smell of gangrene, and the sweat on a man’s upper lip as his stump is irrigated with hydrogen chloride. And yet this is a novel about lives caught up in the threads of a particular time and place, about questions of finding your artistic self and sense of expression, rather than about war. The war is a backdrop – a necessary one for Paul, in this case, as it awakens him, and gives him an artistic subject, so to speak. But essentially this novel explores the emotional lives and conundrums of a group of young people as they edge further into adulthood. You remain interested throughout, all the way through to a conclusion that is surprisingly gratifying.