Fiction:Life Class could be read as Pat Barker's postscript on the theme of war. That the war in question happens to be the first World War might suggest a return to familiar territory - no one does the Great War as fiercely and as compassionately as Barker - but she could be writing about any major conflagration - Iraq, for example?
Pacifists, conscientious objectors, political internees and opportunistic war mongers stalk these pages about the civilian experience of war. But like Barker's acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, Life Class is as much about the imperative of art as it is about battle.
Paul Tarrant is a taciturn young man from the north of England studying at the Slade School of Art in London in 1914. His nemesis is a recent Slade graduate, Kit Neville, confident and self-promoting, already making a name for himself as a painter. The two young men are vying for the attentions of fellow student, the bohemian rebel Elinor Brooke. So far, so predictable. In an interesting departure from stereotype, though, it is the well-connected and socially adept Neville rather than the brooding Northerner, who is the hungrier artist.
The first half of the novel follows this trio and their artsy - and not so artsy - doings in the bars and cafes of pre-war London and the halls of the Slade school under the tutelage of Henry Tonks, a real-life character who trained as a surgeon before turning to art. As the war progressed, however, he returned to doctoring in the field, specialising in plastic surgery for mutilated soldiers. Unlike the figure of the neurologist WR Rivers, who dominated Barker's previous work, Tonks makes only a guest appearance, rather disappointingly. In a note at the end of the book on her sources, Barker reveals that Tonks's portraits of facially deformed soldiers were deemed too disturbing to be exhibited during his lifetime. With Barker's track record, could this hint at more about this fascinating character to come?
In the first half of the novel, the war is but a distant shadow and the reader is struck by the rather solipsistic self-absorption of these young lives. Then Tarrant, turned down for military service, volunteers as a medical orderly in Belgium and the narrative takes fire. The reader can only stand agape as this aimless and dourly unformed young man is suddenly plunged into the horrors of Ypres. The effect is rather like the Dunkirk section in Ian McEwan's Atonement; the blood and mutilation of the field hospital where Tarrant is stationed comes at us in industrial waves making us long for the dulled seedy tedium of before.
"Everything stinks: creosote, bleach, disinfectant, soil, blood, gangrene . . . Every few minutes the door's pushed open and the stretcher-bearers shuffle in with their load, standing like carthorses between the shafts, waiting to be told where to set it down . . . Waking from their half-sleep, the bundles in the blankets begin to stir and cry."
Despite this, there are bizarre lacunae and strange juxtapositions in the midst of the bloodshed. Tarrant rents a room in a small town close to the hospital - "two miles up the road to hell" - where he plans to paint. "At the edge of the square ambulances roared past. Only a layer of thin canvas divided the men inside from the people in the square. The stall holders and the shoppers couldn't see the men inside but surely they must be able to hear them, the cries torn out of them at every bump and hollow in the road."
IN ONE OF the most intriguing sections of the book, Elinor, having chosen Paul over Neville, astonishingly comes to visit him though he is stationed in the middle of the "forbidden zone". Posing as a nurse - though she refuses to do war work because she is ideologically opposed to the war - she appears as a strangely anachronistic war junkie, though she believes she has come to Belgium for love. The visit is short-lived, however, as the town comes under bombardment. She returns to London and pursues some pretty hectic social networking, teaming up with the Bloomsbury set, Lady Ottoline Morell in particular, in an attempt to get a foot-hold in the artistic world. The growing gulf between the lovers becomes evident in the letters they exchange after Elinor's visit. The epistolary form highlights the improbabilities of this fledgling relationship - "she went on living, he was buried alive" - and, as Tarrant realises, it is not just the war but also class that divides them.
It is no surprise that Tarrant is undone by his war experiences, but what does surprise is the unexpected way it comes about. His heart is prized open not by the merciless onslaught of war but by the devotion of an unlikely companion. The unlocking is so subtly done that the heedless reader might miss it. Barker is frighteningly adept at such revolutionary yet subtle shifts in character - as adept as she is on the carnage of war.
That said, Life Class has the feel of a chamber piece. Perhaps the symphonic range achieved in the Regeneration trilogy, which burned with a kind of cumulative energy, has spoiled us. But this reader closed the novel asking the question, what happened next? - and hoping against hope that Pat Barker might tell us.
Mary Morrissy is a novelist and short story writer. She is currently teaching on the University of Iowa's writing programme in Dublin, Iowa
Life Class By Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, 249pp. £ 16.99