The trio of novels published by Pat Barker since her Booker Prize-winning The
Ghost Road (1995) -Another World (1998), Border Crossing (2001) and now
Double Vision - could perhaps be read as an unofficial trilogy, a response
to the three Regeneration novels. Another World updates the memory of the
First World War through a centenarian survivor, Geordie, whose academic
interviewer theorizes that the cultural climate renders anecdotal
recollections of the war conveniently pliable. In the same novel, in a
parallel plot about the dysfunctional family of Geordie's grandson Nick,
Barker took her readers back to the sullen airs of contemporary Northern
England that she had bottled before Regeneration fever took over. And all
three novels feature a particularly grim motif to do with child offenders
that equals the most brutal acts of war, which caused some critics to read
Border Crossing as a commentary on the James Bulger case.
The trilogy idea is not a perfect fit, but then precise repetition is
something Barker herself says history never permits. She prefers vivid
variations on a theme. She shocks many of her characters out of sleep with
some bump in the night that seems to belong to both sleeping and waking
worlds. In The Ghost Road, Billy Prior drags a fallen brother officer back
to the trench, and briefly considers putting him out of his misery; faced
with the same choice, another character decides the other way. Nick makes up
the fire for Geordie using a newspaper "A picture of Sarajevo blackens
and begins to burn" - and Double Vision features men who were there
when that city itself was burning, took pictures and reported home. It is
set at a time of war not done and dusted, but as yet unfinished.
The first three chapters of Double Vision stay close to Kate Frobisher, a
sculptor, as she adjusts to life after a car crash. The hardest thing for
her, beyond regular bouts of physiotherapy at the hospital and depending on
a friend for transport, is being deprived of solitude at work in her studio.
She needs physical help in order to complete her latest commission - a giant
statue of Christ for a cathedral - and she is determined not to miss the
deadline.
Fortunately, her temporary assistant, Peter Wingrave, has the knack of
disappearing discreetly into the background, only reappearing when she has
an order for him. Outside the studio, where solitude is less welcome, the
damage is of a permanent kind. Kate is a widow, and her late husband, a
photographer, was killed in the line of duty. "This wasn't an illness
she would recover from; it was an amputation she had to learn to live with."
At this point, Barker switches attention to the other person who feels Ben
Frobisher's death keenly: Stephen Sharkey, the reporter with whom Ben worked
in Bosnia, Afghanistan and other war zones of the late twentieth century.
They dodged snipers together in Sarajevo, and shared a philosophical whisky
on the evening of September 11, 2001, the night Stephen found out that his
wife was sleeping with another man. After Ben's death, Stephen quits his job
and his marriage and heads north, to a cottage owned by his brother, not far
from Kate. Here he intends to collaborate with Ben posthumously, on a study
of representations of war.
It is an intensely personal task, but Barker is less interested in the work
than the writer. Stephen's nightmares have a family resemblance to
Geordie's, Sassoon's and Wansbeck's in the earlier novels, being symptoms of
a trauma that all four men hope to shrug off back in Blighty: A man gets off
a train, looks at the sky and the surrounding fields, then shoulders his
kitbag and sets off from the station, trudging up half-known roads,
unloading hell behind him, step by step.
It's part of English mythology, that image of the soldier returning, but it
depends for its power on the existence of an unchanging countryside. Perhaps
it has never been true, had only ever been a sentimental urban fantasy, or
perhaps something deeper -some memory of the great forest. Sherwood. Arden.
Part of Stephen's difficulty is that the country he returns to has not been at
all peaceful or unchanging. It has certainly changed. "Do you know from
the top of that hill you can see three burnt areas?" he asks his
brother. "Where the pyres were. I'd no idea they were as close as that."
The foot-and-mouth epidemic also accounts for the disappearance of the sheep
that used to keep the grass short in the graveyard, and the "disinfectant
mats that now lay at the entrance to every tourist attraction".
Memory and trauma are powerful here as in Border Crossing, and Barker allows
events to eddy around her two narrators' recollections of their separate
lives with Ben. Stephen goes to The Hague, to report on the trial of
Slobodan Milosevic.
The seasons and the calls and flights of birds set a scene that is always
tensed for action. Stephen embarks on an affair with the vicar's daughter,
Justine (a name that connects the vicar's daughter with the Marquis de Sade,
the inspiration for The Sadeian Woman by Barker's former writing-course
tutor, Angela Carter ).
Meanwhile, there turns out to be something rather odd about Peter Wingrave,
quite apart from the fact that he wants to be a writer. Stephen reads his
weird stories and says dramatically he has to do something about them,
perhaps send them to his agent, but when he does that, there is little sense
of some great question being answered. The flood Peter threatens never comes.
In Another World, Nick mooted the idea of time that moved like blood,
coagulating around a wound, unpredictable. The permanently clotted world of
Double Vision is all the more poetic for not being an ever-rolling stream.
The novel's title draws attention not only to Barker's narrative structure,
which alternates at an uneven rate between Stephen and Kate, but is also
indicative of her unforced, musical prose. She gets things going with the
most seemingly casual turns of phrase, like a Hemingway who is less grudging
with his imagery, modestly masking the approach of some striking image or
deft association, such as "His sleep was threadbare, like cheap
curtains letting in too much light".
