Between 1916 and 1917, Henry Tonks, professor at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, worked at a hospital treating the wretched young men who arrived back from the front with large sections of their faces missing. At the request of the surgeon, he drew diagrams of their injuries before and after surgery, and subsequently painted a series of pastels that he called “the poor ruined faces of England”. The images are so upsetting that Tonks never exhibited them.

Tonks is a character in this novel. We last see him in August 1915, scrutinising a drawing of a soldier whose jaw has been shot away, a drawing by one of his students who was working as an ambulance driver near Ypres. Tonks’s own record of the disasters of war has yet to be made, but the questions it raises resound through the narrative. Pat Barker’s characters, most of them painters, are struggling to find a role for themselves and their talents in a newly hideous world. To make something beautiful or sublime (the traditional function of art) out of such horror seems perhaps impossible, certainly immoral. To ignore the fighting, as Elinor, one of Tonks’s pupils, tries to do, appears wilful and frivolous. To depict the truth is to create something unbearable. Pictures of dead or mutilated servicemen are still met with an outcry today. War artists were then, as war photographers and news crews are now, required to lie by omission.

Barker’s justly celebrated Regeneration trilogy centred on the poets of the first world war. Life Class has a different tone. Peopled by writers and talkers, the earlier books were reflective and discursive. This one, whose characters feel and perceive more than they can express verbally, has a slightly clipped tone, a new sense of the agonising disjunction between the enormity of war, or even private emotions such as love and jealousy, and humans’ limited capacity for responding to them.

Paul Tarrant, the novel’s art-student hero, is sensitive to a telling image. But in intimate relationships he is clumsy, not least because deadened emotion is necessary in the field hospital. Barker’s prose, accordingly, is blunt, even harsh. This is a novel of plain sentences and short paragraphs in which people are beaten up, or take each other to bed, or get killed without romantic declaration or poetic flourishes. Its striking moments are visual images.

This is not a roman à clef exactly. Tonks is himself. Elinor has a lot in common with Dora Carrington. Her two suitors seem to divide between them some of the characteristics and curriculum vitae of the painter Christopher Nevinson. Other real-life characters flit through the narrative. But although the faces may be familiar, the mood of the world that they inhabit is Barker’s creation: one where masculinity is problematic (young men talk about “effeminacy” and remember the Oscar Wilde trial with anxious distaste) and there are multiple incomprehensions. Elinor, safe in London, determined to block out the monstrous disaster of the war, corresponds with Paul, who is surrounded by the blood and filth of it. For him to contemplate her life, she remarks, must be like looking in through the windows of a dolls’ house. And she is incapable of grasping what he is going through. He lets her know that he has done a 12-hour shift of exhausting, disgusting, emotionally lacerating, life-saving labour. She responds by asking him whether he has had a chance to “get any work done”.

Complete though it is, Life Class, with its inconclusive ending and its large cast of not yet fully explored characters, feels as if it could be the beginning of a second trilogy. I hope it is.

LIFE CLASS by Pat Barker
H Hamilton £16.99 pp248
Buy the book here at the offer price of £15.29 (inc p&p)

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