Life Class by Pat Barker (2008)

As the novel opens, in spring 1914, Paul Tarrant is an art student at the Slade, and not a very successful one. “Is that really the best you can do?” says his professor, devastatingly. (The professor, like many characters in the novel, is a real-life figure, Henry Tonks.) But soon, Paul and his circle are swept up in preparations for war, then war itself. Along the way, Paul briefly becomes romantically involved with a beautiful artist’s model as he considers whether he has a future as an artist.

His friends include Kit Neville, a rich young man who makes his name painting subways and factories, and Elinor Brooke, a rising artist and the woman he falls in love with. Paul and Elinor must each find a deep and genuine way to respond to the war personally and artistically, in ways that are quite different from each other.

I’m deeply fascinated by World War I, and I’ve read Booker Prize-winning Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy set in that period. She’s a highly praised writer and Life Class is no exception: D.J. Taylor of The Guardian, for example, calls her writing here “breathtaking.” But I seem unable to fully appreciate Barker. In her trilogy, I felt she kept breaking off chapters just as they were getting interesting without developing them. With Life Class, although I was interested in the book and kept reading, I also could not join in the praise.

To begin with, I found the characters to be rather thin soup. Paul and Elinor are attractive, charming, talented (at first, Elinor more than Paul), but don’t really seem to have any faults. I was pleased when we got to hear the unattractive, bullying, self-seeking Neville’s point of view for once, because at least he has some personality. Here he is on a visit to Elinor’s parents’ house in the country, wanting desperately to be back in London, with “grit in his eyes, advertising everywhere, steam, people, pistons turning. Anything to escape from the clamorous boredom of trees” (108). I loved the passage where Neville, Elinor, and Paul go on a two-mile bicycle ride, out-of-shape Neville hating it the whole way, wondering why they couldn’t have just taken the car, for Christ’s sake. I sympathized.

Without the overwhelmingness of the Great War, the trenches, the gangrene, the mud, the horror, as a backdrop of automatic significance and to give Paul and Elinor something to respond to, would we ever care about them? I don’t think so.

Many novelists talk about art with a bias towards subject, towards the picture’s story or narrative, rather than discussing things like brushwork, technique, form, balance of light and dark and so on. Barker often displays this bias. What distinguishes her characters’ works is almost always what they depict—pastoral landscapes, trains, portraits, or hospitals—not how they are depicted. Occasionally Barker recognizes a more painterly point of view, as when Paul admires one of Elinor’s paintings: “If he stayed at the Slade another ten years he’d never be able to paint sunlight on wet flesh like that” (p. 69). But when Paul paints his breakthrough picture, what makes it a breakthrough is its subject. Presumably it takes some skill to paint a man with gangrene too, but he manages to do it without benefit of the Slade. How?

I was also surprised to see quite a few clunkers in a book by such a lauded writer, like this terribly stale simile: “boarded-up buildings at intervals along the terrace like black teeth in a smile.” Or a character suggesting an “open marriage,” a term whose earliest cited entry in Merriam Webster is 1971. Or using the term “painting” vastly more often than “picture,” which (I believe, anyway; I could be wrong) was the preferred locution of the time. I also found it strange that we get careful physical descriptions of all the characters except Paul, whose appearance is withheld until page 211, for some reason. Teresa’s and Elinor’s interest in him and Neville’s jealousy would have made a whole lot more sense if we’d known about those “heavy-lidded, slanting, dark eyes…straight shoulders and narrow waist.”

In a similar vein, I thought a more nuanced writer wouldn’t have to come straight out and tell us things like “Paul thought he detected a lot of tension beneath the surface in this family. Neville was in awe of his father, a war correspondent who’d faced anger in every corner of the world. Throughout his life the father had gravitated towards violent conflict, and the son was desperate to measure up. No easy matter if the worst danger you face is a collapsing easel. But it made sense of the younger man’s preoccupation with virility in art” (p. 52). Thank you, Captain Exposition.

I’m being harsh on a book I did, after all, enjoy reading. There’s a very interesting scene when Neville views a painting of the Last Judgment, in the summer before the war starts. Though he hates the subject, saying it’s not relevant to the modern world, he sees its power; he “saw that he was in the presence of greatness,” which is an interesting comment on Neville, and it’s fascinating how the painting foreshadows events to come in Ypres: “wormlike people hid in holes in the ground or stared up at flashes of light in the sky.” Maybe Neville will come to see its relevance.

Although I criticized Barker’s clunkiness, she can also achieve a beautiful turn of phrase. Here, Paul, lonely in Belgium and thinking he won’t see Elinor again, has just had an unsatisfactory encounter with a prostitute: “He fumbled into his clothes as fast as he could and clattered downstairs, out onto the slushy street, feeling as if he’d committed a small, unimportant murder” (287).

I wouldn’t call this novel breathtaking, but worth reading if you’re interesting in the Great War, art of the time, or even the Bloomsbury set, which Elinor gets involved with.