Product Description

In the Spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville — himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter — makes it clear that he, too, is attracted to Elinor, Paul withdraws into a passionate affair with an artist’s model. As spring turns to summer, Paul and Elinor each reach a crisis in their relationships until finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other. Paul’s new life as a volunteer for the Belgian Red Cross is a world away from his days at the Slade. The longer he remains in Ypres, the greater the distance between himself and home becomes, and by the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life, and love, will never be the same again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50484 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
Sharply written and elegantly constructed...breathtaking (Guardian )

A compelling read (Literary Review )

Thoughtful, ambiguous and powerful (Sunday Telegraph )

Guardian, 7 July, 2007
'Breathtaking ... sharply written and elegantly constructed.'

Sunday Telegraph, 8 July, 2007
'Thoughtful, ambiguous and powerful'

Customer Reviews

Same Old Same Old....
I am rather sad that I cannot offer this novel more than 2 stars. I read Regeneration and loved it, the interplay of real life and fictional characters was absorbing. Barker tries that again here but with a differing institution, but for me this time it did not work as well.
There are moments when the use of language is amazing, where the horror of the first world war and the hopelessness of the soldiers makes you want to weep....'The world belongs to them, because they were on their way to die'. Barker is good at that, she knows her subject well. What lets this novel down is that this adds nothing new to the body of Barker's work. I fear now there will be a Life Class part 2.
It is time I think for Barker to move on.
If you love her work, please read this, but I am not sure this offers any more than Regeneration, and perhaps a lot less in respect of development.

"Leave your [deleted] compassion at the door, it's no use to anyone here."
Pat Barker's sensitive exploration of the devastating effects of The Great War on a group of artists from the Slade School of Art complements her similar exploration of the Great War from the point of view of the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in her Regeneration Trilogy, for which she won the 1995 Booker Prize. Examining the lives of art students Paul Tarrant, Elinor Brooke, and Kit Neville as they learn their craft, celebrate life by partying in the days leading up to the war, and eventually make life-altering decisions when war breaks out, Barker creates three worlds, the Before, During, and After of the war.

The superficiality of life Before, the horrors of During, and the disillusionment of After develop here through the interactions of these three characters with each other as the world around them changes--war as a Life Class. When Germany invades Russia and advances on France, Neville and Paul volunteer to drive ambulances for the Belgian Red Cross, and when Richard Lewis, a Quaker recruit becomes Paul's unexpected roommate in Ypres, Paul finds a studio in town where he can draw, and gain a little privacy. Lewis is as appalled as Paul is by the fact that there is no hospital, just a series of huts built around a goods yard, where doctors and nurses have no anesthetics, medications, or disinfectant, and where men lie on straw mats.

When Elinor naively decides to visit Paul, she arrives in Ypres only to have a sudden bombardment send her scurrying back home. In her first letter to Paul after her return home, she urges Paul to take a leave and return to England. "It would be lovely...to go for a meal or [have] toasted crumpets by the fire."

Barker's imagery is vibrant and affecting, and her ability to show the reactions of callow young people to the horrors they see is memorable. Because she shows the same characters at three stages of their lives from 1914 through the war, the reader shares their changes and, in most cases, growth. The limitation of the book, however, may be that some readers will not care about the main characters as much as they want to, simply because the characters are so shallow and so young. The lives they lead in England are superficial lives, and the horrors of Ypres are so horrific that in many ways the young characters do not seem to comprehend them fully. Compartmentalizing is one thing, necessary for survival, but the long-term postwar effects on the characters who return are not examined fully, and those effects might have been the bigger story here. Mary Whipple

Thank you, Pat Barker
I really enjoyed this book. Pat Barker knows her period well, but she never lets the weight of her research overpower the writing. This reader was drawn in from the first page (I'd put her in the Deborah Moggach class for the ability to hook the reader and make you really care about the characters and want to know what happens to them). Kit Neville is a bit of a cipher, but Paul Tarrant and Elinor are wholly rounded, alive and memorable. There were times when I had to put the book down for a while, so vivid and hard to bear was the pain. And yet, in the end, it's a story of love -- especially love of life -- and determination. The ending is perfect.