Suspense, stoicism and survival in wartime Britain: two novels by Pat Barker

It has been quite awhile since I read a Pat Barker novel, and I wonder why it has taken me so long to get back to her writing, because it is consistently strong and subtle. Toby’s Room is no exception. Our protagonist, Elinor, is a student at the Slade Art School, and the novels’ characters feature several of her fellow students, particularly how they interact after coming back from the battlefields of France in WWI.

Elinor, from a privileged, moneyed background, has two siblings, Rachel, the elder sister, already married and with children, and Toby, her brother with whom she has been exceptionally close since childhood. Toby and Elinor have an incestuous relationship which troubles them both, and then war breaks out and Toby goes to be an officer. One morning, Elinor watches the telegraphy boy approaching,

’boy’ you called him though he was a middle aged, even elderly, man – all the boys were in France” (p77), and “these days no telegram was innocent” (ibid).

Elinor correctly assumes it announces the death of her brother, which breaks her family and family home apart.

Some of the boys do return from the front, however, Paul for example, Elinor’s boyfriend or lover, and Kit Neville, the troubled and troubling working-class artist, also from Slade. Kit Neville ends up in the Queen’s Hospital, which all know is for facial injuries. Kit has to have many surgeries to reconstruct his face, and Elinor ends up working in that same hospital, with Tonks, her drawing teacher, recording anatomy.

Pat Barker’s genius is to bring the reader into immediate connection with many aspects of war and post-war fall out, with injuries and wrecked relationships and harrowing losses, and also the other side of the coin, of endurance, courage, the building of new relationships, the endless dance of living.

There is a good suspense in the novel, because Elinor is desperate to know how Toby died, and only apparently Kit Neville knows, because Kit was with Toby, working as Toby’s stretcher-bearer, rescuing fallen soldiers and bringing back dead bodies, or sometimes, just metal tags. Toby is a medical officer, and known particularly for his gallantry and courage, but also for driving his men hard and risking their lives alongside with his own. Kit’s surgeries and medication brings him strange dreams and flash backs, and through these, Pat Barker shows us glimpses, almost ghostly and fragmented glimpses of the horrors of war. The kid, for example, who shot himself in the arm just to try to be sent home from the front.

If only he could get wounded, a slight wound, nothing too serious, just enough to make sure he got sent home (p216-7).

When watching a man with a septic throat,

How did you get that? Neville wanted to ask. If he’d thought it was contagious he’d have climbed into bed on top of the chap and gone through the whole Kiss me, Hardy routine…” (p216).

Barker’s writing is understated and yet luminous, elegant and yet brutal. She confronts the reader with the stark realities and war, its blood and gore but also its poignancy.

In the end, it is fascinating to find out how Toby died, and the suspense is sustained to the end, but it is really more about the experience of war from Elinor’s perspective, a key hole glimpse for the reader of how the war affects all aspects of life, even for those relatively comfortably off, even for those not in direct want. It is not a grim read, for all the grimness of the subject matter. It is a beautifully crafted, compelling read, and I am off to find some more Pat Barker novels to relish!

On my next trip to the county council library, I made good my intention to read some more Pat Barkers, so although in a rush, dashed over to the B section of fiction; there was just one Pat Barker novel there which I had not read, so without even looking at its blurb, I checked it out, brought it home, and began to read it at the next opportunity.

To my surprise, the first word was ‘Elinor’, and my first thought was, goodness, has Pat Barker named another protagonist Elinor? But very quickly, it became apparent that I had picked up the sequel to Toby’s Room. In Noonday, we see Elinor again, now much older, now married to Paul. From the trenches of France in WWI of Toby’s Room, to the 1940s Blitz of London. Not only do the characters join the two novels; their very memories and imaginations mesh their experiences and feelings across both books.

Paul hated the Underground stations that had been turned into shelters […] For Paul, there were memories of other tunnels, humped bodies in half-darkness, sleeping or dead” (p95).

Thus does Barker remind us that these citizens surviving the Blitz, are people already traumatised by the previous war, and that this latest bombing of London reawakens their nightmares. She depicts people at their best and worst, some showing incredible courage and some exploiting others, as always happens in a crisis situation. She also recognises the irrationality of sustained fear, or living under siege:

People clung to each other these days, as if the mere fact of being known, recognized, addressed by name, could protect you from the random destruction of bombs and blast (p95).

Barker portrays the grimness of the Blitz with as much elegant brutality and evocativeness as she depicted the fighting in the trenches.

Sitting like this in silence, listening to the sirens, you felt the darkness deepen. Even with every lamp in the room lit, you were aware of it, pushing against the windowpanes, seeping through cracks in doors and walls, dragging the city back into barbarism. London: no longer one of the world’s greatest centres of civilization, but merely a settlement on a river, lit by guttering candles after dark” (p93).

Barker gives a lovely depiction in the background of the social norms and mores. For example, regarding the expectations of women at this time: Elinor had not made public her marriage to Paul, and is despised by her sister’s house keeper for being single in middle age:

’She’s a Miss, you know.’ Elinor know exactly what she meant. Miss-take. Missed out. Even, perhaps, miss-carriage?” (p5)

Barker also reminds us that male war artists are salaried, whereas female war artists “are paid on a commission by commission basis, unlike men” (p174), and that these kinds of gender discriminations were the norm then.

One has often heard and read about the stoicism of Londoners under the bombing raids, but Barker’s novels really fill in the details, non-sentimentally and without fuss, but with powerful, quiet drama. Her depiction of how the Londoners coped, the ambulance drivers, the rescuers, the patrol men and women, and everyone else, in fact, who went about their work so calmly even when terrified, who functioned despite crippling personal loses, show so many unsung heroes on every bombed out street and across this devastated landscape. It leaves one wondering if the Britons of the current generation would be able to handle themselves now, in just such a calamity, with the same uncomplaining stoicism and quiet courage.

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