 Don't Miss
More at Powell's
Powell's Q&A, Q&A | December 13, 2009
By Norberto Fuentes
Describe your latest project. Norton has just published The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, a novel that took seven years of my life to complete as I...
Continue »
-
 |
$10.00 List price: $23.95
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
| Qty |
Store |
Section |
| 1 |
Burnside |
Literature- A to Z |
More copies of this ISBN:
This title in other formats: -
New, Trade paper, $14.95
-
Used, Trade paper, $8.00
-
Used, Trade paper, $9.95
-
Used, Trade paper, $10.50
-
Adobe digital editions, $13.27
-
Microsoft reader ebooks, $13.27
-
Palm reader ebooks, $13.27
-
Adobe digital editions, $21.26
-
Microsoft reader ebooks, $21.26
-
Palm reader ebooks, $21.26
-
New, Compact disc, $29.95
-
New, Mass market, $13.00
Life Class
by Pat Barker
|
|
|
|
Synopses & Reviews From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy, an acknowledged masterpiece of modern fiction, Life Class is an exceptional new novel of artists and lovers caught in the maelstrom of the Great War.
It is the spring of 1914 and a group of young students have gathered in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two parts of an intriguing love triangle and, in the first days of war, they turn to each other. As spring turns to summer, Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross and tends to wounded, dying soldiers from the front line. By the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life and love will never be the same for him again.
In Life Class, Pat Barker returns to her most renowned subject: the human devastation and psychic damage wrought by World War One on all levels of British society. Her skill in relaying the harrowing experience of modern warfare is matched by the depth of insight she brings to the experience of love and the morality of art in a time of war. Life Class is one of her genuine masterpieces. Review: "Set initially in 1914 before the start of WWI, Barker's first novel since 2004's Double Vision tells the story of two students at London's Slade School of Fine Art, Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke, along with that of Kit Neville, a promising young painter. Paul begins an affair with Teresa Halliday, a troubled artist's model, and Kit woos Elinor, but both men rush off to the Continent at the outset of hostilities to work with the wounded. The author's unflinching eye for detail and her supple prose create an undeniably powerful narrative, but her skills cannot compensate for a weak plot. What appear to be critical story lines (Paul's affair with Teresa, Kit's painting career) are almost abandoned once Paul and Elinor become lovers. And the book's main theme — war's impact on art and love — pales in comparison with the tragic experiences of those who fight and die in the conflict. Despite riveting passages depicting the waste and horror of WWI, this effort falls short of the standard set by Barker's magisterial Regeneration trilogy, the last of which, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: "The title of Pat Barker's stirring new novel refers to a course that her characters are taking in a London art school as Europe stumbles toward World War I. But the title also refers to the educational nature of their experiences, the 'life class' thrust upon them every day with its unforeseeable curriculum and its deadly final exam. The young men and women whom Barker follows through school and into ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) the horrors of battle must somehow figure out how to live amid the incongruity of beauty and carnage, art and destruction. It's a challenge none of them can prepare for, of course, but Barker records their struggles with such discerning insight that the dimensions of that challenge seem a little clearer for us in a time of war. When the novel opens, in 1914, Paul is a discouraged second-year art student working alongside some of the country's most promising painters. He's quickly running through his inheritance from his grandmother, and he's not good enough to justify the expense. His stern professor, the real-life surgeon and art teacher Henry Tonks, tells him, 'There's no feeling. ... You seem to have nothing to say.' That brutal critique startles Paul into realizing that for him, 'art had always been Somewhere Else,' something idealized and removed from daily experience. But he can't imagine an alternative until later, when everything beautiful has been stripped away. Barker has constructed this novel with a daringly languid plot. That the story remains so engaging is a testament to her elegant style and psychological acuity. The first half almost seems to drift as it follows Paul's fading efforts to paint and his equally doomed affair with a married art model, who is really just a substitute for the woman he loves, Elinor, one of the school's most promising artists. The tension accumulates slowly in a fascinating romantic triangle that involves Paul and another suitor for Elinor's heart, a braggart named Kit Neville, who is already selling his paintings successfully in London. Theirs are frustrating relationships, and Barker turns them over and over to flesh out subtle, conflicted emotions. Paul considers Neville spoiled and bitter, and yet looking at one of Neville's landscapes, he can see that 'in comparison with this his own work was immature.' Swimming with him on a cool afternoon, Paul realizes, 'It wasn't friendship, though a friendship might develop; it wasn't rivalry either. Neville was too far ahead of him for that.' Paul's feelings for Elinor are similarly ambivalent. He loves her even as he realizes she's needy and manipulative. A mutual friend tells him, 'If you love anybody, you love Elinor, and you only love her because you know she won't have you.' It's a jarring diagnosis, as upsetting as Neville's statement a few months later that 'for Elinor men come in twos.' When he makes a toast to 'Our Lady of Triangles,' Paul doesn't know what to say, his 'thoughts were scattered across the table like spilled pins, every one of them sharp enough to hurt.' As war grows closer and England falls into fits of patriotism and paranoia, Barker draws a particularly sharp portrait of Elinor's predicament. Painting seems largely irrelevant in the face of the German menace, and a woman painter is even more dubious. 'Everybody doing important war work, except me,' she writes to Paul in one of many wonderful letters in the novel. 'I alone preserve an iron frivolity.' Even her male friends don't realize how they marginalize her by declaring that 'virility was the essence of great art; effeminacy had to be extirpated at all costs.' She wonders, 'Where did that leave her? Counting the hairs on her chest?' In the competition for her heart, both Neville and Paul vow to respect her talent, but she knows how quickly that promise would break under the pressures of domestic life. 'I don't like being sexless,' she thinks, but sex seems to come with trappings that threaten to suffocate her career. Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for 'The Ghost Road,' the final novel in a trilogy about World War I, and the same sure talent is evident in the second half of 'Life Class' when Paul becomes an orderly and ambulance driver in Belgium. The experience burns away everything about his previous life. The listless art student becomes 'a column of blood, bone and nerves encased in a sheath of cold, sweaty skin.' Barker knows just how to suggest the wide sweep of destruction and unutterable despair with a few searing images: a dying horse shrieking, the face of an astonished survivor, a man 'lying on the ground cradling his intestines in his arms as tenderly as a woman nursing a sick child.' What interests her particularly in 'Life Class,' though, is the revelatory effect of this experience on her characters' aesthetics: What should be the subjects for art in a time of war? Elinor refuses to join the war effort and tries as much as possible to 'ignore it.' 'It's been imposed on us from the outside,' she tells Paul. 'It's unchosen, it's passive, and I don't think that's the proper subject for art.' For her, painting is an act of affirmation and redemption that should portray 'the things we choose to love.' But for Paul the war provides the essential subject, material that finally matters. Between exhausting sessions in the hospital, he steals away to a private room to paint 'the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly': cleansing infected injuries, wrapping fresh stumps, tying raving men to gurneys. Let Elinor think he'd created 'an arty freak show'; he's determined to paint what he's sees. 'It's not right their suffering should just be swept out of sight,' he tells her, almost willfully misrepresenting her argument to make his own self-righteous point. Barker never pushes the contemporary allusions here, but these are questions with tragic relevance for us. At a time when we're encouraged to go on with our lives and photographers are banned from showing coffins returning from Iraq, what images of war and its ravages are appropriate? The lessons in 'Life Class' aren't easy, but they're deeply affecting and necessary. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World. Send e-mail to charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com." Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "As ever with Barker...the writing is breathtaking...sharply written and elegantly constructed." D. J. Taylor, The Guardian Review: "With great tenderness and insight, and a daring to forgo simple resolutions, Barker conveys a wartime world turned upside down." Mark Bostridge, The Independent Review: "This is a story about hopeful ambitions and relationships redirected and reshaped by a climate of catastrophic change....[It] render[s] the horrors of combat with (Barker's trademark) meticulously researched detail and piercing clarity. Secondary characters' experiences likewise amplify into lucid microcosms of the global cataclysm that shadows every individual life....Mature, unsentimental and searching. One of this excellent writer's finest books." Kirkus Reviews (starred) Review: "After several intriguing but lumpy novels set in the present or near-present, it becomes clear to the reader that World War I resonates with Ms. Barker with special force, for Life Class possesses the organic power and narrative sweep that her recent books with more contemporary settings lack." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Review: "Barker doesn't spend a whole lot of time on the joy of creating or flashes of inspiration. Instead, as she paints a portrait of how three very different personalities cope with carnage and horror, she examines the place of art in a shaken world." Christian Science Monitor Review: "Life Class leaves us with a profound sense of gratitude for writers like Barker who are able to look at the world's frequent sorrows and occasional splendors with unflinching compassion." Los Angeles Times Review: "Life Class feels urgent and timely. It addresses head-on what Barker's previous novel...explored only obliquely: In a world where so much has gone wrong, where so much is at stake, can we justify making love and making art?" Miami Herald Review: "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters in steady, even strokes; social and political drama, as well as personal ambition, expose their contradictions over the course of the novel." San Francisco Chronicle Review: "Barker's portrayal of the landscape of war...is all the more affecting for its stripped-down prose." Boston Globe Review: "[A] book so alive from page to page that it's difficult to put down." Seattle Times About the Author Pat Barker is the author of the highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize; as well as seven other novels, most recently Double Vision. She lives in England.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780385524353
- Author:
- Barker, Pat
- Publisher:
- Doubleday Books
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- World War, 1914-1918
- Subject:
- Hospitals
- Subject:
- Human figure in art
- Subject:
- World War, 1914-1918 -- Psychological aspects.
- Edition Description:
- Us
- Publication Date:
- January 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 320
- Dimensions:
- 8.22x5.84x1.17 in. .93 lbs.
Other books you might like
-
-
-
-
-
-
Related Aisles
|
