Double Vision

News from the Burning City

The trio of novels published by Pat Barker since her Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road ( 1995) — Another World (1998), Border Crossing (2001) and now Double Vision — could perhaps be read as an unofficial trilogy, a response to the three Regeneration novels. Another World updates the memory of the First World War through a centenarian survivor, Geordie, whose academic interviewer theorizes that the cultural climate renders anecdotal recollections of the war conveniently pliable. In the same novel, in a parallel plot about the dysfunctional family of Geordie's grandson Nick, Barker took her readers back to the sullen airs of contemporary Northern England that she had bottled before Regeneration fever took over. And all three novels feature a particularly grim motif to do with child offenders that equals the most brutal acts of war, which caused some critics to read Border Crossing as a commentary on the James Bulger case.

The trilogy idea is not a perfect fit, but then precise repetition is something Barker herself says history never permits. She prefers vivid variations on a theme. She shocks many of her characters out of sleep with some bump in the night that seems to belong to both sleeping and waking worlds. In The Ghost Road, Billy Prior drags a fallen brother officer back to the trench, and briefly considers putting him out of his misery; faced with the same choice, another character decides the other way. Nick makes up the fire for Geordie using a newspaper — "A picture of Sarajevo blackens and begins to burn" — and Double Vision features men who were there when that city itself was burning, took pictures and reported home. It is set at a time of war not done and dusted, but as yet unfinished.

The first three chapters of Double Vision stay close to Kate Frobisher, a sculptor, as she adjusts to life after a car crash. The hardest thing for her, beyond regular bouts of physiotherapy at the hospital and depending on a friend for transport, is being deprived of solitude at work in her studio. She needs physical help in order to complete her latest commission — a giant statue of Christ for a cathedral — and she is determined not to miss the deadline.

Fortunately, her temporary assistant, Peter Wingrave, has the knack of disappearing discreetly into the background, only reappearing when she has an order for him. Outside the studio, where solitude is less welcome, the damage is of a permanent kind. Kate is a widow, and her late husband, a photographer, was killed in the line of duty. "This wasn't an illness she would recover from; it was an amputation she had to learn to live with."

At this point, Barker switches attention to the other person who feels Ben Frobisher's death keenly: Stephen Sharkey, the reporter with whom Ben worked in Bosnia, Afghanistan and other war zones of the late twentieth century. They dodged snipers together in Sarajevo, and shared a philosophical whisky on the evening of September 11, 2001, the night Stephen found out that his wife was sleeping with another man. After Ben's death, Stephen quits his job and his marriage and heads north, to a cottage owned by his brother, not far from Kate. Here he intends to collaborate with Ben posthumously, on a study of representations of war.

It is an intensely personal task, but Barker is less interested in the work than the writer. Stephen's nightmares have a family resemblance to Geordie's, Sassoon's and Wansbeck's in the earlier novels, being symptoms of a trauma that all four men hope to shrug off back in Blighty: A man gets off a train, looks at the sky and the surrounding fields, then shoulders his kitbag and sets off from the station, trudging up half-known roads, unloading hell behind him, step by step.

It's part of English mythology, that image of the soldier returning, but it depends for its power on the existence of an unchanging countryside. Perhaps it has never been true, had only ever been a sentimental urban fantasy, or perhaps something deeper — some memory of the great forest. Sherwood. Arden.

Part of Stephen's difficulty is that the country he returns to has not been at all peaceful or unchanging. It has certainly changed. "Do you know from the top of that hill you can see three burnt areas?" he asks his brother. "Where the pyres were. I'd no idea they were as close as that." The foot-and-mouth epidemic also accounts for the disappearance of the sheep that used to keep the grass short in the graveyard, and the "disinfectant mats that now lay at the entrance to every tourist attraction".

Memory and trauma are powerful here as in Border Crossing, and Barker allows events to eddy around her two narrators' recollections of their separate lives with Ben. Stephen goes to The Hague, to report on the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. The seasons and the calls and flights of birds set a scene that is always tensed for action. Stephen embarks on an affair with the vicar's daughter, Justine (a name that connects the vicar's daughter with the Marquis de Sade, the inspiration for The Sadeian Woman by Barker's former writing-course tutor, Angela Carter ). Meanwhile, there turns out to be something rather odd about Peter Wingrave, quite apart from the fact that he wants to be a writer. Stephen reads his weird stories and says dramatically he has to do something about them, perhaps send them to his agent, but when he does that, there is little sense of some great question being answered. The flood Peter threatens never comes.

In Another World, Nick mooted the idea of time that moved like blood, coagulating around a wound, unpredictable. The permanently clotted world of Double Vision is all the more poetic for not being an ever-rolling stream. The novel's title draws attention not only to Barker's narrative structure, which alternates at an uneven rate between Stephen and Kate, but is also indicative of her unforced, musical prose. She gets things going with the most seemingly casual turns of phrase, like a Hemingway who is less grudging with his imagery, modestly masking the approach of some striking image or deft association, such as "His sleep was threadbare, like cheap curtains letting in too much light". Or there's Stephen with his brother, a divorced journalist and a married doctor: "\ stood together by the hedge, with this life-long competition behind them, and talked about the weather". Or there's Milosevic, seen by Stephen through bullet-proof glass with a flaw in it so that "the pudgy, truculent features rippled and reformed like a reflection on water". Out-and-out ugliness in this novel's predecessors meant not just images of death in the trenches (Regeneration) but of an obscenely domesticated brutality (Blow Your House Down, Another World). Here, it means equally acute images of embarrassment and imperfection (such as a portrait of the lover as a "middle-aged man with white hairy legs and raging conjunctivitis").

The subject of Stephen's book is also the subject of his conversations with Ben, an ethical debate that comes with the job. When should the photojournalist avert his camera's gaze? Does the necessity of seeing atrocity whole extend to images of burning victims in the Twin Towers (something that one real-life cameraman, Jules Naudet, decided he could not film)? Stephen is shocked to learn that Ben returned to the scene of a crime they had discovered in a rat-infested stairwell in Sarajevo. But in order to photograph what they had first seen before they had covered up the body for the sake of decency, Ben has to interfere: "He hadn't staged the photograph. He'd simply restored the corpse to its original state. And yet it was difficult not to feel that the girl, spreadeagled like that, had been violated twice". Kate and Stephen resume the debate in the Bowes Museum, where they see a painting, Goya's "Prison Scene". "Photographs shock, terrify, arouse compassion, anger, even drive people to take action, but does the photograph of an atrocity ever inspire hope? This did."

Goya's "Prison Scene" really is in the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, just as the Twin Towers really did fall down and books really are being written about the media and representations of war. Anybody looking for more "thought-provoking and useful" books on Goya could do worse than taking Barker's advice in the acknowledgements and look up Old Man Goya by Julia Blackburn, or Goya by Janis Tomlinson. Martin Bell's In Harm's Way could tell you about journalism at the front line, and Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag perhaps has something to say about photography and ethics. It is difficult not to see such a reading list as an extension of the novelist's fictional project into fact, rather than the other way round, and thus as another reason to link Double Vision to Barker's First World War trilogy , which includes similar lists. "Fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not", began the author's note at the end of Regeneration.

Memory and its foibles and the war reporter's ethical dilemma together form a perspectival disparity that the novel's title takes in, as one incident illustrates well. Stephen is struggling over a hill on a jog one morning, and struggling simultaneously with ideas about the media and war in the manner of Jean Baudrillard. "War had gone back to being sepia tinted," as Barker has insisted it must not be. "Nothing as vulgar as blood was ever allowed to appear." Up to this point, the narrative pace has been so gentle as to feel menacing. Now it is violently jolted, out of Stephen's mind and into that of a third narrative character. Prior to this moment, only the thoughts of Kate and Stephen were on view. Suddenly, through a gap in the double exposure of writer and artist, woman and man, the violence domesticated by cool analysis, distantly dealt with by the intellect, explodes into bloody being as immediate and meaningless terror. It is precisely the moment that the reader is caught wanting to know, to look more closely, and also to look away, in a superbly managed chapter that releases adrenalin to spare for the remainder of the novel. Double Vision is alarming, not least because history has given a conscientious realist like Pat Barker a new war to write home about, even if, in the jaundiced view, it is not another Great War.

TLS p.19, issue 5239.
Michael Caines's anthology of plays by eighteenth-century women will be published next year.

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