Life Class by Pat Barker Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Life Class
Book Review: Incomplete
Summary: 2 Stars
The book opens with a studio Life Class, where budding artists learn to draw or paint the human figure by using a live model. However, in the full context of the book, the title could be taken to mean that the principal characters, fellow students, are learning how to live. Here is the problem of the book, because so much is unresolved by the end of the book. There are a number of "floaters," characters whose significance to the story is unknown and whose presence is distracting. They detract from the trajectory of the story. The sections of "Life Class" dealing with life at the front in World War I are powerful. Paul Tarrant, the protagonist, grows as he is rquired to extend himself and his feelings during his involvement in that effort, and his artistic output changes as he experiences the horrors and sacrifices of the war. My chosen review title, "Incomplete," represents my view that Paul, at the end of the book, is incomplete in his journey to develop a life. He needs to return to the war. As for the other characters, they have amazingly remained the same, despite the upheaval of England in the years of the story (early 20th century, first World War). Eleanor, the other major character, has become a detached figure, and it seems meaningful that she has "evolved" from painting landscapes and figures to decorating teapots. While Paul has grown, she seems to have shrunken. For me, the unresolved relationship between Paul and Eleanor represents the failure in the book to resolve the issues the story raises. Incomplete.Book Review: Life Class
Summary: 2 Stars
I finished this book but it took some doing. We were reviewing it in a book discussion and I wanted to get through it. The characters seemed a bit flat and uninteresting - the end of the book was better but still, the 1st world war as a backdrop can be depressing any time. Interesting references to facial reconstruction and the art that was created around peopled wounded in this way.
I don't recommend it.
Book Review: Life Class is a gritty look at life in World War I England and on the battlefields and hospitals of France
Summary: 4 Stars
Eminent Yorkshire novelist Pat Barker is best known for her World War I Trilogy of novels: "Regeneration"; "The Eye in the Door" and "The Ghost Road" which has netted her countless literary awards. (including the prestigious Booker Prize).
The Life Class holds its own with these classic works. It begins at the Slade School of Art in London in 1914. Barker introduces us to the main characters:
Paul Tarrant-A young artist who is not doing well at art school. He has a short romance with Teresa a worldly model. He is beaten up by Teresa's husband. Paul falls out of love with Teresa because he is besotted with the beautiful Elinor.
Elinor Brooke-A young virginal artist at the Slade School. Her wealthy family wants this fetching girl to marry and have children as was expected in English society. Elinor, however, seeks a life in art. She is courted by many men including:
Kit Neville-He is love with Elinor but she rejects his marriage proposal. His chief rival for Elinor's hand is Paul Tarrant. The two men meet in France.
Paul sexually initiates Elinor and the two fall in love. The best part of the book is the letters they write to one another during World War I. Elinor wishes to pretend there is no war going on while Paul is deeply involved in war service as a Red Cross Volunteer. This difference in viewpoints will make their amorous relationship a rocky one.
The book is written in a clear prose reminiscent of such authors as Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh. All of Barker's books are relatively short but pithy and unforgettable in their depiction of the horrors of war and the vagaries of the human heart. I enjoyed the book as much as I did the World War I trilogy. Pat Barker is one of the finest British authors alive today.
Book Review: Martial Art
Summary: 4 Stars
Pat Barker channels her inner Ian McCewan in her most recent treatment of World War I and its impact on the modern soul of man. With her trademark skill in weaving fact and fiction evident throughout the book, Barker brings a few memorable characters to life and issues an indictment of man's impulse to destroy and the way it wars with his drive to create. Does it rise to the level of "Atonement", or even the Regeneration series? No, but it doesn't need to.
A group of tortured young artists toil at the famed Slade Art School in London in the years just preceding the Great War, thrashing out their passions for their work and for each other, looking, as is the wont of youth, for a doorway into the worlds of greatness and love. Paul Tarrant, the protaganist and keenest sufferer in the class, loves Elinor, the gifted society girl, but Neville, who is more talented than Paul and becomes his natural rival, loves her too. So Paul embarks on a physically absorbing affair with the troubled Teresa, a model at the Slade, and finds himself entangled in her violent marital troubles. And so it goes, another generation of creative types sorting themselves out, while outside the world boils and starts to explode.
The soap opera of the Slade set is reasonably diverting, but the narrative has the sense of drift, as if the author herself is burdened by the same lack of assurance of her characters. We all know what's coming, since we know the time frame involved, but rather than a sense of dread, the event itself comes as a relief, and the struggles of the main characters with themselves and the cruelties of their world far more compelling. They become more interesting, and ironically the war becomes a benificent change agent.
Not that Barker doesn't strain to articulate her fervent anti-war message. When Paul, excused from armed service due to nascent TB, embarks to France to serve as a medical assistant, we're served the gruesome feast in full. A French soldier under Paul's care has made his protest against the martial madness by shooting himself in the head. While being moved into the hospital theater "blood wells from the man's mouth, great thick black gobbets of blood. As he turns his head in the direction of their voices, his left eyeball swings against his cheek. 'Will he live?' Paul asks. She shrugs." There's a lot of this, which some might call gratuitous, particularly the episode where Paul treats a patient whose genitalia have been sliced off by shrapnel. His condition ignites a bedside debate over whether it would still be worth it for him to live.
Unfortunately, and unlike McEwan, Barker's narrative seems preachy rather than powerful, her characters much more shallow and predictable. It's not that they don't inspire any empathy--they're just too self involved for an outside viewer to become engrossed in their fates.
In the latter part of the book Barker falls back on the epistolary approach, narrating through letters exchanged between Elinor and Paul as he struggles with the grotesque realities around him and she rails against the oppressive trivialities around her. 'Elinor to Paul-"...I can't help feeling that my doings are terribly trivial compared with yours and that this may even be part of their attraction for you. It's like looking through the window of a doll's house, isn't it?"
Indeed. Elinor puts a fine point on the effect of the whole book. It's small in scale, not displeasing to experience, but as a window on life, to be taken just about as seriously.
Book Review: Sadly unhistorical
Summary: 1 Stars
After having enjoyed Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, particularly for its historical aspect, Life Class is hugely disappointing. Barker hasn't done her research on the true young artists at the Slade in 1914, the influence of Tonks was nowhere near that of the Vorticists' publishing of "Blast" (1914) and their works, nor Roger Fry's two crucial exhibitions of 1911 and 1913, and she misrepresents the women artists of the time, thus receiving none of the credit due them. With the influence that Barker has in forming the public's views on this (and any) period of history, she's done all a great disservice.