Double Vision Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, 307pp, £16.99 ISBN 0241141761

Combine that darkest of painters, Francisco Goya, whose words provide the frontispiece of Pat Barker's latest novel, and Barker's own fascination with the dark side of the soul, and you have a very dark book.

It's also not a very comfortable book to read, particularly if, like me, you happen to be a war correspondent. Long fascinated by war and its aftermath, this time Barker has moved into the present day and the fallout from 11 September. Her central character, Stephen Sharkey, is a war correspondent who insists he has hung up his flak jacket for the last time.

"People get into darkness to the point where it's the light that hurts," someone tells him, a line which perhaps explains why war correspondents find themselves returning to horrors a sane person would shy away from, and it is real life that they find it hard to deal with.

But having covered every conflict in the past ten years from Bosnia to Afghanistan, Stephen has had enough of witnessing other people's tragedies. Two images haunt him - that of a raped and mutilated girl with her skirt up, her eyes staring at him in a bombed-out building in Sarajevo, and the dead body of his photographer colleague Ben Frobisher, who was killed by a sniper on the road in Afghanistan just in front of his own car.

Stephen's marriage has collapsed after he called home from Manhattan, having covered the destruction of 11 September, to discover that his wife was in bed with another man. Most real correspondents would be wondering how on earth he reached New York on a day when all flights were grounded, frustrating most of them in London.

Determined to recover from his broken marriage and finally cure his addiction to war, Stephen goes to live in his brother's cottage in a rural Northumbria ravaged by foot-and-mouth disease. Inevitably - as male war correspondents are never far apart from their libidos - he starts an affair with Justine, the 19-year-old nanny to his nephew Adam.

Nearby lives Ben's widow, Kate, a sculptress bravely determined to complete a 15ft statue of Christ for her local church, despite a car accident that has left her unable to raise her arm.

Everyone in this scarred community seems to have suffered some tragedy. At times the book seems a little bit too full of symbolism - the frequent references to the pyres of burning sheep; Adam, the neglected nephew who collects the skulls of roadkill victims on the dark, winding country lanes and is overjoyed to find a mown-down badger; the vicar dreaming of dark trees coming in through the window . . .

As in Regeneration, her wonderful trilogy on the psychological damage caused by fighting in the trenches during the First World War, here Barker is fascinated by what motivates war correspondents to keep going back for more. The theme is further explored in the relationship between the cynical, battle-hardened Stephen and sensible Justine, "one of those flushed-pink sturdy English girls who never make it past the first round of Wimbledon". Justine astonishes Stephen by refusing to watch the news: she remarks that there is nothing she can do about what is going on, and says of those glued to the live television footage of the battlefront, "it's just wanking".

Stephen struggles to explain his "voyeurism", making no reference to the people he has met in these war-torn places or the fact that he cares about their fates. He argues weakly that his coverage enables people to "make moral choices". Barker could perhaps credit war correspondents with some compassion.

Although some news editors might behave like tinpot generals, Stephen was not, like the First World War soldiers Barker writes so well about in other books, being sent off to fight for his country. Yet her description of him arriving in Northumbria, getting off the train, looking at the sky, shouldering his kitbag and then trudging off home is the classic image of the soldier returning. Despite its contemporary setting, sometimes I felt this novel read as if the ghosts of 1914 were crossing the page and the effects of mustard gas were producing demons in the mind. Just as Stephen returns to find an English countryside much changed and in crisis, so war has changed enormously since those days.

But Barker is a skilful writer and her sparse style makes this book hard to put down. If we are left wondering about the many loose ends and why plot lines are introduced if they are not going to be resolved, perhaps it is because we want to go on reading. In real life, not all our questions are neatly answered. If they were, war correspondents would be out of a living.

Christina Lamb is a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. Her latest book, The Sewing Circles of Herat: my Afghan years, is published in paperback by Flamingo (£7.99)

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