Life Class
Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, 249pp, £16.99
Paul and Elinor are students at the Slade School of Art when they meet in early 1914, but at the outbreak of war Paul volunteers for the Belgian Red Cross. While he spends his days at Ypres in the stench of the salle d’attente, tending to maimed and dying soldiers, Elinor continues to study at the Slade, becoming immersed in the aesthetic and philosophical ideas of Bloomsbury society. Their lives grow apart, but they still share a belief in the importance of art.
In Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, the devastations of the First World War leave men questioning their masculinity. This time it’s women who are concerned with gender roles, but male characters still take centre stage. For her era, Elinor is a model feminist, disdainful of marriage and dedicated to her work as an artist. While Paul is dealing with casualties on the front line, she can largely ignore the war. It is social inequality that makes her lifestyle possible: “I’m a woman. Nobody’s asking me to fight.”
Barker portrays the war’s effect on Paul, and its lack of impact on Elinor, so that the decay of their relationship feels inevitable. But it’s always clear where her sympathies lie: certainly not with the woman who describes war as “unchosen, it’s passive and I don’t think that’s a proper subject for art”.
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