Rendering and Remembering
By JOHN
VERNON
TOBY’S ROOM
By Pat Barker
302 pp. Doubleday. $25.95.
“It had become a preoccupation of his — almost an
obsession — working out how the war had changed him; other people, too, of
course.” The war is World War I and he is Paul Tarrant, a character in Pat
Barker’s new novel, “Toby’s Room.” But the obsession belongs equally to Barker,
who has pursued it through a remarkable series of novels: the much-admired “Regeneration”
trilogy (“Regeneration,” “The Eye in the Door” and “The Ghost Road”), “Life
Class” and now “Toby’s Room.”
We can only surmise why Barker keeps returning to
the Great War more than 20 years after “Regeneration.” When it was first
published, reviewers marveled at her ability to write about a historical moment
for which neither her age nor, presumably, her experience had prepared her. One
might conclude that she has something to prove, but these novels go far beyond
a demonstration of the powers of the historical imagination. Like most good
works of fiction, they’re not so much about the events they depict as about the
resonance of those events, the way certain actions ripple through people’s
lives. Actual scenes of war are few; the fighting mostly happens offstage. But
the damage of war, both physical and psychological, is everywhere, graphic and
unforgettable.
“Toby’s Room” portrays a group of students at the
Slade School of Fine Art in London. When the war begins, both Paul Tarrant and
Kit Neville serve as volunteers with the Belgian Red Cross. However, their
friend (and Paul’s off-and-on lover) Elinor Brooke chooses to disregard it.
Like Virginia Woolf (who makes a cameo appearance), Elinor thinks that since
women are outside the political process the war doesn’t concern her, and she
imposes a taboo on herself: the war is not to be acknowledged, in either her
art or her life. But her brother, Toby, a doctor, has become a medical officer
at the front, and when the telegram arrives describing him as “Missing,
Believed Killed,” Elinor’s comeuppance has only begun. She knows that Neville
was serving with her brother as a stretcher bearer and writes to him, trying to
learn what happened to Toby, but he doesn’t reply. And so she too becomes
obsessed — with how Toby died, with why his remains were never found, and, most
of all, with why an unfinished final letter, returned to the family among his
belongings, says that he knows he’s not coming back.
Barker’s method in “Toby’s Room” is the same one
she employed in the “Regeneration” trilogy: to use historical characters and
events as way points for charting her narrative. Her mix of the fictional and
the real is seamless, no doubt because she understands that “real” in a novel
always means imagined versions of once-living persons. In “Toby’s Room,” Henry
Tonks, the Slade professor of fine art, is the historical figure at the story’s
center. When the war erupts, he divides his time between the Slade and Queen
Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, where he sketches wounded soldiers as an aid to
facial surgeons, thus making his skills serve both art and medical science. (In
an author’s note, Barker helpfully supplies a link to a Web site where readers
can view the historical Tonks’s portraits.)
Barker herself is clearly fascinated with science,
and her way of telling a story could even be thought of as a laboratory
experiment. She introduces us to soldiers who have lost crucial pieces of
themselves in the war — speech, memory, a leg, a face — then inserts these
soldiers into the maze of everyday life in order to see what will happen. Loss
both alters and hyperbolizes them; it confirms who they’ve always been while at
the same time hideously magnifying their unrelenting personalities.
Aside from Elinor, Kit Neville is perhaps the most
memorable of the novel’s characters. Awkward, cynical and offensive, this
“famous war artist” returns to London from the front horribly disfigured.
Instead of pitying himself, he jokes about his mutilation. Wearing a Rupert
Brooke mask, he rides in a cab whose driver brags that the actual poet was once
his fare and quotes his most platitudinous line — “There’s some corner of a
foreign field / That is forever England” — to which Neville responds, “That
would be the bit with my nose under it.”
In a remarkable series of chapters, Neville endures
an operation on his face and with his morphine-warped consciousness remembers
the events leading up to Toby’s death. Is he in England dreaming of the war or
in France dreaming of Queen Mary’s Hospital? In Barker’s vivid use of interior
monologue, it appears to be both.
Chronologically, “Toby’s Room” straddles Barker’s
previous novel, “Life Class.” The major characters are the same, and the events
of “Life Class” dovetail neatly into the five-year hiatus between Parts 1 and 2
of “Toby’s Room.” The second novel, then, is not so much a sequel as an
expansion — in both directions — of the first. Each occupies the negative space
of the other, and background information absent in the first novel shows up in
the second, from the reason Elinor’s hair is so short to the source of her
sexual reticence. The result is a strange sort of duet. In a sense, the two
novels make a unit, yet each is also self-contained. Whether this impulse to
enlarge her story will result in a third novel remains to be seen, but if it
does I suspect readers will be treated to something noteworthy: an intersecting
instead of a purely sequential trilogy. Some trilogies become obligations — as
in, “I’ve written the first two, I guess I have to write the third” — and
consequently run out of steam. I don’t imagine this will happen with Barker.
Her stories are too engaging, and they grow and expand in unexpected
directions.
“Toby’s Room” takes large risks. It’s dark, painful
and indelibly grotesque, yet it’s also tender. It strains against its own
narrative control to create, in the midst of ordinary life, a kind of deformed
reality — precisely to illustrate how everything we call “ordinary” is
disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly.
John Vernon teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton
University. His most recent novel is “Lucky Billy.”
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