Book review: Noonday, Pat Barker

Pat Barker brings her trilogy, which opened with Life Class, to a close. Photo / Rex Features

Early in Noonday, the fictional war artist Paul Tarrant awakes from a fever to question his motives for reuniting a small boy with his mother. Was it because he wished he could have done the same for himself? Yes, he concludes, and in doing so he'd put the boy in danger. "He'd failed in the most basic human task: to shield the present from the deforming weight of the past."

You assume you move on, he thinks, from what's happened to you, but "there's a trick, a flaw, some kind of hidden circularity in the path".

That hidden circularity, that deforming weight, is Barker's subject. Noonday completes a trilogy begun with Life Class and Toby's Room. Like the Regeneration trilogy, the extraordinary sequence of novels for which Barker is best known, these two were set in World War I; now she has turned her attention to World War II. But although she writes with precision about its distinct effects on the senses - the "edge of darkness buzzing" in an air raid; the relative depth of shadows in a blackout; the "mean, sneaky smell" of a gas leak - it seems less like a new war than an exacerbation of one that has never gone away.

As the heroine, Elinor Brooke, puts it, "every loss picks the scab off previous losses". Another character recognises in himself a "callousness" learned in the trenches.

Barker's Regeneration trilogy was set in the trenches and at Craiglockhart hospital outside Edinburgh, where a famous psychologist treated patients with shell shock. The psychologist, William Rivers, and some of the patients - Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen - appeared under their real names.

Twelve years after the last book in that trilogy, Barker gave readers the beginning of another: Life Class, which featured a group of students at the Slade School of Art, loosely but not directly based on artists such as Paul Nash and Dora Carrington. The role of William Rivers in the Regeneration trilogy is refracted in Life Class and its 2012 sequel, Toby's Room, through the character of Henry Tonks, a real surgeon and artist who made a meticulous record of the faces he reconstructed.

In Noonday, we meet Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville more than two decades after the end of Toby's Room. Elinor and Paul are married; Kit is married to Elinor's friend Catherine; both marriages have cooled. The death of Elinor's brother Toby - witnessed by Kit in the trenches and never spoken of by him since - is still keenly felt. Scenes from the earlier books are raked over, recalled unbidden.

The work the painters did in that earlier period has made their careers - their canvases now hang in the Tate and the National Gallery - but the intervening years have made each of them "a war artist without a war". "It was a strange predicament," Paul reflects, "to be remembered for what everybody else was trying to forget."

If anything, the present conflict has given them - or some of them - an opportunity. They have chosen to stay in London, committed to their old Bloomsbury haunts and working as ambulance drivers and air raid wardens. Their active lives are lived at night.

Barker's chronological leap is both ambitious and self-evident. Self-evident, because both wars fell within her characters' span. Ambitious, because that apparently obvious trajectory requires a sophisticated bridge between the drama of the present and the haunting of history. It must bear a heavy communal weight (London is burning, children are being evacuated) while never dwarfing traffic on a more intimate scale: a marriage, a friendship, a parent's death, a long-held resentment.

Overall, Barker's focus is sharp. She knows how hard it is to find a glazier for a single shattered window in a city of broken glass. When Paul tries to persuade Elinor to move to the countryside on the grounds that in the last war "people didn't take their wives to the trenches", she replies: "No, but the trenches didn't run through the family living room."

Barker's sentences can be pedestrian but they are direct enough never to obscure her dramatic sense of structure. The closer you get to the end, the more lives need saving and the more thwarted and complicated the domestic backdrop.

But in Noonday Barker has lost the medical aspect that gave the earlier novels one of their main areas of inquiry. There is no Rivers, no Tonks. Instead, we have a "spuggie": the medium Bertha Mason, pale-eyed, foul-mouthed and vast. She is not a mentor or a saviour but she is the most prominent character outside the central circle of friends, and the vessel for an idea: the "porous" membrane "between the living and the dead". Is Bertha genuine, or a fraud? She's both. She really hears the voices of the dead (their reports about the devil are hilarious - "not so much the Prince of Darkness, more a commercial traveller down on his luck") and they get her into trouble. Her underworld intelligence about the numbers killed is, as the policeman who's after her puts it, "a threat to public morale". But she also has to put on a performance to make money, and she sighs at the thought of "more cheesecloth up her fanny" when fake ectoplasm is needed in the seance.

Bertha would be one of the best characters Barker has written were it not for the strained third-person narration by which she reaches the reader. Apart from the passages from Elinor's diary, a third-person narrative is standard for this trilogy, and on the whole, Barker's tone is unobtrusive enough for free indirect speech to seem natural. But Bertha is a bawdy northerner on the run, holding seances in pawnshops and invaded by restless spirits. Barker does her viewpoint and, in dialogue, her voice triumphantly well. Why, then, has she chosen to place her at a distance?

Noonday
by Pat Barker
(Hamish Hamilton $37)

- Canvas, Telegraph