Artists in a time of war

"Life Class" by Pat Barker

Doubleday, 311 pp., $23.95

Thirteen years after she won the Booker Prize for "The Ghost Road," British writer Pat Barker has returned to the World War I battlefront. And it's done her a world of good.

"The Ghost Road" was the closing volume in Barker's "Regeneration Trilogy," an epic work of fiction that raised a host of questions about society's urges toward collective violence, whether that society be the Europe of the early 20th century or the tribal Melanesia observed by 19th-century anthropologists.

In "Life Class" (in bookstores Tuesday), the scope is more restricted (the book appears to be the first in a projected series of novels whose scope may expand later on). The time is the summer of 1914 and winter of 1914-1915. The action, set in England and Belgium, is seen through the eyes of a small circle of friends and rivals attending London's famous Slade School of Fine Art.

As in the earlier trilogy, real-life figures mix with Barker's imagined characters. Artist Augustus John, Slade teacher Henry Tonks and arts patron Lady Ottoline Morrell all play roles in the story, though not so central as the roles played by poet Siegfried Sassoon and anthropologist William Rivers in the earlier books.

Instead, the young art students — loosely inspired by Slade-trained artists Christopher Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington — occupy the limelight. For 100 pages, Barker fully immerses us in their milieu before making any mention of "the crisis in the Balkans." The affinities, insecurities and competition among would-be artists just finding their voices are masterfully rendered.

As war breaks out, the novel splits into two. The self-absorption of struggling young artists (in the book's first half) yields to those same characters' urgent, fractured reactions to a world plunged into blood and chaos (in its second half).

The artists are: Paul Tarrant, who works in a hospital near the frontlines in Belgium and, after years of floundering, finally finds his subject matter in his patients; Kit Neville, a Futurist painter who had some success before the war and now is drawn toward the front as well (although not as an ambulance driver, as he'd hoped); and Elinor Brooke, who stays in London and refuses, on principle, to let the "imposed" subject of war infiltrate any of her artistic efforts.

Both Paul and Kit are attracted to Elinor who, prewar, fended them off in ambivalent ways. Now, as Elinor becomes their link to the world back home, the rivalry between them grows more intimate and awkward. But the book's central tension stems from questions surrounding the artist's role in wartime.

Should an artist depict what he sees because, as Paul says, "it's there. They're there, the people, the men. And it's not right their suffering should just be swept out of sight"? Or is an artist making an exploitative "Faustian pact" when he portrays atrocities, however successfully he renders them?

Barker leaves the question unanswered — even as she illuminates the dilemma.

Despite its somber subject matter, "Life Class" is a swift read. Barker's prose has become so artfully distilled that she can put thorny aesthetic and ethical points across with little seeming effort. Clarity and subtlety are welded together in streamlined fashion. Characters' behavior bends or reverses itself in ways that surprise even them. The result is a book so alive from page to page that it's difficult to put down.

Barker also brings her usual wizardly descriptive powers to the task, whether she's evoking artists' studios or makeshift operating theaters near the battlefront. Her physical description of her characters is just as good, as is her nailing of relationships.

In an interview, Barker has said she's still writing about these same characters, and there is something about "Life Class" that, as fine as it is, feels incomplete. It's not a reviewer's place to prescribe, but I can't help hoping she'll take Paul, Kit and Elinor through and beyond the war to the 1920s and 1930s, when war — both past war and future war — cast its shadows over everything.