All about art, but lacking in artistry

FICTION: Toby’s Room By Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton, 264pp. £16.99

ELINOR BROOKE is an art student and unusually ambitious. She wants to succeed and is attending a famous art school, the Slade, in London. None of this sounds remarkable, except that it is 1912 and Elinor, from a stiff, upper-middle-class background, has chosen a career over early marriage.

This is the 12th novel, and the first in five years, by Pat Barker, the winner of the 1995 Booker Prize (as it was then). It has a dull opening compounded by a surprising lack of period atmosphere. The dialogue, never one of her strengths, is particularly laboured, and the characterisation is sketchy. Elinor has arrived at a crisis in her relationship with her beloved brother, Toby, which is described with the melodramatic heavy-handedness of a bad romance yarn aspiring to cut-glass precision.

As the prose is so strained, it is easy to speculate instead whether this novel is intended as an act of homage to Virginia Woolf. Stylistically, the two writers are worlds apart, and Woolf’s extraordinary third work, Jacob’s Room (1922), shaped by her emerging modernism – which was to be followed by, and perfected in, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse (1927) – casts a thematic shadow over Barker’s lumpily earthbound narrative. Also hovering over Barker’s book is the fact that Woolf never recovered from the early death of her beloved brother Thoby in 1906.

Barker’s language rarely soars, and certainly not here; she is a truth teller, not a magician. “He bent forward, his sleeve a black wing brushing her face.” The extracts from Elinor’s diary are particularly weak.

Barker’s narrative appears to be going nowhere until a potentially vital character is introduced. The arrival into the Slade lecture room of Professor Tonks immediately suggests that Barker is about to engage in something she has done very well in the past, most notably in the Ghost Road trilogy, the summoning of real-life people.

The intimidating professor, seen through Elinor’s eyes as “a tall, formally dressed, thin, ascetic man with the face of a Roman emperor, or a fish eagle”, is Henry Tonks (1862-1937), a famously caustic surgeon and artist who taught at the Slade from 1892 until 1930, becoming professor of fine art in 1918, a post he held until his retirement.

Tonks, a name nowadays more associated with the Harry Potter series, became involved with the pioneering plastic surgery devised by British doctors in response to the gruesome facial injuries suffered by soldiers returning from the Front. Tonks painted the ruined faces of victims. The portraits are disturbingly eloquent.

Readers of Barker’s previous novel, Life Class (2007), will be intrigued and/or irritated by the replication of material. Toby’s Room is less a sequel than a revisiting of her previous book. There is a hasty flatness about this novel that leaves the impression Barker felt some of the material used in that earlier novel had further possibilities.

Ultimately though, the major problem overwhelming Toby’s Room is Barker’s passionate engagement with the first World War. So interested is she in this subject that the opening sequences read as merely an obstacle to be negotiated before Barker concentrates on the history.

By recruiting Tonks, Barker then encourages the reader to see the somewhat androgynous Elinor as Dora Carrington, while Kit Neville must be based on the artist Mark Gertler, and the mild-mannered Paul Tarrant is most likely inspired by the artist Paul Nash. All of which adds to the stilted quality of the many of the exchanges.

When Elinor participates in dissecting corpses as part of her anatomy course, the narrative acquires an element of conviction through Barker’s formidable and proven grasp of source material. Toby, never a fully realised character when present, becomes totally shrouded in mystery after he is reported missing in action. His plight does not develop into a tragedy as Elinor herself is so thinly drawn.

Pat Barker learned her craft well. Her fifth novel, Regeneration (1991), the opening volume of The Ghost Road trilogy, remains her finest book to date. In it she assembles a memorable, mainly real-life cast dominated by poet Siegfried Sassoon and Dr WHR Rivers (1864-1922), the army neurologist and psychiatrist who worked with soldiers suffering trauma who were sent to Craiglockhart, a military hospital outside Edinburgh.

Rivers, a remarkable figure on many counts, features throughout the trilogy. In Toby’s Room, Barker evokes Queen’s Hospital (or Queen Mary’s Hospital), in Sidcup, in Kent, the emerging plastic surgery centre, in much the same way as she used Craiglockhart in the trilogy, most vividly in the opening volume.

The similarities between Regeneration and Toby’s Room also highlight the glaring differences. The earlier novel is far more convincing. It is atmospheric and Barker carefully creates a sense of period. By contrast Toby’s Room flounders between fact and fiction and is stymied by its loose connection with Life Class.

In fairness to Barker, always tenacious and gritty in her storytelling, there are moments of pathos. The narrative never loses sight of the horrific reality not only of war but, most importantly, of the damaged and the maimed - the living ghosts who invariably overshadow the dead and the lost. “So: a thousand young men with gouged-out eyes, blown-off jaws, gaping holes where their noses had been” would be “patched up and sent on their way with whatever the surgeons had managed to supply in the way of a face.”

For Barker’s wartime artists, landscapes are supplanted by a terrain consisting of broken bodies. Men such as Kit Neville, who has lost his nose, hide their disfigurements behind masks fashioned on the features of poet Rupert Brooke. The humour, such as it is, is supplied by the vicious retorts of the embittered Neville. It is he who finally reveals the truth about what happened to Toby. This emerges, with arch symbolism, in a Suffolk village which resembles Ypres. Yet Neville is prepared to conceal the facts. Barker, however, long preoccupied by the moral responsibility of art and the artist, ensures that an artist, Paul Tarrant, should place honour above personal feelings. Most ironically, though, for an earnest, painfully worthy novel so concerned with art, there is little artistry to celebrate.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times