Fiction: Pat Barker, the most determined and directed of British novelists, has acquired a new fluidity. Double Vision, with its several moments of potent fear, lacks the grandeur of the trilogy but it tells a convincing, multi-layered story, and tells it well, writes Eileen Battersby
A war correspondent who has seen one dead body too many, including that of his close friend, a photo-journalist, realises his need to escape from London. Aside from Stephen Sharkley's trauma, there is the collapse of his marriage to a wife who got bored with waiting and looked elsewhere. He heads north, to the village which is home to his smug doctor brother.
Meanwhile Kate, the widow of Ben the photo-journalist, has endured another ordeal, a bizarre car crash yards from her home, in the same village. This is a rural England devastated by the burning pyres of dead animals sacrificed in the wake of the foot-and-mouth outbreak. War and death: Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration trilogy, and the most candid of novelists, is on familiar territory. Loss initially provides the central theme before survival takes over.
In ways the narrative is a sequence of mourning, with several interacting characters all trying to make sense of their situations.
None of the characters holds centre-stage. Each has their own importance. Barker quickly achieves the sense of creating a circle of people linked by various circumstances. Stephen, the reporter on the run from his personal mistakes and professional pressures, intends to take refuge in writing a book about "the way wars are represented". Instead, sanctuary comes in the form of Justine, the local vicar's daughter, whose passage from A levels to Cambridge medical studies has been postponed for a year due to illness.
Layer by layer, like an archaeologist revealing the past, Barker establishes a small world populated by people who are disturbingly real. A few are likeable, no one is too nice, none are really happy and most are about as odd as Stephen's young nephew, Adam, an eccentric 10- year-old with an inability to grasp the relevance of any individual beyond himself. The sole jot of potential evil is represented in the personality of Peter Wingrave, a good-looking literature graduate who survives by gardening and piecemeal jobs.
All of the parts quickly slide neatly into place. Peter, already vaguely known to Kate through his maintenance work in the churchyard, is presented to her by Alec the do-gooder vicar as an assistant in her studio. Kate has a deadline for a vast bronze of Christ, but her accident injuries have left her physically depleted. Still grieving for her husband, she must now work by proxy. Peter is attractive and very strange - and she needs help.
History and the facts of the present are consistently balanced against the details of daily life as lived in a small place among an even smaller group of people. There is little room for walk-on players, so intently does Barker observe her core characters. Bits of gossip fill in the gaps, the characters supply each other with information. The success of the narrative is that Barker manages to make it all seem very natural.
Perhaps not the most elegant of writers, she is, however, an effective one, with a feel for the disturbing. Her prose is plain, almost gruff, relieved by occasional flashes of lyric intelligence. Descriptions of events, such as a car crash seen from the victim's perspective, a burglary that explodes into a physical attack, a memorably evoked storm, and a potential freak disaster on an outing are all vivid and felt.
She makes tremendous use of Stephen's reaction to a Goya exhibition and later to his thoughts on the artist:
He was thinking about Goya, about his love of visiting circuses, fiestas, fairs, freak shows, street markets, acrobatic displays, lunatic asylums, bear fights, public executions, any spectacle strong enough to still the shouting of the demons in his ears. Portrait of a man who had come through.
Justine, who works part-time as Adam's minder, has yet to forgive her mother for walking out on her father. As expected, the girl is alert to the lack of real affection offered to Adam, who is regarded as little more than an insurance policy by Beth, who is desperate to hold on to her unfaithful doctor husband.
It could sound like a melodrama, with all the ingredients of any soap opera - people on the run from their emotions, grieving women, a middle-aged man with a history and a girl with none involved in an unlikely romance. But Barker succeeds because she avoids the obvious. This is fiction without frills. Double Vision is sustained by a commonsense tone that draws the reader in. Cross-references to war in Bosnia, to the process of sculpting, to a fairground ride demonstrate how cleverly Barker handles information.
A tough humour runs through the narrative. Stephen has few illusions:
One look in the mirror said it all. Lids crusted, eyelashes matted, the whites of his eyes criss-crossed with red veins, a Martian landscape. Contact lenses left in. After several painful attempts he managed to get them out.
Later, standing in a chemist's, he "looked, he thought, peering at himself in the mirror above the display stand, like a soon-to-be-divorced, almost middle-aged man, sweaty, frightened, uncool . . ."
Stephen's awareness of his fragmentation is well-conveyed, particularly when he meets his brother, Robert, at whose small cottage he hopes to recover his sense of self. Many writers may have been tempted to have made more of a character such as Kate the widowed sculptress, but Barker has become more interested in people than in token heroes.
Her early fiction, such as Union Street, Blow Your House Down and The Century's Daughter (now re-titled Liza's England), was strongly campaigning, good, gritty realism. But with her fifth novel, Regeneration (1991), she emerged as a major force. It is a powerful work, the first and strongest element of what became a courageous trilogy (the other books were The Eye in the Door, in 1993, and The Ghost Road, which won the 1995 Booker Prize).
Psychological turmoil is the bedrock of Barker's fiction. War situations, with their combination of terror and surreal euphoria, clearly fascinate her. Shocking images and ghosts reverberate. Regeneration remains her finest achievement, while the other two trilogy novels, particularly The Eye in the Door, with its evocation of casual evil, are also excellent.
Another World (1998) was essentially a domestic drama bordering on horror story, which struggled beneath the weight of Barker's war theme. Her subsequent book, Border Crossing, lacked her characteristic commitment. Double Vision is as confident as it is honest and succeeds in its intention of looking at individual lives in flux.
For a writer who is so strong on physical detail, on the settings in which events occur - the light, the slant of the sun - she is also skilled at characterisation. All of the people in this book come to life, her dialogue is believable, and this makes her narrative twists and shifts convince more as plausible developments than mere devices.
Late in the novel, a routine burglary becomes something far more sinister as Justine surprises the thieves. Even here, Barker resists opting for the obvious. Nothing is pursued laboriously to the conclusion. Pat Barker, the most determined and directed of British novelists, has acquired a new fluidity. Double Vision, with its several moments of potent fear, lacks the grandeur of the trilogy but it tells a convincing, multi-layered story, and tells it well.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Double Vision. By Pat Barker, Hamish Hamilton, 307pp, £16.99