by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99)
Pat Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for the second novel in her Regeneration trilogy, which powerfully described early psychoanalysis and shell-shock during the First World War. So sex and death during the Blitz would seem like fertile ground for Barker’s new novel, Noonday.
A third of the way into the novel, one of the trio of central characters has a realisation. Paul has just helped a scruffy boy called Kenny, who had been evacuated from London because of the Blitz, return home to his mother, only to see the building they lived in destroyed during an air raid. Paul realises that “he hadn’t been thinking about Kenny at all. It had been about himself and his mother. A kind of proxy reconciliation.” Kenny the working-class street urchin is sacrificed so that posh Paul can contemplate his subconscious.
There is a lot of this kind of stuff in Noonday. The three central characters—Kit, who loves Elinor, who is married to Paul—meet some horrid poor people and jump in and out of bed with one another. We are often told how they feel: “Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless.” Elinor starts a diary in which she explains the plot. The bombs fall in coincidental places.
The best of this novel lies in the details: we learn that prostitutes during the Blitz hammered nails into their shoes so that their footsteps could be identified by potential clients in the blackout, and that after an air raid everyone tended to speak in whispers. As much as those points are interesting, Noonday struggles to escape the temptations of sentimentality that a story set in the Blitz affords.
Pat Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for the second novel in her Regeneration trilogy, which powerfully described early psychoanalysis and shell-shock during the First World War. So sex and death during the Blitz would seem like fertile ground for Barker’s new novel, Noonday.
A third of the way into the novel, one of the trio of central characters has a realisation. Paul has just helped a scruffy boy called Kenny, who had been evacuated from London because of the Blitz, return home to his mother, only to see the building they lived in destroyed during an air raid. Paul realises that “he hadn’t been thinking about Kenny at all. It had been about himself and his mother. A kind of proxy reconciliation.” Kenny the working-class street urchin is sacrificed so that posh Paul can contemplate his subconscious.
There is a lot of this kind of stuff in Noonday. The three central characters—Kit, who loves Elinor, who is married to Paul—meet some horrid poor people and jump in and out of bed with one another. We are often told how they feel: “Left alone in London, Paul felt increasingly restless.” Elinor starts a diary in which she explains the plot. The bombs fall in coincidental places.
The best of this novel lies in the details: we learn that prostitutes during the Blitz hammered nails into their shoes so that their footsteps could be identified by potential clients in the blackout, and that after an air raid everyone tended to speak in whispers. As much as those points are interesting, Noonday struggles to escape the temptations of sentimentality that a story set in the Blitz affords.
