Book: Double Vision
Author: Pat Barker
Price: Hamish Hamilton, ?16.99
What kinds of people make interesting fictional characters? The question ought not to be necessary. What matters, as EM Forster noted in Aspects of the Novel, is not who they are but that they are convincing, that we feel the novelist has not "designed" them but created them. Yet reading the novels of Pat Barker, it is a question that repeatedly obtrudes. To answer it in a general way, you would have to say "People who think." Even in the case of her most physically active characters-her infantrymen of the Ghost Road trilogy, or the sculptor and foreign correspondent of her latest novel-thinking, or a kind of intellectual dexterity, seems to be their most eligible quality.
She is not alone in this. Since CP Snow, Aldous Huxley and Iris Murdoch, "thinking" characters have been privileged in serious British fiction. In the last two decades, AS Byatt, Ian McEwan and David Lodge have institutionalised thought as the province of the universities. McEwan's protagonist in Enduring Love is a science journalist whose partner is an academic; Lodge's comic world unfolds almost entirely within the walls of the academy; in Possession, the only people who think are academics. The British "literary" novel of the last 20 years has become a way of subcontracting the business of thinking to invented characters with the proper credentials for it.
If this is true, then it is clear that we will want thinkers we can respect in the novels we read. Barker's Ghost Road trilogy-Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road-offered both action and thought in a radical way, stirring first world war fact and fiction together so thoroughly that, as she suggested in her author's note to Regeneration, "it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not." The backbone of The Ghost Road was the actual meeting that took place in 1917 between Siegfried Sassoon and the anthropologist and neurologist WHR Rivers, and Sassoon's friendship with Wilfred Owen while he was under Rivers's care. The second and third novels did not have quite the same urgency and authority, simultaneously prosaic and vivid, of that material. Barker's bisexual hero Billy Prior, though promising in some way (comic? sexual? vernacular?), seemed an insufficiently profound part of the story, especially in the makeweight romance he conducted with his fianc?e Sarah Lumb. This is a common problem of novels which are compounded of documented greatness and pathos and their fictional counterparts. Fact in a novel, given half a chance, will charm the reader with its complexity and reality, elbowing pale fiction out of the door.
The Ghost Road occupies a curious space in British reading tastes. Its novelistic compass is victory and sacrifice, the heroic theme located in the historical past. To map that space, one needs to go back to the parting of the ways of fiction between 1890 and 1920, into those who wrote literary novels-Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James-and those who wrote for the masses-Kipling, Galsworthy, HG Wells. The interest of the latter three is now historic; writers in a period of social and political change, they were stuck in the old categories of empire, class, property and sexual repression. (The outdated certainties of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga explain why nobody reads it any more but also why, when adapted into an easier form, it has been one of the most successful television dramas of the last 40 years: the certainties become comforting.) The literary novelists of the era, however, are still read and admired for their prescience-for drawing their power from the reality of changing conditions. How relevant this split still is can be seen in British readers' continuing appetite for losing themselves in the certainties of historical fiction ("sexed up" to appeal to the taste for explicitness-perhaps that was the point of Billy Prior).
Pat Barker's first world war trilogy established her as a novelist who wrote convincingly about war and its infernal importance. More recently she has moved from the past to the present day, while maintaining her thematic pact with the violence that men do. Her last novel, Border Crossing, was a chronicle of a child killer, and her protagonist Danny Miller reappears in Double Vision under a new identity as Peter Wingrave, an evasive odd-job man and would-be writer who, like a virus, psychologically infects or affects most of the characters: the sculptor Kate Frobisher, who employs him as her assistant; Justine, his girlfriend; Stephen Sharkey, a foreign correspondent who has retired to a cottage in the country to write a book; and Alec Braithewaite, the local vicar and Justine's father.
If it is about one thing, Double Vision is a novel about reverberations of violence, of the murder committed by Peter 20 years before, of the death of the war photographer Ben Frobisher, Kate's husband, and of a handful of world historical events-the siege of Sarajevo, 9/11, the invasion of Afghanistan. Barker unflinchingly introduces these events onto her fictional rural north of England stage. She contrives to have Sharkey, the foreign correspondent, in Afghanistan when Ben Frobisher is murdered, and in Manhattan on the day of the al Qaeda attack. She also has him take a few days off from writing his book to attend the trial of Milosevic at The Hague.
I didn't enjoy Double Vision. Not because I disliked Barker's writing, often admirably plain in an era of forced style, or her desire to examine themes of violence, and its representation and origins. She does not try to analyse the causes of violence, which is in her favour. The novel opens with Kate Frobisher crashing her car on a patch of winter ice, and as the branches of a tree shatter her windscreen and "claw at her eyes and throat," the reader understands that violence is in nature and thus in humanity.
Yet here, as she did in The Ghost Road, she writes from the top down, starting not with an individual, but with an angle. Her characters therefore think rather than feel. They are subordinate to the historical or journalistic reference points they represent, mouthpieces for the ideas the author wishes to explore. In EM Forster's terms, these are characters designed, not created. The events invoked-Sarajevo, Afghanistan, 9/11-may be dramatic, but these invocations are short cuts to significance. This is shown up by the one section of dramatic background that works, and that may have been experienced by the author: Double Vision takes place during the foot-and-mouth cull, and its stench and savagery fill your nose and throat. The other backgrounds-Sharkey's book, the Milosevic trial, memories of Sarajevo-are of course legitimate sources to illuminate a foreground, but I am hard pressed to say what the foreground is, unless it be a foreign correspondent's affair with a vicar's daughter. There are thoughtful conversations: Goya's notion that art needs to show the violence it knows is discussed intelligently by Kate Frobisher and Stephen. But the apparently routine life events that touch the people in this novel occur in the manner of a television drama-people are widowed, or begin fucking someone 20 years younger, or do Hitchcockian things (dressing up in women's clothes)-and when the pace slackens, a new outbreak of random brutality is inevitable. The narrative reaches for great themes: the tone is that of an episode of Casualty.
Had Barker written from the bottom up, from characters that came to her mind in Forster's "delirious excitement" rather than the coldness of design, she might not have written such a surgical round-up of issues about violence. Instead, she might have written a novel about someone whose secret world and motivation threw light on our social and cultural conditions-surely one of the regulators of violence; someone, perhaps, like George Bowling in Orwell's Coming Up for Air (an unsurpassed portrait of England) or Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh's prescient wartime Sword of Honour trilogy.
But such a novel is, at some level, at odds with its society, and Double Vision is not a novel of dissent. Barker is careful not to disturb English mythology. There is a moment when she seems to have slipped back into Ghost Road territory as she recalls the image of a serviceman with a kitbag, stepping down from a train, looking at the surrounding fields, and "trudging up half-known roads, unloading hell behind him, step by step." She concedes that this image may only ever have been a sentimental fantasy but, instead of exploring the idea, reinforces the fantasy by ascribing it to "something deeper-some memory of the great forest. Sherwood. Arden."
Well, perhaps. We are a contradictory race. Not a little of our imagined potency comes from such pastoral emblems, despite their lack of substance. But they do not help us to face the world, or ourselves. Pastoral may have given way to urban, and urban to multicultural, but postwar British fiction continues to rely on received mythologies about ourselves. I am not talking about the need for psychology, or for more interiority of character. I am talking about sociology, an understanding of the social and historical settings we live in, because only sociology can lay bare the context in which psychology or "character" function. Madame Bovary is the archetype of this fictional approach; Michel Houellebecq's Atomised is a more recent example. (Significantly, both caused deep offence on first publication.) Evelyn Waugh once said, "I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language... I have no technical psychological interest." But Waugh's language said harsh things about our postwar world, many of which turned out to be true. In much contemporary British fiction, we reach for, but do not get, grand themes, because writers are obsessed with character, and a kind of character class-system-the cleverer the characters, the more "literary" the novel-and lack the imaginative courage to describe in detail the society and background that give rise to it.
