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Double Vision A Novel Pat Barker 9780374209056 Books

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Double Vision A Novel Pat Barker 9780374209056 Books

The easy part is reading Pat Barker's stories. The tough part is thinking comprehensively about what one has read. Therefore, this review will be desultory in nature, with my observations subject to revision, as I continue to think about this terrific book.

Double Vision is my second read of Barker, and it won't be my last. Her economic use of language, in an epoch of a surfeit of information, is perhaps her greatest strength. Settings are drawn well and sufficiently, but not Hardylike. Characters are consistent throughout, speaking a dialogue that's believably real for us moderns.

This story centers around a seemingly "retired" war correspondent and his links from his now dead photographer/partner's life. Without spilling too much, I'll say that it is enough anti-war in its effects on the main characters as it has to be without imitating the woes of Hecuba in Troy.

Although the war scenes are alarming, the tale of insecurity in secure suburban civilization is probably the better carrier of message. The hints about human predation in just a few sentences in a scene where Uncle Stephen picks up nephew Adam from school play wondrously with judgments about our actual achievements regarding security.

To finish now, I'll say that the somewhat comedic ending indicates to me that a novel can be sensitive to commercial concerns, without sacrificing truth.

This book can be read easily in a weekend. You'll find it a labor to set down.


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Double Vision A Novel Pat Barker 9780374209056 Books Reviews

In alignment with her previous novels, Pat Barker explores how people have been fractured by violence in her latest novel, DOUBLE VISION. In the post-9/11 world Barker finds more manifestations of violence to write about. Each character in DOUBLE VISION has experienced some traumatic event that has resulted in a double vision of sorts. One eye is turned back to the past and the other is looking forward from the moment that violence shattered their life. They will never be the same.
In the north of England in the countryside near Newcastle Stephen Sharkey moves from London to the North after resigning from his post of a war correspondent. He settles down in his brother's empty cottage to write about his experiences in various war-torn locations. But although he has removed himself from the danger, he continues to be plagued by nightmares and flashbacks of his horrific war experiences. Meanwhile Beth, the wife of his deceased colleague who was shot by a sniper in Afghanistan, struggles to recover from an automobile accident. She lives only miles from Stephen's cottage, but she endures her own double vision of how violence ruptured her life and cut short the life of her husband.
In addition to the two main characters there are others who suffer from their own double vision. There is Justine who interrupts a home robbery and is beaten up and Peter who has suffered some secretive misdeeds that landed him in prison at a young age. Not only have the characters suffered from violence but also the landscape. Barker included numerous references to violence of the Foot and Mouth epidemic that has resulted in pyres to extinguish the affected livestock and the resulting decline in tourist trade and local economic commerce.
Barker performs a good exploration of how contemporary violence affects individuals and the land but I feel that she could have reached deeper into the individual darkness of each of her characters. This is a slim book at roughly 250 pages therefore there is adequate space to expand without dire consequences. There are also some characters that were not fully developed such as 10-year-old Adam. Otherwise DOUBLE VISION is a satisfying read. 3.5 stars.
Pat Barker's DOUBLE VISION resolves perfectly the beery "brew-haha" of Miller Lite's immortal bar argument "Tastes great! Less filling!" In this oh-so-faint cousin to English pastoral novels of George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy, Pat Barker has crafted a writerly but irrelevant novel filled with characterless characters, too-improbable plot contrivances, and pop philosophical conundrums supposedly arising from the great (and noticeably non-Asian, non-African) horrors of the last decade - Afghanistan, Kosovo, and 9/11.

The novel begins with the heroine, Kate Frobisher, suffering a temporarily debilitating auto accident on an icy country road. Kate is a sculptress, recently commissioned to create a fifteen-foot statue of (who else?) Christ. Her late husband Ben has recently died in Afghanistan, working there as a war photographer, and now Ben's partner and boozy friend Stephen arrives to incorporate Ben's work into a book about war and its observers and the meaning of recording such events while not participating (far, far, far better treated in the DVD "War Photographer" about James Nachtwey).

Remarkably, Stephen's brother Robert lives close by to Kate, and although Stephen falls for Kate, he falls even harder for Robert's 19-year-old babysitter, Justine (so exotically French!), the only child of the local (and badly divorced) vicar, Alec, who happens to take in ex-cons, one of whom, Peter, becomes Kate's temporary arms and legs in the art studio while she recovers from her accident. Got all that? Add in Robert's son Adam, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and Peter's Zelig-like personality and surprise criminal past, all shadowed by that indomitable 15-foot Christ statue, and the result is "another fine mess" as Oliver Hardy used to say.

Barker's style is reservedly British, but her prose is observant and at times compelling if you can look past such Anglicisms as kerb (curb), poofs (gays), and fug ("a fug of warmth and music", "a fug of human bodies and damp wool"). She spins a convoluted web of strained family relationships among Robert's and Stephen's family, and between Stephen, Justine, and Alec, and their impact on one other plays at times like a multi-themed concerto.

Unfortunately, the interjections of BIG IDEAS about war, media, the role of the correspondent/photographer, Goya's representations of war, the fragility of life and our perpetual exposure to random violence and tragedy, even in the English countryside, reduce a novel of manners to Novel Lite. Nice prose, but too many big ideas too easily tossed off and unexamined, requiring too many plot manipulations to accommodate their presence (or force their presence in the first place). In the end, after all the dancing around horrific war images of rape and death, sniper bullets through the skull, and 9/11 catastrophes, we're left with Stephen's stunningly banal observation, "No experience is valid without the accompanying image." This philosophical gem presents itself just before a day cruise almost turned Titanic reminds us again about life's ever-threatening tragedies.

In the end, DOUBLE VISION feels more like a gentrified, exurb-London version of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEARS, full of grunts and head-clubbings (literal and figurative, that is) within an artsy, cloistered-almost-to-incestuousness, gossipy, adulterous, self-consciously angst-ridden clan of urban (and faultlessly urbane) transplants. Only Mrs. Peel and Mr. Steed are missing to complete the tableaux.

For those seeking this kind of countryside "slice of life" with a little intrigue, I recommend the more compelling and considerably more artistically satisfying alternatives of Graham Swift's WATERLAND and EVER AFTER and Robertson Davies' THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY.
The easy part is reading Pat Barker's stories. The tough part is thinking comprehensively about what one has read. Therefore, this review will be desultory in nature, with my observations subject to revision, as I continue to think about this terrific book.

Double Vision is my second read of Barker, and it won't be my last. Her economic use of language, in an epoch of a surfeit of information, is perhaps her greatest strength. Settings are drawn well and sufficiently, but not Hardylike. Characters are consistent throughout, speaking a dialogue that's believably real for us moderns.

This story centers around a seemingly "retired" war correspondent and his links from his now dead photographer/partner's life. Without spilling too much, I'll say that it is enough anti-war in its effects on the main characters as it has to be without imitating the woes of Hecuba in Troy.

Although the war scenes are alarming, the tale of insecurity in secure suburban civilization is probably the better carrier of message. The hints about human predation in just a few sentences in a scene where Uncle Stephen picks up nephew Adam from school play wondrously with judgments about our actual achievements regarding security.

To finish now, I'll say that the somewhat comedic ending indicates to me that a novel can be sensitive to commercial concerns, without sacrificing truth.

This book can be read easily in a weekend. You'll find it a labor to set down.