Noonday

January 4, 2016
Barker concludes a trilogy that began with three students at the Slade School of Fine Art in the run-up to World War I (Life Class), in this third volume, which takes the former classmates to London during the Blitz in 1940. Elinor Brooke and Paul Tarrant are now married and middle-aged. Paul is an air raid warden, and Elinor drives an ambulance. The third classmate, their mutual friend Kit Neville, arrives from America, where he has left behind his wife and daughter, and goes to work for the Ministry of Information as a German translator. Despite all the death and destruction around them, all three still try to advance their painting careers. Elinor even receives a commission from Kenneth Clark of the War Artists Advisory Committee. But an indiscretion on Paul’s part causes a rift in his marriage to Elinor, one that Kit, who says he has always loved her, sets out to exploit. And forever hanging over the story is the ghostly presence of Elinor’s brother, Toby, killed in action during WWI. Unfortunately, Barker’s depiction of how Londoners bravely put up with Hitler’s nightly bombing raids feels flat and familiar. The narrative meanders among several new characters—Kenny, a lost boy of the Blitz, and Bertha Mason, a medium—to limited effect, before finishing up in a flurry of melodramatic plot developments. In the end, this is a disappointing third act to a series that lacks the impact of Barker’s superior Regeneration trilogy.

Starred review from January 1, 2016
After a midtrilogy slump with Toby's Room (2012), Barker returns to form in the rueful, cautiously hopeful conclusion to a story that began in pre-World War I London and concludes with its three protagonists enduring the Blitz. Ambitious young students when their complex bonds were forged at the Slade School of Fine Art in Life Class (2008), Elinor Brooke, Kit Neville, and Paul Tarrant are now middle-aged painters contending with ingrained sexism (Elinor), a declining reputation (Neville), and the knowledge that his best-known, if not necessarily his best, work is behind him (Paul). World War I brought disfiguring injuries to Kit and drew together Elinor and Paul as lovers; now all three are on the homefront, dealing with the carnage produced by German planes' near-nightly bombings. Barker searingly re-creates a wartime landscape in which the apocalyptic has become routine: people stoically huddle overnight in Tube stations and barely notice the rubble they walk past on the daytime streets; rescue workers hunt for survivors inside devastated buildings that may collapse at any moment. But this is not a rah-rah Britain's Greatest Generation novel; Barker unsentimentally depicts Kit maneuvering for advantage as Paul and Elinor's marriage falters. Her mother's death stirs unwelcome memories of Elinor's charged relationship with her brother Toby; Paul, unsettled by thoughts of his own long-dead, mentally ill mother, falls into bed with a fellow air-raid warden. "Why do men think that makes it better?" Elinor snorts when he offers the time-honored excuse that the affair wasn't important. "It makes it worse." Is her one-night stand with Kit payback or a long overdue reckoning with their past? It might be both; Barker is as subtle and tough-minded here about human nature as in all her work. Yet the closing pages suggest the possibility of new beginnings even as they acknowledge the permanence of old wounds. Lacks the epic sweep of her Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy but nonetheless, a strong example of this gifted British writer's intelligent, uncompromising way with fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2015

Booker Prize winner Barker's celebrated "Regeneration Trilogy" boldly took on World War I, as did her recent novels Life Class and Toby's Room, about Elinor Brooke, Kit Neville, and Paul Tarrant, students at the Slade School of Art when war intervenes. This work wraps up their story, moving on to World War II as the Blitz burns up London's nights.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.