KEY POINTS:
Paul Tarrant is a young man trying to learn how to be an artist at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, just before the outbreak of World War I. Bronchial and frail, Paul is attempting to draw a nude in a "life class" conducted by the formidable Professor Henry Tonks (based on the real Tonks who taught at Slade), "a dark planet" who moves through the room throwing out criticism like darts. Tonks arrives at Tarrant's easel and looks at the mess the student has that very minute decided is a "dishonest failure".
"Is that really the best you can do?" asks Tonks.
Paul rushes, shouting, out of the class, and has a strange, violent encounter in a park, a bruising which matches his internal turmoil over his "career", the voice of his dead Nan, "a slum landlord of quite astonishing rapacity", mocking his delusions that he could ever be any good.
Best not to brood alone. Later that night, Paul meets up with friends at the smoky Cafe Royal - fellow artist Elinor Brooke; Kit Neville, a truculent, childish painter whose career is starting to take off (which Paul thinks is most unfair); and Elinor's friend Teresa, a model. Paul and Teresa start an affair, based on an attraction which quickly wears off on his part, especially when her estranged husband starts stalking them both. Paul suspects the husband is a fabrication Teresa has conjured to create attention. Part of this may be true.
And Paul is starting to get even more confused by the rising depth of his feelings for Elinor, after whom Kit Neville also lusts, in a bullying kind of way.
This triangle leads into one of the funniest sections of Life Class, which is a superb return to the World War I territory Barker inhabited so adroitly in her Regeneration trilogy in the early 90s and for which she won the 1995 Booker for the final instalment, The Ghost Road.
Elinor is staying at her parent's home in the country, about to host Paul and Kit for a weekend, an invitation she now feels was a mistake. Kit has proposed, by letter, which she has ignored, and the unwitting Paul has been inserted into the guest list as a buffer against Kit's "constant, clumsy efforts to manoeuvre her into bed".
The trio sets off for a bike ride. Kit can't ride very well, "he was boiling, eyes stinging with sweat, upper lip prickling, temper and temperature sky-high." He is an accident waiting to happen.
Barker's chapters here, on Elinor's family dynamics, Kit's feverish misogyny and Elinor's innate desire to be left alone, are brilliantly fluid.
But then war alters everything, as Kit and Paul take off separately to the front in France and Belgium to work in makeshift hospitals. Paul becomes numb, a working machine, leavened a little by correspondence with Elinor, whom he has decided he must love. She visits him, in his little rented room. They make love but she's still not sure what impels her - love, loneliness, fear or all of those. When war ends, will they have a future or has all that wounding and death gone too deep for them to heal? Does art have any relevance any more?
Barker's most recent novel Double Vision dealt with contemporary war zones, in Sarajevo and Afghanistan. In less nimble hands Life Class could have felt like going back to the future, a rehash of the Regeneration series. I came away from this book full of renewed admiration for her ability to pin down the psychological dynamics of young people under the pressure of war, her apparently effortless writing - and her dry-as-a-bone humour.
Returning to poor old Kit, and that bike ride, where Elinor is admiring the scenery: "Miles and miles of grass," she is saying to Paul. "You know how the colour changes when the wind blows over it?"
Thinks Kit: "Oh, for Gods sake. Grass is grass." He hasnt got a clue.
