Double Vision
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Pat Barker's vision of our times
REVIEW BY ROBERT WEIBEZAHL British novelist Pat Barker is less well known in this country than she deserves to be. She won the Booker Prize for her 1995 book The Ghost Road, the last volume in the Regeneration trilogy, set during and after the First World War and centered around the relationship between the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychologist William Rivers. Yet despite resounding plaudits from critics on this side of the Atlantic, Barker hasn't collected the large readership of, say, Martin Amis or Julian Barnes. This benign neglect may be because Barker's books are not flashy or hip. She doesn't mean them to be. What they are is intelligent, thought-provoking and always well-told. Her latest, Double Vision, is no exception. Set in present-day England, it is a deftly wrought and disturbing story of two people whose lives have been inalterably touched by the violence of our post-9/11 world. Kate Frobisher is a sculptor who lives on the edge of a forest near Newcastle, in the north of England. She is banged up when her car skids on some black ice on a cold night just after Christmas, and though her injuries are not permanent, she is temporarily limited in what she can do physically. This disability poses a problem because she has a major commission—a 15-foot statue of the risen Christ for the cathedral—and the day of the unveiling is fixed and looming. Kate reluctantly acknowledges that she needs help, and she hires a local man, Peter Wingrave, at the suggestion of the vicar. She is fiercely protective of her autonomy as an artist, but even more so she cherishes her solitude, because she is mourning her late husband Ben, a photojournalist killed during the American war on terror in Afghanistan. She is pleased when Peter proves an invaluable and non-intrusive presence, at least at first. At much the same time, Stephen Sharkey moves to the area from London. A burned-out war correspondent who was a friend of Ben Frobisher, Stephen has quit his job and plans to write a book about the media's complicity in war and contemporary violence. He hopes to use Ben's photographs in the book, which is one of the reasons he has come north. The other is that he in the throes of a divorce, an occupational hazard. Stephen moves into a cottage on his brother's property, and soon becomes involved with his nephew's au pair, Justine Braithewaite, the 19-year-old daughter of the vicar. Justine and Peter had been involved the previous summer, and their break-up has left Justine feeling a little insecure about the nature of love. For his own part, Peter, an aspiring writer, is an enigma. When Stephen reads some of Peter's eerie short stories, he senses that there is more to this man than meets the eye. Justine tells him that Peter has trouble understanding the boundary between admiration and obsession. Then Kate discovers Peter in her studio late one night. Having donned her work clothes, he is mimicking her actions, pretending to sculpt the huge figure. Shocked by this violation of her very sense of self, Kate sends Peter packing. But Peter lingers on the periphery of their lives, and may or may not play a part in the very different kind of jolt that awakens Stephen from his emotional stupor. Though set in the present, Double Vision shares much with Barker's earlier work. It underscores themes she has worked with in the past: memory and expiation. Both Kate and Stephen must shed the past in order to move on—Kate with her art, Stephen with his life—and there is a resonance in these imperatives for any of us who has lived through the violence of the last two years, even on the sidelines. Barker's prose has nuance and grace that often belie her subject matter—with its undercurrent of appalling brutality—and her ideas about the psychological effects of violence are presented in a subtle and elliptical way. As with Kate's mammoth sculpture or one of Ben's photographs, one needs to step back and see the whole picture in order to feel the full impact of Double Vision. Robert Weibezahl's new book, A Second Helping of Murder, has just been published by Poisoned Pen Press.
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