LIFE CLASS by Pat Barker

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

Paul and Elinor and their art student friends inhabit a pre-World War 1 privileged, bohemian nirvana in London, but with an entertaining array of neuroses on the quality of artwork and relationships. Instead of tilting to the vapid, Paul and Elinor are developed with satisfying depth as suspense builds as to how the war will alter their worlds. War comes, and breezy sequences about art, cafes, social tiffs and affairs, inheritances, and sexual tensions, become sharply juxtapositioned against Paul’s vital role supporting the medicals on the Western Front. Cutting off uniforms, wound washings, and triaging the dead and dying are presented unsparingly, but with an underlying tone of empathy. Thoughts and emotions of a young person confronting WW1’s horrors are portrayed masterfully as Paul comes to know himself better during war, but he finds that questions are raised that can never be answered. As with Ms. Barker’s better-known Regeneration, fictional characters seem tethered around a historical figure, in this case Henry Tonks, a British surgeon and wound artist, although Dr. Tonks has a minor role in this story.