In session: 'Life Class' looks at true nature of living

The title of Pat Barker's stirring new novel refers to a course that her characters are taking in a London art school as Europe stumbles toward World War I. But the title also refers to the nature of their experiences, the "life class" thrust upon them every day with its unforeseeable curriculum and its deadly final exam. The young men and women whom Barker follows must somehow figure out how to live amid the incongruity of art and destruction.

When the novel opens, in 1914, Paul is a discouraged art student. His professor tells him, "There's no feeling. ... You seem to have nothing to say." That brutal critique startles Paul into realizing that, for him, art had always been something idealized and removed from daily experience. But he can't imagine an alternative until later, when everything beautiful has been stripped away.

Barker has constructed this novel with a daringly languid plot. That the story remains so engaging is a testament to her elegant style and psychological acuity. The first half almost seems to drift as it follows Paul's fading efforts to paint and his equally doomed affair with a married art model, who is really just a substitute for the woman he loves, Elinor, one of the school's most promising artists. The tension accumulates slowly in a fascinating romantic triangle that involves Paul and another suitor for Elinor's heart, Kit Neville, who is already selling his paintings in London.

Paul loves Elinor even as he realizes she's needy and manipulative. A friend says, "If you love anybody, you love Elinor, and you only love her because you know she won't have you." It's a jarring diagnosis, as upsetting as Neville's statement that "for Elinor men come in twos."

Barker won the Booker Prize in 1995 for "The Ghost Road," and the same sure talent is evident in the second half of "Life Class" when Paul becomes an orderly and ambulance driver in Belgium. The experience burns away everything about his previous life. The listless art student becomes "a column of blood, bone and nerves encased in a sheath of cold, sweaty skin." Barker knows just how to suggest the wide sweep of destruction and despair with a few searing images: a dying horse shrieking, the face of an astonished survivor, a man "lying on the ground cradling his intestines in his arms as tenderly as a woman nursing a sick child."

What interests her particularly in "Life Class," though, is the revelatory effect of this experience on her characters' aesthetics: What should be the subjects for art in a time of war? Elinor refuses to join the war effort and tries to "ignore it." "It's been imposed on us from the outside," she tells Paul. "It's unchosen, it's passive, and I don't think that's the proper subject for art."

But for Paul, war provides the essential subject. Between exhausting sessions in the hospital, he paints "the worst aspect of his duties as an orderly": cleansing infected injuries, wrapping fresh stumps, tying raving men to gurneys. Let Elinor think he'd created "an arty freak show"; he's determined to paint what he sees.

Barker never pushes the contemporary allusions here, but these are questions with tragic relevance for us. At a time when we're encouraged to go on with our lives and photographers are banned from showing coffins returning from Iraq, what images of war? The lessons in "Life Class" aren't easy, but they're deeply affecting.