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Resumen
A new novel from the Booker Prize winning Pat Barker, author of the Regeneration Trilogy , that unforgettably portrays London during the Blitz (her first portrayal of World War II) and reconfirms her place in the very top rank of British novelists.
London, the Blitz, Autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul Tarrant works as an air-raide warden.
Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three reach out for quick consolation. And into their midst comes the spirit medium Bertha Mason, grotesque and unforgettable, whose ability to make contact with the deceased finds vastly increased demands as death rains down from the skies. Old loves and obsessions resurface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice.
Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville begun with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room , Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.
Reseñas (4)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
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. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
Booker Prize-winner Barker has enjoyed critical and popular acclaim for her trio of novels about Great Britain in WWI, the so-called the Regeneration trilogy of Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1994), and The Ghost Road (1995). Barker's new novel completes a second trilogy begun with Life Class (2007) and continued with Toby's Room (2012), which dramatizes the lives of three friends from art school in London, from the last year of WWI to the early years of WWII, when the British capital suffered under the blitz of German bombs. The ability to conjure a national crisis exploding into a series of personal disasters, which so notably marked Barker's previous trilogy, is on full display here. But the weakness of plot many readers found in this trilogy's first two volumes, especially when compared to the tight, sturdy plots in the Regeneration novels, diminishes this final volume as well. But expect demand just the same, as the admiration for Barker transcends any recent lack of electricity.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2016 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
WE HAVE BEEN here before, with a screaming spread across the sky as the bomb goes into its "long, shrieking descent" and the chandelier begins to shake and an argument vanishes "into air" as the walls buckle from the shock of the blast. London, 1940. We know the pictures: St. Paul's Cathedral in the smoke, with its dome popping out into a patch of clear sky; walls caught in midtumble, and fire hoses playing in the dark, their jetting water like a band of light; the Henry Moore drawings of people sheltering in the tube stations. And we know the books. The Blitz and the later V-1 and V-2 bombings of the city have left an extraordinary literary record, whether in works produced at the time by writers like Graham Greene or in later fiction by Ian McEwan and Sarah Waters, among others. So Pat Barker's 13th novel deliberately puts us on familiar ground, and all the more so because "Noonday" doesn't limit itself to the bombs. Almost all books about the period pair the uncertainties of war with those of sexual passion, and in its account of a triangle that has endured for almost 30 years, this one is no exception. That's not the only way we've been here before. "Noonday" is also the third volume in a trilogy. We already know the now middle-aged painters who are its major characters, two men and a woman to whom Barker first introduced us in "Life Class" when they were students at London's Slade School of Fine Art in the years before the Great War. The trilogy's second and finest volume, "Toby's Room," took us into that war's hardest days, and in 1940 Paul Tarrant still limps from an old wound. Kit Neville got it worse - his nose was shot off, and he now lives with a surgically reconstructed face. Paul and Kit's fellow student Elinor Brooke lost her brother, Toby, in 1917, and one of the first things we learn in "Noonday" is that she and Paul have now married. Though we suspect she'll have more to do with Kit. All that allows Barker to start in the middle of a family drama, and the novel's opening chapters get the full benefit of the careful development these characters have earlier received. But there's one final way Barker has brought us here before: This is her second trilogy about war and art and the relation between them. Barker began her career with two novels set in the tough north-of-England world from which she herself came. Both "Union Street" and "Blow Your House Down" - pounding accounts of women's physical experience, of their lives as bodies - should be better known than they are. Barker first found a large audience, however, with what's become known as the "Regeneration" trilogy, whose final volume, "The Ghost Road," won the Booker Prize in 1995. "Regeneration" begins in a hospital for shell-shock victims at the height of the Great War, and differs from the new work in that most of its m ajor ch aracters are historical figures, including the poet Wilfred Owen and the pioneering psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers. In the years since her first trilogy appeared, Barker has returned obsessively to the questions about war and its representation those books raised. Her 2003 novel "Double Vision" involves the legacy of a British photographer killed in Afghanistan, and this latest trilogy depends in part on a series of actual paintings that were once thought impossible to hang, before-and-after images of Great War plastic surgery by the Slade's own Henry Tonks. I mean no disrespect to "Noonday" in saying that it doesn't match the "Regeneration" books. Those novels stand among the greatest achievements of contemporary fiction, demonstrating an unrivaled understanding of the psychology of physical trauma and a mastery of historical detail, whether of hospital life, London's homosexual demimonde or the trenches themselves. They are demonic and inspired. "Noonday" is, in contrast, the work of a professional, someone doing a job she already knows how to do, and doing it well. But it doesn't offer the same sense of discovery, and not simply because the Blitz seems so familiar. Indeed, the people and settings in her earlier trilogy had an equal if not greater literary pedigree. The war has pulled Barker's characters away from their easels, but though they all talk about needing to paint, only Elinor still places her art at the center of her being. In the book's opening pages she stands at her sister's house before a portrait of their dead brother. It's been rendered from photographs by a fashionable artist, and she thinks it "a complete travesty. Item: one standard-issue gallant young officer, Grim Reaper for the use of." She herself has done a better one, but Elinor's family has never taken her work seriously and she resents "not having been asked to paint this family portrait." After all, "she had three in the Tate; none here." At least her marriage seems an equal one, as equal as one could hope for in 1940, and yet when a bomb takes out their house she's startled to see the look of relief on Paul's face at the destruction of the spaces that have held their lives. She retreats for a while to a country cottage; he begins to sleep in his studio, near his regular beat as an air-raid warden. What happens next is predictable, and Elinor soon learns about Paul's brief lurch into adultery. When she comes back to London and her own job as an ambulance driver, she moves into a room of her own, a Bloomsbury flat only "two doors down" from where she lived as a student. Her life has come around, or maybe just stood still, and as part of that Kit Neville is once more standing at her door. He had proposed to her in "Life Class," before grudgingly accepting Paul as both a rival and a friend. In the years since, he has both married and divorced Elinor's best friend, and now he too drives ambulances through the city's nighttime hell. Barker builds a rich account of the Blitz upon these characters, and "Noonday" is perhaps strongest in its set pieces of London's wartime life. Paul searches for a missing child, Kit looks for a prostitute in the blackout, and one horrible night Elinor sees some horses from a brewery stable running toward her "out of the orange-streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire." Yet something seems to be missing. "Regeneration" and its successors depended on a seamless fusion of history and the fictional imagination, on the roles Barker gave to so many actual people. This second trilogy lacks that resonance. Great names walk across its pages, but the only significant real presence belongs to Elinor's teacher, Henry Tonks, and the scenes in "Toby's Room" in which he draws the shattered faces of the men on the operating table are the trilogy's finest. "Noonday" seems just a bit smaller than Pat Barker at her best, however readable and indeed enthralling, and however much its stakes are matters of life and death - smaller than when art and history were on the table as well. MICHAEL GORRA'S most recent book is "Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece." He teaches English at Smith College.