Double Vision

A library sale find, Pat Baker's DOUBLE VISION (2003) was new to me. I have read and thoroughly enjoyed her REGENERATION trilogy, as well as LIFE CLASS and a couple more of her novels. Her characters are always real and compelling, and the ones here are no different. Kate, a sought-after sculptor, is recently widowed, her husband (a war photographer) killed by a sniper in Afghanistan. She is also temporarily disabled from an auto accident, and is working on a larger-than-life Christ, so is forced to hire a studio assistant, Peter, recommended by the local vicar. Turns out Peter has a rather questionable past, did some prison time. The vicar, who tries to help prison parolees, had taken him in. Peter even apparently had a brief, torrid affair with the vicar's daughter Justine, who is also an important character. Just nineteen, she takes up with Stephen Sharkey, a forty-something war correspondent who has come back to live in the country guest house of his doctor brother, Robert, where Justine is employed as an au pair for Robert and Beth's precocious ten year-old son, Adam, who has Asperger's syndrome. Stephen, suffering from PTSD, is taking a break from his dangerous profession to write a book about war. Oh, and he was best friends with Kate's late husband, Ben, and was there when Ben was killed.

So, whereas I fully expected Stephen and Kate to end up together, that didn't happen. Oh, and Justine is brutally assaulted by two burglars who break into Robert's home, but is rescued just in time by Stephen.

So here's the thing, plot-wise DOUBLE VISION is all over the place, messy, surprising and unpredictable. But then life can be that way, right? And all of the characters here are just so damn good! The ending was, well, there wasn't much of any actual ending. Did everyone - or ANYone - "live happily ever after?" Hard to say. Nevertheless I'm glad I found this book (only fifty cents), and very glad I read it. Pat Barker is simply a wonderful writer. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

[warning: potential spoilers] I am conflicted about this novel. It develops a lot of psychological tension which almost seems to demand some sort of incident . . . which doesn't really come. The story does see some resolution but in a rather arbitrary, quotidian way. And many of the strands don't really resolve at all. But I think there's a contrast being built between a world of trauma--growing up essentially parentless, war reporting, prison--where stories regularly include those symbolic, violent climaxes we've come to expect in literature, and a world of relative normality where it's more like one thing after another, where one happening is not a resolution to past happenings, where stuff happens and people try to cope.

Imperfectly done, I think. It could use to have been somewhat longer, but bringing this novel to a successful, satisfying end would have been very difficult in any case.

It's not often that I agree with anything in the Telegraph, but the line on the cover "unputdownable and thought-provoking" describes my feelings on this book fairly precisely. A much more modern setting than many of her books, but issues of grief and guilt are again at the core of this book. Her writing is eloquent but never over wordy and she makes you savour many of her sentences. Highly recommended.

Having covered it all, from Bosnia to Ground Zero, foreign correspondent Stephen has hung up his flak jacket and gone to ground in a cottage on his brother's land, in a rural north-east devastated by the foot-and-mouth disaster. Two things have particularly moved him - the body of a raped and mutilated girl on a stairwell in Sarajevo, and the death of his war photographer friend, Ben Frobisher, shot while taking his own last shot on a road in Afghanistan.
Ben's sculptress widow, Kate, lives nearby, neck in a brace from a road accident but determined to complete the huge figure of Christ she is making for the cathedral. Unwillingly, she has hired for the heavy work a young assistant, the personable but unsettling Peter Wingrave, who comes recommended by her philanthropic vicar friend. The vicar is father of Stephen's girlfriend, the much younger Justine, a fresh-faced, sensible girl who has a romantic history with the mysterious Peter.

As always with Pat Barker, reading just one page is enough for her to draw you into the book and the world she has created. Her characters are real people, some nice, some not so nice. Several stories intertwine: a widowed sculptor has a car accident and needs help to finish a commission, the war-correspondent friend of her deceased husband comes to spend some time away from London in his brother's holiday cottage nearby, trying to recover from PTSD on his own. The brother's family is not as happy as it looked at first sight, and there is a lovely au-pair, the not so chaste daughter of the vicar. All written expertly, keeping you going without effort. A very good read, posing some interesting questions

Publisher's Blurb
Insomnia, exhaustion, recurring nightmares. Stephen Sharkey is suffering the after effects of his career as a war reporter, most recently in Afghanistan, where Ben Frobisher, war photographer and friend, has been shot dead on assignment. Hanging up his flak jacket and turning his back on the everyday reality of war, Stephen moves into a quiet and peaceful cottage in the north of England. It seems the perfect environment in which to write his book on the representations of war, one that will be based largely on Ben Frobisher's work. But Stephen's supposed isolation offers no protection from other people's suffering or the shattering effects of human brutality.

There were actually two threads in this novel: the Stephen Sharkey one detailed in the blurb, and another story in which Kate Frobisher, sculptor, widow of the dead Ben Frobisher, is central.

At the beginning of the story Kate is involved in an accident late at night on an icy road and she is severely injured when her car slams into a tree. Just before passing out she is aware of a man standing next to the car, peering in the driver's window. When she is later rescued by police and ambulance, the "watcher" is never mentioned, but Kate knows he did nothing about rescuing her.

Kate has recently been commissioned to create a large bronze statue of Christ for the local church, but she has been severely injured in the accident and has to employ someone to help her make the plaster cast for the sculpture. The local vicar finds someone for her - a man working as a gardener, who has a mysterious background.

I'm not sure why I thought this would be crime fiction. In my defence some of Pat Barker's novels are listed in crime fiction indexes. So I chose this recording on the basis of the author's name, and really should have read the blurb more carefully. The frustrating thing is that a crime is committed, but resolution is not central to the novel.

Thought provoking tale of teh effects of war on those who have not carried the guns.