Toby's Room

Description

Pat Barker returns to the First World War in this dark, compelling novel of human desire, wartime horror and the power of friendship War evokes memories that many would soon rather forget. But when it takes Elinor's brother, Toby, the past becomes an irrepressible force -- and the only one that can unravel the mysteries behind Toby's final days on the battlefield. How exactly did her brother die, and why? Elinor goes to those around her for help -- but they, too, are fiercely guarding secrets of their own. Her classmate Kit, a witness to Toby's death, holds a vital key to what happened, but he is in no mood to talk. Enlisting the help of her former lover Paul, Elinor determines to uncover the truth -- but at what cost? More importantly, what was the clandestine affair that had taken place between the siblings in 1912, and what will it mean for everyone when Toby's ghosts finally catch up to them? Moving from the Slade School of Art before the First World War to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the attempt to rebuild the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

Pat Barker was born in 1943. She is the author of Union Street, Blow your House Down, The Century's Daughter, The Man Who Wasn't There, the Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road), Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, and the Life Class Trilogy (Life Class, Toby's Room and Noonday). Pat Barker lives in Durham.

Praise for Toby's Room: "Barker...has pursued [World War I] through a remarkable series of novels: the much-admired "Regeneration" trilogy...Life Class and now Toby's Room.... [T]hese novels go far beyond a demonstration of the powers of the historical imagination. Like most good works of fiction, they're not so much about the events they depict as about the resonance of those events, the way certain actions ripple through people's lives.... Toby's Room takes large risks. It's dark, painful and indelibly grotesque, yet it is also tender. It strains its own narrative control to create in the midst of an ordinary life a kind of deformed reality-precisely to illustrate how everything we call 'ordinary' is disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly."- John Vernon, New York Times Book Review "[T]he writing is lucid and often beautiful."-Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly "A tantalizing and moving return to wartime London."-Joanna Scutts, Washington Post "You get a glimpse inside Toby's room in Pat Barker's poignant novel of the same name, but what you remember are three real and very different English landmarks - the Slade, London's prestigious art academy; Cafe Royal, frequented by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf; and the Queen's Hospital, opened in 1917 to serve injured British soldiers in need of facial reconstruction.... No one evokes England in all its stiff-upper-lip gritty wartime privation like Barker. She is as uncompromising as Henry Tonks, as determined to render an honest portrayal of war. She will not allow us to sweep it out of sight.... [She] sets the bar high."-Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald "Haunting and complicated sibling love is at the heart of Pat Barker's Great War novel.... [T]he precision of Ms. Barker's writing shows her again to be one of the finest chroniclers of both the physical and psychological disfigurements exacted by the First World War."-Wall Street Journal "Barker deftly fused fact and fiction in her hugely impressive "Regeneration Trilogy" by turning the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen into integral characters. She continues this blending in Toby's Room.... [It] is in many ways Barker's most ambitious novel to date.... As ever, the war scenes, and the accounts of the broken men who inhabit them, are, by turn, gripping and unsettling. However, in with the carnage and the trauma are those expert passages on art as something both reflective and redemptive. This is a powerful book that chronicles in various ingenious ways, and from certain unique perspectives, 'the poignancy of a young life cut short.'"-Malcolm Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle "A Pat Barker novel...is a novel that deals in some way with the horrors of World War One, and it's a also a novel about art, but mostly it's a novel about how art attempts to depict the horrors of World War One. And this is how a Pat Barker novel attempts to depict the horrors of World War One: bluntly."-Brock Clark, Boston Globe "[A]lthough Toby's Room is not billed as a prequel or sequel to Life Class and the reader need not be familiar with that novel in order to get to grips with this... [t]hose who do know Barker's previous work will be struck by recurrences and continuations in this novel not only of events in Life Class, but in Regeneration, too.... [Barker's] prose remains fresh, humanely business-like, crisp and unsentimental. Images are scrupulously vivid, and the plot has real momentum."-Freya Johnston, Telegraph (London) "A driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.... For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue - in her plain, steady, compelling voice - to be turned into art."-Hermione Lee, Guardian (London) Praise for Life Class "Beautiful and evocative . . . A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation." -People "Life Class possesses organic power and narrative sweep . . . Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of war and its fallout with meticulous precision." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters . . . and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious." -San Francisco Chronicle Praise for the Regeneration Trilogy "A masterwork . . . complex and ambitious." -The New York Times Book Review "It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel." -The New Yorker "A literary achievement . . . remarkable." -San Francisco Chronicle "Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction." - The Boston Globe