Double Vision. Pat Barker. Hamish Hamilton. UK £16.99, HB

review by Pat Boran

In her best-known work to date, the Regeneration trilogy, which included the Booker winning third instalment The Ghost Road, Pat Barker proved herself equal to the narrative complexities of a war story often told but seldom if ever as movingly realised. In Double Vision, her eleventh work of fiction, war is again part of her subject matter, but this time her focus is on the homecoming of a somewhat shaken foreign correspondent.

Still suffering from what he gradually admits is post traumatic stress disorder, together with the loss in Afghanistan of his photographer friend Ben, Stephen Sharkey heads for what he expects to be the quiet north of England countryside where he hopes to recuperate and write a book about representations of war. Central to his book will be a discussion of his friend's Ben's photographs, which is how his life and that of Ben's widow Kate coincide.

At the start at least, this looks like an inevitable love story between two people drawn together by their mutual loss, but nothing could be further from the truth. The world Stephen finds himself in, and the sexual relationship he stumbles into with the 19-year-old daughter of the local Vicar, refuses to be convenient or uncomplicated. And when sculptor Kate, following the car accident that dramatically opens the book, takes on a local lad to help her, equally unforeseen but altogether more unsettling things begin to happen for her.

In a sense, Double Vision is about things never being as they first appear. With its twin themes of recovery and art, there are strong echoes of JL Carr's brief masterpiece A Month in the Country. But this book is less about the darkness of war than a darkness much closer to home. Journalism, photography and sculpture aside, the double vision which gives this novel its title is a looking again at aspects of rural England, a land in which most marriages are on the rocks, in which the vicar, like everyone else, struggles with and for his faith, and in which chance violence can erupt at any time.

And yet, against all these odds, Double Vision has a credible and healing resolution, suggesting that sometimes, the best and only cure for the troubles of the past is to release oneself into the uncertainty of the present moment.

© copyright Pat Boran