The First World War is the inspiration for Pat Barker's best fiction. The British novelist, best known for her Regeneration trilogy, returned to the trenches in her 2007 novel Life Class, and Toby's Room digs deeper into that novel's characters and their relationships.
In 1912, Elinor Brooke is a free-spirited art student at London's Slade School of Art studying under surgeon and artist Henry Tonks. He wants her to bolster her figurative work with a better understanding of the building blocks of the body, and urges her to take an anatomy dissection class at the nearby medical school, where her brother Toby is training to be a physician.
Elinor becomes romantically entangled with two classmates, including the dashing and talented Kit Neville. Then war begins, and the men ship off to France while she retreats to her painting, occasionally joining the Woolfs and Bells for Bloomsbury weekends of art, literature and pacifism.
Barker jumps ahead to 1917, as Elinor receives word that Toby is missing in action. Kit returns from the front with a horribly disfigured face and becomes a patient at the hospital where Elinor is now working with Tonks to illustrate surgeries. Kit served in Toby's unit, so Elinor is determined to learn from him what really happened to her brother. With a blunt realism that fits the brutality of the war, Barker successfully integrates the real-life history of Tonks and the Bloomsbury Circle with the passion, jealousy and fragility of her characters. Barker's Great War is no Downton Abbey. Instead, she dives deep into the end of the romantic British Empire and the beginning of modern British existential ambiguity. --Bruce Jacobs