Double Vision Paperback – December 1, 2004

The easy part is reading Pat Barker's stories. The tough part is thinking comprehensively about what one has read. Therefore, this review will be desultory in nature, with my observations subject to revision, as I continue to think about this terrific book.Double Vision is my second read of Barker, and it won't be my last. Her economic use of language, in an epoch of a surfeit of information, is perhaps her greatest strength. Settings are drawn well and sufficiently, but not Hardylike. Characters are consistent throughout, speaking a dialogue that's believably real for us moderns.This story centers around a seemingly "retired" war correspondent and his links from his now dead photographer/partner's life. Without spilling too much, I'll say that it is enough anti-war in its effects on the main characters as it has to be without imitating the woes of Hecuba in Troy.Although the war scenes are alarming, the tale of insecurity in secure suburban civilization is probably the better carrier of message. The hints about human predation in just a few sentences in a scene where Uncle Stephen picks up nephew Adam from school play wondrously with judgments about our actual achievements regarding security.To finish now, I'll say that the somewhat comedic ending indicates to me that a novel can be sensitive to commercial concerns, without sacrificing truth.This book can be read easily in a weekend. You'll find it a labor to set down.

I am giving "Double Vision" three stars because I love Pat Barker and because it was worth three stars until towards the end. I found some of what happened (or didn't happen) hard to swallow. Maybe the end was left open-ended on purpose, but I wasn't happy with the dangling stories. Stephen and Justine? She really was just a child, and I didn't buy it. And what about Peter? More dangles. Otherwise, an engrossing and fast-paced story (as usual with Pat Barker). I've just discovered her and will read many more.

Pat Barker's DOUBLE VISION resolves perfectly the beery "brew-haha" of Miller Lite's immortal bar argument: "Tastes great! Less filling!" In this oh-so-faint cousin to English pastoral novels of George Eliot, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy, Pat Barker has crafted a writerly but irrelevant novel filled with characterless characters, too-improbable plot contrivances, and pop philosophical conundrums supposedly arising from the great (and noticeably non-Asian, non-African) horrors of the last decade - Afghanistan, Kosovo, and 9/11.The novel begins with the heroine, Kate Frobisher, suffering a temporarily debilitating auto accident on an icy country road. Kate is a sculptress, recently commissioned to create a fifteen-foot statue of (who else?) Christ. Her late husband Ben has recently died in Afghanistan, working there as a war photographer, and now Ben's partner and boozy friend Stephen arrives to incorporate Ben's work into a book about war and its observers and the meaning of recording such events while not participating (far, far, far better treated in the DVD "War Photographer" about James Nachtwey).Remarkably, Stephen's brother Robert lives close by to Kate, and although Stephen falls for Kate, he falls even harder for Robert's 19-year-old babysitter, Justine (so exotically French!), the only child of the local (and badly divorced) vicar, Alec, who happens to take in ex-cons, one of whom, Peter, becomes Kate's temporary arms and legs in the art studio while she recovers from her accident. Got all that? Add in Robert's son Adam, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and Peter's Zelig-like personality and surprise criminal past, all shadowed by that indomitable 15-foot Christ statue, and the result is "another fine mess" as Oliver Hardy used to say.Barker's style is reservedly British, but her prose is observant and at times compelling if you can look past such Anglicisms as kerb (curb), poofs (gays), and fug ("a fug of warmth and music", "a fug of human bodies and damp wool"). She spins a convoluted web of strained family relationships among Robert's and Stephen's family, and between Stephen, Justine, and Alec, and their impact on one other plays at times like a multi-themed concerto.Unfortunately, the interjections of BIG IDEAS about war, media, the role of the correspondent/photographer, Goya's representations of war, the fragility of life and our perpetual exposure to random violence and tragedy, even in the English countryside, reduce a novel of manners to Novel Lite. Nice prose, but too many big ideas too easily tossed off and unexamined, requiring too many plot manipulations to accommodate their presence (or force their presence in the first place). In the end, after all the dancing around horrific war images of rape and death, sniper bullets through the skull, and 9/11 catastrophes, we're left with Stephen's stunningly banal observation, "No experience is valid without the accompanying image." This philosophical gem presents itself just before a day cruise almost turned Titanic reminds us again about life's ever-threatening tragedies.In the end, DOUBLE VISION feels more like a gentrified, exurb-London version of CLAN OF THE CAVE BEARS, full of grunts and head-clubbings (literal and figurative, that is) within an artsy, cloistered-almost-to-incestuousness, gossipy, adulterous, self-consciously angst-ridden clan of urban (and faultlessly urbane) transplants. Only Mrs. Peel and Mr. Steed are missing to complete the tableaux.For those seeking this kind of countryside "slice of life" with a little intrigue, I recommend the more compelling and considerably more artistically satisfying alternatives of Graham Swift's WATERLAND and EVER AFTER and Robertson Davies' THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY.

After reading 5 books and the Trilogy I strongly recommend Pat Barker's Double Vision. Inside this work is an intricate weave of rational and instinctive behaviour about how wars affect people. Images that follow the persons wherever they go, and avoid giving a rest to mind and soul.As the wars mentioned in the book are contemporary the reader has a great participation and constant checking of feelings of what it was doing while that event happened and which was its reaction at that moment- Difficult to leave aside without reaching the end.

Pat Barker works her talents in yet another creation of believable complexity that is almost impossible to put down once started.

Barker tells her stories with an almost magical clarity. This theme of violence and its effects on us is treated in an oddly gentle manner, developed with her usual penetrating insight. Highly recommended.

Pat Barker is a sensitive and profound writer and with Double Vision she just adds to the list of her great books. She is exploring the new territory of the psychological impact of societal change.

Subtle and beautiful. All the shades of gray and white. Genius. Never was the process of artistic creation better limned.

I read this after reading the Regeneration Trilogy Pack and Pat Barker really does her research. Really good read.