Life Class, by Pat Barker

With her twelfth novel, Pat Barker returns to her old stamping ground of the Great War, site of the Regeneration trilogy. It is almost as though she has unfinished business to see to, but here the central figures are a group of art students whose eventual role in the war is not as combatants but infrastructure, volunteers toiling - and suffering - in the front-line hospitals. And for the first part of the novel, the war features merely as noises off, the ominous build-up that these young try to ignore but realise must eventually derail their lives.

That early 20th-century scene is evoked with some vigorous and emotive writing, details dabbed in with a quick brush-stroke - the way a cab rocks as the driver gets into his seat, real figures making a cameo appearance: Professor Tonks of the Slade, Augustus John, Ottoline Morrell. Tonks, indeed, is rather more than a cameo since his dismissive comment on the work of Paul Tarrant, the protagonist, provokes some soul-searching. Has Paul made the wrong choice in going to art school? But the war is about to seize him by the scruff of the neck and, in a grim twist, it is his raw experiences in that hospital that will produce his first telling pieces of work.

Paul comes from a working-class background, his Slade fees covered by a grandmother who is an East End landlord. The most significant of his fellow students, Kit and Eleanor, are middle-class; the beginnings of the century's erosion of class barriers are suggested. Kit is a mawkish fellow, with whom Paul has a curious love-hate relationship, heightened by their mutual passion for Eleanor, but it is Kit who is first the promising artist and, by the end, the acclaimed war artist, lionised in the Café Royal, which also has several cameo appearances.

Eleanor continues at the Slade, where student numbers are dramatically depleted. And the war takes over, saturating the novel with the stark and now grimly familiar furnishings - the hideously wounded men, the stench of gas gangrene, the anguish and the exhaustion. The familiarity of this scene is owed in the main to the art that it has generated: the poetry, the fiction, the paintings, which makes Barker's choice of theme appropriate, but which can also provoke a curious reaction in the reader. You acknowledge and applaud the way in which art has brought home that appalling carnage, but at the same time there is something uncomfortable about the divide between reality - this shocking slice of history, and the people who endured it - and the artifice of fiction, or of a poem or a painting.

Barker's evocation of the front-line hospital is masterly, gripping in its narrative thrust and judicious in its use of detail - the twitching stump of an amputated leg, gunfire rocking water in a glass. If there is a whiff of the card-index, she herself briskly acknowledges that with the comprehensive list of sources, from Henry Tonks's Art and Surgery to Vera Brittain's diary. It is no criticism to say that I at once wanted to get hold of those titles that I did not know; simply a recognition of this divide: there is the reality, and there is the invention it has generated.

There is a further divide emphasised in the novel - between the horrors of the trenches and the sometimes impervious lifestyle of those at home, just across the Channel. Paul by now sees his old Slade group, and himself, as "spoiled, self-indulgent, selfish children", a harsh judgement perhaps - they were merely behaving like any generation of students - but it reflects the chasm between those who had looked into the hell of the war and those who had not. Eleanor has not, and sees the war as irrelevant, so far as art is concerned. She, and her like, would be startled if confronted by the immensity of the artistic response to the war, of which this novel is a worthy instance.

Penelope Lively's new novel is 'Consequences' (Fig Tree)

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