Toby's Room.. War and Art.

Pat Barker’s latest novel Toby’s Room revolves around the unravelling tale of Toby Brookes’ suspicious death. He was pronounced ‘Missing, Believed Killed’ whilst serving as a doctor in the First World War. It becomes his younger sister Elinor’s obsession to reveal what really happened to her beloved sibling as she believes it is a cover up story. However, Toby’s death is not the central theme of the novel; it also discusses how art can be used as a cathartic relief from war by many of the characters, male and female.

The title echoes Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and is written partly in tribute, although they are not similar novelist. Woolf’s 1922 novel is in memory of her brother, who died young, and is written in the aftermath of the war in which so many millions of young men were killed. Its central female character is a woman painter, a pacifist who is trying to remain outside the war. Her novel shows how unsparing and rigorous war art can be.

There are three interlocking main subjects of this novel: what has happened at the front to Elinor's brother, Toby Brooke; how a woman artist responds to the war; and – the strongest part of the book – how to treat, and look at, and not turn away from, the ruined faces of terribly injured veterans.

The novel begins in the summer of 1912 when Elinor, a student at the Slade School of Art, travelled from London, back to her childhood home. Her parents lived largely separate lives; her mother staying in the country for her health while her father’s life revolved around his club. Her elder sister, Rachel, was distant and critical of the choices she had made. But Elinor was close to her brother, a little too close. Something happened between them that summer that changed their relationship, and shook Elinor.

The novel really starts to unravel in Kit Neville’s, an injured soldier who was also a painter, morphine fuelled dreams, nightmares and unconsciousness. He re-lives the harrowing time spent at war and in doing so slowly reveals the secret that he has kept about Toby’s death.

Toby’s Room revolves around the same bases as Barker’s previous work, especially her well known trilogy, Regeneration, set in Craiglockheart hospital, as it is a novel about middle class men in War and how they use the arts to heal their wounded souls and bodies, especially from shell shock, but predominately, their traumatised minds. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen mediated their pains and experiences of war through writing poetry and are encouraged to talk about their experiences in order to free their psyche of the recurring nightmares that drag them unwillingly back to the war.  However, the characters in Toby’s Room are the men who survived the war and the women left behind who must cope. All of them use art to do so; drawing and painting portraits and landscapes.

Tonks, the man who taught the majority of the characters, Elinor, Catherine, Neville and Paul, uses his gift in the only way he feels he can help the men of war, by drawing their facial injuries before and after their surgery at Queen Mary’s facial hospital. His cathartic use of art differs vastly from Elinor’s use; hers is selfish. After Toby’s death Elinor escapes inside the walls of her family home alone and paints the landscapes she shared with Toby as children, as she vowed she would in the event of his death.

Tonks's drawings are medical illustrations, and also artworks. After Neville’s nose is blown off, he becomes one of the patients at the hospital, and a subject for what Tonks calls his Rogues Gallery. The treatment given is to fit a "nose pedicle" – flesh taken off the man's chest, rolled into a tube and sewn on to the face – and to wait to see if it takes. Often, it doesn't: one man in the hospital has had 23 operations. When he gets back to working, Kit paints futuristic, mutilated machinery. Paul, as a commissioned war artist, paints landscapes but "the landscapes are bodies".

Toby’s bedroom becomes a shrine to him for his estranged sister. It stopped in time from when he was pronounced dead, as if by not touching it, it would perhaps bring Toby back, or at the least preserve him in some vain hope.

Finally, the truth is revealed in a climactic scene with Kit Neville during a violent storm in a Suffolk village, whose marshy landscape reminds him of Ypres (a replay of a very similar scene in Regeneration). These personal stories, which also involve the victimisation in wartime of Germans in England, and of pacifists and homosexuals, give the book a strong and intense plot-line.

Everything is recorded in Barker's incomparable third-person free indirect technique, slipping in and out of characters' thoughts that "floated to the surface ... and burst like bubbles": cool, assured and virtuosic. The interpolated diary elements add little to this intimate address.

This is an insightful novel showcasing one facet of war that was not and since, has not been covered much, yet it was not as strikingly powerful as Barker’s trilogy. Barker’s new angel of focusing on the room itself, as opposed to the affects the art has on the men suffered in war could be behind this feeling. Barker’s inclusion of a link www.gilliesarchives.org.uk to Tonk’s real drawings at the back of the book, reminds the reader that the novel is based on reality. It is insightful and horrifying to see these drawings, but extremely worth looking.