Customer Reviews

Double Vision: A Novel

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It's a long time since I read a book in a day, and it's a long time since I read a novel that made the hairs on my legs stiffen and my skin shiver with fear, but I did with this one.

Pat Barker has always appealed as the author of novels of nuance and subtlety but which don't become over-literary in a "school of creative writing" way. But she excels herself in this book. It's about lots of things: why people cover wars and what covering wars sometimes does to their minds; about love and loyalty. But it's also a very good yarn. Pat Barker has an old-fashioned and utterly welcome belief in plot and comprehensibility. Double Vision is a very good read - plus a lot more.

Pat Barker is brilliant novelist, best known for her "Regeneration" trilogy about WWI. "Double Vision" is also about war, but about its aftermath, and about war now--the state of endless war we live in during the 21st century. There are several surprises in this novel, whose characters are rich and deep, and whose plot has the kind of pace a tv thriller might have. Although on the surface it seems simple enough, the novel in fact is opening up very complex questions about the ethics of making images of atrocities and combat, as well as about the nature of love.

Pat Barker gets right to the point - she is a direct story teller. Even though she is extremely skillful as a writer, with a wonderful skill for description of person and place, she believes in telling a comprehensible story with beginning, middle, and end and none of that ambiguous hanging ending that can be too arty and frustrating.

Well what was this story about? Well it is about as many themes as there were primary characters. It is about grief and recovery from grief. It is about starting love over again with mature eyes. It is about recognizing that your ego blinds you to dangers.

Kate has lost her photographer husband in Afganistan, yet she moves forward, she continues to create, and she continues to be brave.

Steven has seen it all and experienced it all as a war correspondent and now a newly divorced man. Yet he allows first unexpected lust and then unexpected love to be kindled in a relationship with a young woman, Justine, 20 years younger than himself.

Alec, the Episcopal minister and father of Justine, appears to be the humble wise man of God, but in fact he is an egotist who thinks he can really help ex-prisoners make a change in their lives, yet his ego is so big he puts his daughter, Justine, in danger.

Peter is an ex-prisoner around 30 years old, who killed a woman when he was 10. Pat Barker plays a game with the reader in that she gradually reveals disturbing information about Peter, making him into somewhat of a Patricia Highsmith type of villian, but by the end of the novel, we see that he is a catalyst. He revealed to Kate her inner courage; he is Justine's ex-lover who decides to break up with her rather than reveal his past; he is Stephen's competition; and he is the instrument that brings Alec into true humility from his egotism. He is not a Highsmith or Hitchcock villian as Barker would lead us to believe in the early clues she puts in our path in the first chapters.

The book is packed full of literary skill.

Double Vision by Pat Barker is a novel that defies description. Within its pages there is war, crime, murder, rape, love, hate, sex, artistry, creativity, duplicity, anger, tenderness, inspiration: a dictionary might have enough words to list its subtleties. What it has aplenty is feeling and emotion, an ability to convey its characters' innermost thoughts in an almost tactile manner, as if sculpting them for a hand to explore their surface. At times, Pat Barker's characters surprise even themselves.

At the heart of the book is a series of relationships between four individuals - Justine, Ben, Kate and Stephen. The two men used to work together as a team. They have covered wars and conflict throughout the world. Stephen was the writer, Ben the photographer, who would always insist on getting that one last shot, the one that the eyeless onlooker would miss, the one whose poetry would convey the true horror, the one whose horror, perhaps, might stir conscience. But one day, an Afghanistan, he pursued his perfectionist brief one shot too far and, over-exposed, another's eagle eye picked him out.

The loss felt by Stephen will never be adequately described, especially by himself. His partner's death puts him in limbo and he retires to write. Ben's sculptor wife, Kate, is left both numb and destroyed by her loss, a loss which becomes everything and nothing. A commission to create a giant Christ for a prime site in a churchyard is both pressing and unexpectedly therapeutic. She wants him naked. He must be clad. But then an accident damages her arms and she must seek help from a gardener, Peter, who is clearly much more than a pruner of roses. Exactly what Peter might be adds a sense of tangible mystery to parts of the book, but these serve only to highlight the fact that he is perhaps the only one of the characters with a recorded and therefore accessible past.

Justine is the vicar's daughter. At nineteen she was ready to go to university, but illness disrupted her plans. Being ditched by a boyfriend did not help. And so academe was deferred by an enforced gap year. She `does' for Stephen's brother and his wife, specialising in caring for a difficult, demanding child. When Stephen lodges with the family, but in a separate dwelling a hundred yards from the house, he and Justine meet. He is old enough to be her father. So what? Their relationship develops through the book, their frequent sexual encounters both rich and surprising. Pat Barker's ability to tease out emotional reaction, to crystallise it but at the same time to keep it fluid makes the story of Stephen and Justine exciting, exhilarating, contradictory, impossible and accepted in one. Whatever people's ages, whatever their motives, whatever the consequences, either real or imagined, people still need love, can sense its promise, can invite it, even when they know it could hurt, humiliate, destroy.

Double Vision is thus a complex story of how a group of friends and acquaintances interact with history, reality, their hopes and fears in a small community in the north-east of England. There is a strong sense of place, a keen eye for detail in a rural landscape that is at least partly hostile. Not that other landscapes are not hostile. Memories of war and its consequences haunt some of the characters. Failed relationships taunt others. Unrealised dreams snag away at the fraying edges of what might have been. Death turns lives upside down, lives that go on to new ecstasies of joy, creativity or even plunder.

At the end of the book you know these people intimately and intuitively. But your knowledge and understanding of people is like a photograph. It is valid only for the instant in which it was taken. As memory, it solidifies an ever changing reality into an illusion of permanence, like a sculpture captures a moment of movement, a moment that never happened. Life goes on. This is a beautiful book.

With her,'Regeneration' trilogy, Barker staked a claim as an important contemporary voice, visiting the killing fields and hospitals of traumatised vets during WW1. Her interweaving of narratives and dour pacing were suggestive of the era's ambience. Here, she's gripped more frenetically by post 9/11 and Bosnian atrocities with equal aplomb. She's summoned a 40 year-old war correspondent in the throes of divorce in a leading role, his brother, heading in the same direction, a bereaved sculptress, a local vicar and his saucy 19 yr old who's just come out of an entanglement with Peter, now working as the sculptress's assistant. She has a commission to make a larger than life Christ, for the local church.The passion and despair of Goya's Black paintings seeps through the text as a pretext for photos of war fronts and the Christ figure. The assistant, Peter,is the wildcard in the pack. His eccentric behaviour and difficult to read politeness is quite a construct, given the bag of over-achievers he's embroiled with.The unpredictable, some might feel, unresolved, conclusion strikes just the anxious note the themes address. In all, the archetypes throb and mark an exciting terrain for Barker's readers.

this is a story about violence against women. not psychological or emotional violence, but physical trauma. mostly violence perpetuated by men against women in war and different forms of assault. and violent acts of nature resulting in accidents that could force a question of gender by way of divine intervention: if god exists as good why does 'he' allow violent acts, accidental or otherwise, to happen? though posing such a question might be stretching a theme a little too far, i can't say it's not, however subtle, a suggestion a reader might entertain. toss a vicar into the mix, who harbors, let's say, in his soul, forms of violence.

there's also healing and redemption. well, not exactly redemption for the contrite, but what art reflects and pictures, and why no female counterpart to suffering and redemption exists as metaphor as exacting as a male image, in particular, christ. or goya's work.

DOUBLE VISION
By Randall Ingermanson
Review by Laura V. Hilton

Dillon Richard is a brilliant and meticulous engineer at CypherQuanta, but his boss has just announced that the company is going under unless he can come up with a computer program in three weeks which is guaranteed to make all other computers - except theirs - worthless.

Rachel Meyers is a quirky, erratic biophysicist who has developed a quantum computer that will change the world . . . if Dillon can write the program. Then CypherQuanta will be worth billions. But someone is determined to steal the secret . . .

Keryn Wills is a mystery writer and part-time chief financial officer at CypherQuanta. She needs Rachel and Dillon to complete the project, but she doesn't want them to be friends. After all, she wants Dillon for herself.

Now time is running out and there are three secrets that must be solved. Will they manage to unravel the mysteries before time runs out? And, since both women are after Dillon, who will he choose--girl-genius, Rachel, or calming Keryn?

DOUBLE VISION is a real page turner. My husband grabbed this book before I did and he pronounced it a keeper. Now my son is anxious to get his hands on it. I found the characters adorable, I could identify with each of them, and I couldn't wait to see who Dillon would choose. The computer/physics/engineering stuff went right over my head, but it's clear that Randy Ingermanson knows this topic.

The faith message in DOUBLE VISION is expertly woven in and isn't preachy. I enjoyed reading DOUBLE VISION and recommend it highly. $12.99. 382 pages

Pat Barker's "Double Vision" seems unfinished, an exploration of contemporary themes that never quite come together. Kate Frobisher lost her photographer husband Ben to terrorists in Afghanistan. Stephen Sharkey, an acquaintance of Ben's, visits his brother Robert in the country to put together a book of Ben's photos. Robert lives near Ben's widow, Kate. Stephen sleeps with Justine, the au pair and seems to fall in love with her.
There is a car accident, boating mishap, sinister assistant, a burglary, affairs galore, and not much in the story that pulls it all together. One is left asking, huh?