Toby's Room [Hardcover]

Pat Barker (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 2, 2012

From Booker Prize winner Pat Barker, a masterful novel that portrays the staggering human cost of the Great War. Admirers of her Regeneration Trilogy as well as fans of Downton Abbey and War Horse will be enthralled.

With Toby’s Room, a sequel to her widely praised previous novel Life Class, the incomparable Pat Barker confirms her place in the pantheon of Britain’s finest novelists. This indelible portrait of a family torn apart by war focuses on Toby Brooke, a medical student, and his younger sister Elinor. Enmeshed in a web of complicated family relationships, Elinor and Toby are close: some might say too close. But when World War I begins, Toby is posted to the front as a medical officer while Elinor stays in London to continue her fine art studies at the Slade, under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks. There, in a startling development based in actual fact, Elinor finds that her drafting skills are deployed to aid in the literal reconstruction of those maimed in combat.

One day in 1917, Elinor has a sudden premonition that Toby will not return from France. Three weeks later the family receives a telegram informing them that Toby is “Missing, Believed Killed” in Ypres. However, there is no body, and Elinor refuses to accept the official explanation. Then she finds a letter hidden in the lining of Toby’s uniform; Toby knew he wasn’t coming back, and he implies that fellow soldier Kit Neville will know why.

Toby’s Room is an eloquent literary narrative of hardship and resilience, love and betrayal, and anguish and redemption. In unflinching yet elegant prose, Pat Barker captures the enormity of the war’s impact—not only on soldiers at the front but on the loved ones they leave behind.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Toby's Room:


"Barker...has pursued [World War I] through a remarkable series of novels: the much-admired "Regeneration" trilogy...Life Class and now Toby's Room.... [T]hese novels go far beyond a demonstration of the powers of the historical imagination. Like most good works of fiction, they’re not so much about the events they depict as about the resonance of those events, the way certain actions ripple through people’s lives.... Toby's Room takes large risks. It’s dark, painful and indelibly grotesque, yet it is also tender. It strains its own narrative control to create in the midst of an ordinary life a kind of deformed reality—precisely to illustrate how everything we call ‘ordinary’ is disfigured by war. And it succeeds brilliantly."— John Vernon, New York Times Book Review


"[T]he writing is lucid and often beautiful."—Thom Geier, Entertainment Weekly


"A tantalizing and moving return to wartime London."—Joanna Scutts, Washington Post


"You get a glimpse inside Toby’s room in Pat Barker’s poignant novel of the same name, but what you remember are three real and very different English landmarks — the Slade, London’s prestigious art academy; Cafe Royal, frequented by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill and Virginia Woolf; and the Queen’s Hospital, opened in 1917 to serve injured British soldiers in need of facial reconstruction.... No one evokes England in all its stiff-upper-lip gritty wartime privation like Barker. She is as uncompromising as Henry Tonks, as determined to render an honest portrayal of war. She will not allow us to sweep it out of sight.... [She] sets the bar high."—Ellen Kanner, Miami Herald


"Haunting and complicated sibling love is at the heart of Pat Barker's Great War novel.... [T]he precision of Ms. Barker's writing shows her again to be one of the finest chroniclers of both the physical and psychological disfigurements exacted by the First World War."—Wall Street Journal


"Barker deftly fused fact and fiction in her hugely impressive "Regeneration Trilogy" by turning the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen into integral characters. She continues this blending in Toby's Room.... [It] is in many ways Barker's most ambitious novel to date.... As ever, the war scenes, and the accounts of the broken men who inhabit them, are, by turn, gripping and unsettling. However, in with the carnage and the trauma are those expert passages on art as something both reflective and redemptive. This is a powerful book that chronicles in various ingenious ways, and from certain unique perspectives, 'the poignancy of a young life cut short.'"—Malcolm Forbes, San Francisco Chronicle


"A Pat Barker novel…is a novel that deals in some way with the horrors of World War One, and it’s a also a novel about art, but mostly it’s a novel about how art attempts to depict the horrors of World War One. And this is how a Pat Barker novel attempts to depict the horrors of World War One: bluntly."—Brock Clark, Boston Globe


"[A]lthough Toby’s Room is not billed as a prequel or sequel to Life Class and the reader need not be familiar with that novel in order to get to grips with this... [t]hose who do know Barker’s previous work will be struck by recurrences and continuations in this novel not only of events in Life Class, but in Regeneration, too.... [Barker's] prose remains fresh, humanely business-like, crisp and unsentimental. Images are scrupulously vivid, and the plot has real momentum."—Freya Johnston, Telegraph (London)


"A driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world.... For Barker, the wounded faces of the soldier-victims are realities, and also emblems of what must never be forgotten or evaded about war, and must continue – in her plain, steady, compelling voice – to be turned into art."—Hermione Lee, Guardian (London)



Praise for Life Class

“Beautiful and evocative . . . A coming-of-age story that transcends the individual and gestures to the fate of a generation.”
—People

“Life Class possesses organic power and narrative sweep . . . Barker conjures up the hellish terrors of war and its fallout with meticulous precision.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Here, as in her best fiction, Barker unveils psychologically rich characters . . . and resists the trappings of a neat love story, reminding us once again that in art and life we remain infinitely mysterious.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for the Regeneration Trilogy

“A masterwork . . . complex and ambitious.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“It has been Pat Barker’s accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel.”
—The New Yorker

“A literary achievement . . . remarkable.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction.”
— The Boston Globe

About the Author

Pat Barker is most recently the author of Life Class, as well as the highly acclaimed Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize; as well as seven other novels. She lives in the north of England.

www.doubleday.com

Life Class is available in Anchor paperback.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (October 2, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780385524360
• ISBN-13: 978-0385524360
• ASIN: 0385524366
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The secrets of home, exposed in wartime October 7, 2012

By Jill Meyer TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Pat Barker's new WW1 novel, "Toby's Room", is a book of secrets. Some are so nuanced that you don't realise they are secrets - or even facts - til they're exposed. That's what a good writer - and Pat Barker is a remarkable one - does to advance both the storyline and the characters' lives.

"Toby's Room" begins in 1912 and ends in 1917. The first part - the shorter part - introduces the reader to the Brooke family - parents who are estranged both physically and emotionally. Three children, Rachel is the oldest and is married, and the two younger, Toby and Elinor are, respectively, a medical student and an art student, and live in London. Elinor Brooke was featured in an earlier Barker book - "Life Class" - which I haven't read, along with two other main characters in this book, Kit Neville and Paul Tarrant. The new book appears to be a sequel of sorts, though when I read the description of "Life Class", both seem to present the same WW1 battle scenes. Maybe like Jane Gardam's tandem duo, "Old Filth" and "The Man with the Wooden Hat", the same characters appear in both Barker's books, telling the story from different angles.

Toby Brooke - the medical student in 1912 - is the center of that part of the story. Elinor and Toby were raised almost as twins and stay extremely close as they age. She lives near him in London while a student at the real Slade School of Fine Art, but certain feelings intrude that are destructive to both. By 1917, Toby, Kit, and Paul are off to France to fight. Toby is a front-line doctor and the other two are in auxiliary battle roles.

Toby disappears on the battlefield - literally blown up with no remains - and the Brooke family is devastated. Elinor realises she must know what happened to Toby in the days leading up to his death. Knowing that Kit Neville had served with Toby, she tracks him down in an English hospital for the facially wounded. At the hospital, she meets her old teacher from Slade - Henry Tonks - by then a noted illustrator of the work of Dr Harold Gillies. Gillies, like Tonks, was a real doctor, and is known as the "father of plastic surgery". Elinor Brooke goes to work with Tonks and Gillies as a medical illustrator.

And then secrets start coming out. Secrets long hidden from both within the Brooke family and in their relationships with others outside it. Most are devastating, but learning them can help Elinor and her friends move on with their lives, knowing that what happened on the battlefield have impacted them so profoundly.

Pat Barker is a master writer. Her combining real and fictional characters makes this book even more interesting than it might have been had she simply been writing fiction. In a way, this book can be compared to John Boyle's "The Absolutist" in tone and style.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pat Barker does it again October 21, 2012

By J. Hurd

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I have read all of Pat Barker's novels about WW I and each of them grabs me from some place where empathy begins and moves on to anquish. The characters endure the worst of war and its aftermath and bring the reader along for a clear view. Becoming reaquainted with characters from earlier books helps to establish a longer view of the affect warfare has on everyone well into their lives.

Toby's Room draws us back again to WW I when the war became too awful to comprehend, picking up where the artists in Still Life were left in shock at how it had dealt with their lives. Elinor, who tried to be above the war and refused to look it in the eye, is now face to face with the death of her brother and the terrible physical injuries to her friends. I am a nature illustrator so I understand the place of medical illustration in chronicalling the facial injuries in that time when photography was less useful. Elinor has taken on this role and it has to change her. Paul and Kit, both injured in the fighting, become "war artists" who are not allowed to depict death. These people are not perfect, but they try to behave as well as they can, sometimes betrayed by the nature of their flaws. We want them to find peace in compassion for one another even if understanding is elusive.

These books are so beautifully written, from the way they expose us to the inner lives of the people we send to do awful things, to the honest, but not graphic, look at the awful things they have done. They do not spare the feelings of those of us who didn't have to go, but want to turn away when we are confronted with the returning human wrecks we honor. Can't recommend this book and its precursors, more highly.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "But there was something: a shadow beneath the water." October 18, 2012

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I understand that you cannot judge a book by its cover. On the other hand, Joel Spector's pastel rendering of Toby on the dust jacket of Booker Prize winner Pat Barker's new novel TOBY'S ROOM is precisely the way the writer portrays him, a stroke of genius on the part of the artist, and important since much of the book has to do with artists, both those who draw the war wounded and the character Elinor Brooke who paints portraits of her brother Toby Brooke. This is another of those novels that you cannot say a lot about the plot without spoiling the book for future readers. Is this a characteristic of Booker Prize winners I ask. Julian Barnes (A SENSE OF AN ENDING), Ian McEwan (SWEET TOOTH), and John Banville (ANCIENT LIGHT), three previous winners, are other examples. While the characters certainly are complex and well-developed--- it is intriguing to watch them change as the narrative progresses--this novel is ultimately plot driven, beginning in 1912 and ending in 1917 and is about the effects of the Great War on several characters, both those who stayed at home and those who went to war. Elinor and Toby are members of a British family with secrets. "What a family they were for not speaking. . . Apart from the breakdown of her parents' marriage, she [Elinor] couldn't have said what the secrets were. But there was something: a shadow underneath the water." (p. 6). Soon Elinor has her own deep dark secrets to keep. Ultimately she will discover many more secrets in connection with her beloved brother Toby. We learn from the dust cover blurb that he will not return from World War I-- so I am not revealing the ending of the novel-- but Elinor and the other members of her family of course, as would all families in that predicament, want to know the details of his death. The ending continues to haunt me, however, since I am not convinced that the character Kit Neville is completely truthful in his account of what happened to Toby.

Certainly no Jane Austen, Ms. Barker writes as effectively of the horrors of war and its effect on both men and women as any male writer I can think of. Actually, although this novel is in no way derivative, I was reminded of another great war novel as I read it, Ernest Hemingway's A FAREWELL TO ARMS. Her descriptions of both the battles and the scenes in the hospitals as well as the men who died or were wounded are quite amazing-- the smells, the visual images. One wounded soldier's face is a "red ruin." He is also described as the Elephant Man, a "Minotaur, a feature that was both more and less than a man."

Ms. Barker's themes are universal: both the secrets and conflicts within families, the heroism and courage that many demonstrate in battle, what war does to families, what happens to families when they lose sons [or daughters in these times] to a war. In a particularly poignant scene, the character Paul, whose limp from a wound Ms. Barker paints so vividly that you can actually see him stumbling, meets a local doctor whose "boy had been in France, he said. He's always hoped Ian would take over the practice, but now this. . . Nothing, he said, as they parted at the door, would ever be the same again." There is also the necessity that a lot of people have to believe that they have gotten something good from a war. Sound familiar? Additionally we see discrimination against perfectly innocent people in time of war because of their nationality. Elinor's best friend Catherine, who is living in London, is ostracised because she is German. Finally Ms. Barker writes of love in all its different manifestations.

This writer's language is always appropriate, often blunt and sometimes beautiful: Here is Ms. Barker's description of a river: "The water underneath the nearest arch broke into V-shaped ripples as a boat passed through. "There were flecks of crimson on the surface of the river, where the setting sun had briefly managed to free itself from a bank of cloud, but they were fading even as he [the character Paul] watched." Then she goes about breaking your heart when Paul finds Toby's books and photographs when he, on a visit to the Brooke family home, is preparing for bed in Toby's room. "That little boy was suddenly a powerful presence in the room. . . Paul could almost believe he heard a faint echo of the explosion that had blown this laughing boy into unidentifiable gobs of flesh. The poignancy of a young life cut short. He hadn't known Toby, but at this moment he could have cried for him: the small boy who's located himself so precisely in the world, and now was nowhere."

A first-class novel.