Book Reviews
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
|||
|
Double
Vision by Pat Barker Rating: •••• (Highly
Recommended) |
|
||
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|
||
|
|
|||
|
Plain Sight Pat
Barker’s latest novel, Double Vision, gets off to a strong start (pp. 3-5): Christmas was over. Feeling a slightly shamefaced
pleasure in the restoration of normality, Kate stripped the tree of lights
and decorations, cut off the main branches and dragged the trunk down to the
compost heap at the bottom of the garden. There she stood looking back at the
house, empty again now—her mother and sister had left the morning after
Boxing Day—seeing the lighted windows and reflected firelight almost as if
she were a stranger, shut out. A few specks of cold rain found her eyelids
and mouth. All around her the forest waited, humped
in silence. Shivering, she ran back up the lawn. Gradually she re-established her routine. Up
early, across to the studio by eight, five hours’ unbroken work that
generally left her knackered for the rest of the day, though she forced
herself to walk for an hour or two in the afternoons. The weather turned colder, until one day,
returning from her walk, she noticed that the big puddle immediately outside
her front gate was filmed with ice, like a cataract dulling the pupil of an
eye. She heated a bowl of soup, built up the fire and huddled over it, while
outside the temperature dropped, steadily, hour by hour, until a solitary
brown oak leaf detaching itself from the tree fell onto the frost-hard ground
with a crackle that echoed through the whole forest. People had glutted themselves on food and
sociability over Christmas and New Year and wanted their own firesides, so
the first few evenings of January were spent alone. But then Lorna and
Michael Bradley asked her to their anniversary party and, though she was
enjoying the almost monastic rhythm of her present life, she accepted. Since
Ben’s death that had been her only rule: to refuse no invitation, to
acknowledge and return any small act of kindness—and it was working, she was
getting through, she was surviving. Once there, she enjoyed the evening, in spite of
having restricted herself to just two glasses of wine, and by eleven was
driving back along the forest road, her headlights revealing the pale trunks
of beech trees, muscled like athletes stripped off for a race. She was
leaving a stretch of deciduous forest and entering Forestry Commission land,
acres of closely planted trees, rank upon rank of them, a green army marching
down the hill. Her headlights scarcely pierced the darkness between the
pines, though here and there she glimpsed a tangle of dead wood and debris on
the forest floor. She kept the windows closed, a flag of warmth and music
sealing her off from the outside world. The lighted car travelled
along the road between the thickly crowding trees like a blood corpuscle
passing along a vein. Somewhere in the heart of the wood an antlered head
turned to watch her pass. Almost no traffic—she overtook a white van near the
crossroads, but after that saw no other cars. The road dipped and rose, and
then, no more than 400 yards from her home, where a stream overflowing in the
recent heavy rains had run across the road forming a slick of black ice, the
car left the road. There was no time to think. Trees loomed up,
leapt towards her, branches shattered the windscreen, clawed at her eyes and
throat. A crash and tearing of metal, then silence, except for the tinny beat of the
music that kept on playing. One headlight shone at a strange angle, probing
the thick resin-smelling branches that had caught and netted the car. She lay, drifting in and out of consciousness,
aware that she mustn’t try to move her head and neck. She knew she was injured,
perhaps seriously, though she felt little pain as long as she kept still.
Saliva dribbled from the corner of her mouth, blood settled in one eye. After what seemed a long time she heard the noise
of an engine. Her own wrecked car filled with shifting parallelograms of
light and shade as the other car’s headlights swept across it. The engine was
switched off footsteps rang clear on the road, slurred across the grass
verge, and then a figure appeared at the window. A headless figure was all
she could see, since he didn’t bend to look in. She tried to speak, but only
a croak came out. He didn’t move, didn’t open the door~ didn’t check to see
how she was, didn’t ring or go for help. Just stood there, breathing. She tried to lift her head, but a spasm of pain
shot down her spine and she knew she mustn’t move. Slowly she slipped into
unconsciousness, fighting all the way, then battled her way back to the
surface, where now there were other voices, frightened voices—frightened of
her, of what she’d become. Ambulance,’ she heard. ‘Police.’ Then the familiar sound of somebody thumbing numbers
into a mobile phone, and at last she was able to let go and accept the dark. In something too high, too tight, for a bed.
White sheets pinned her legs down. Walls the colour
of putty. Mum’s voice, then Alice’s, but she knew they couldn’t be here, they’d
left the day after Boxing Day, and so she refused to acknowledge them, these
phantom relatives, and concentrated instead on getting some spit going in her
mouth. Her tongue felt swollen, and was so dry it stuck to the roof of her
mouth. ‘Look,’ said Her mother’s head came between her and the light.
‘Dead to the world. Can’t hear a word you’re saying.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know. They always say, don’t they, “Keep talking”? You never know how much gets
through.’ Was she dying? Couldn’t persuade herself it
mattered much. Water. ‘Do you think she can hear us?’ Mum said. She has been somewhere else. She remembers the
trees, the dark road, the branches pushing through broken glass, the man by
the window, breathing. But then it all begins to fade. She tried to turn her head and couldn’t. Some
kind of brace round her neck stopped her moving. Her right arm was swaddled
against her side by the tight sheet. She could feel her arms, and her legs,
and her toes. She wiggled them to make sure, remembering how her father,
right at the end of his long illness, after the stroke, had hated the arm he
couldn’t feel and kept pushing it away from him. At least she wasn’t like
that. It all still belonged to her, this barren plain she looked down on from
the height of her raised head, this fenland under its covering of snow. She started to drift off again, heard her mother
say, ‘We’re only tiring her. I think we’d better go and let her sleep.’ Somebody had sent roses. She opened her eyes and
there they were, tight, formal, dark red buds, like drops of blood in the
white room, but her eyelids were too heavy to go on looking, and when she
opened them again the roses were gone. From
there on, Barker leads readers of Double Vision
through many forms of seeing: as the artist captures life, through clear
glasses, with Asperger’s, with one eye to the past
and one to the future; with incomplete self-images; with insight. By the end
of the novel, readers are awash with deep understanding of what really
matters in life, one of the reasons we enjoy reading novels. Steve
Hopkins, February 23, 2004 |
|||
|
|
|||
|
ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Double
Vision.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
