Toby’s Room explores the WW1 lives of characters from Barker’s previous novels, but her focus has shifted to the medical aftermath for the wounded and how families process bereavement.
Which was wrong of me, because when you’re sending men to war as cannon fodder, it does matter that the officers are better fed than the men, and that even when they are wounded, they are treated better than the men… There are class distinctions in the novel, but I hadn’t paid much attention to them because they seemed extraneous to the main theme of memory and how it is constructed. Wikipedia tells me that her other novels which apparently acquired these labels were Perhaps I should read Liza’s England (1986) which has been waiting patiently on the TBR since I found it years ago in an OpShop. Since I’ve only read her war novels and one of her forays into rewriting Greek myth, I hadn’t come to this conclusion at all.
Toby’s Room, as you can tell from the front cover design, continues Pat Barker’s preoccupation with themes of war, survival and recovery, so I was interested to read at Wikipedia that before writing the Regeneration Trilogy (1991, 1993, 1995) she felt that she had been typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist-label, label, label-novelist.
0 kommentar(er)
