More WW1 literature by a contemporary author.
Art and war collide in Booker Prize winner Pat Barker’s latest novel. The author talks to Yvette Huddleston about Toby’s Room.
“What I am interested in is why human beings slaughter each other on a mass scale,” says novelist Pat Barker.
“Most other animals don’t do that. What is it about the nature of human beings that we do?”
Barker’s latest book, Toby’s Room, focuses on the experiences of a group of young men and one young woman during the First World War. It is an era Barker has explored before, in the 1990s, in her powerful and moving Regeneration Trilogy – Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and the Booker prize-winning The Ghost Road. At the centre of the three novels was the pioneering work of Dr William Rivers in the treatment of the psychological trauma of war.
Barker was initially inspired to write about the First World War by family history. “My grandfather was bayoneted – he had a huge scar – and my step-father was gassed in the trenches at the age of 15,” she says.
What brought Barker back to “the war to end all wars” for Toby’s Room was writing one of her more recent novels, Double Vision (2003), which dealt with modern warfare and featured a photojournalist among its characters.
Art on the battlefield and a lost generation - Books - Yorkshire Post
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