Toby's Room

[Michelle Young]

Saw this latest offering by Pat Barker in Waterstones today. Anyone read it? Is it worth the money or is it another let's write about sex and have a tenuous link to the Great War book?

Michelle

[Moonraker]

I got given a copy for Christmas.Toby and Elinor are brother and sister who before the war have an incestuous relationship. He becomes a doctor who goes to great risks (to himself and his men) to rescue wounded men from No Man's Land and to identify the dead lying out there so as to inform correctly their next of kin. When he himself is reported "missing, believed killed", his sister is anxious to find out exactly what happened to him and enlists the help of her fellow art student, Kit Neville, recently back from the war with his face destroyed and who was with Toby when he was killed.

Some of the scenes are set at Queen Mary's Hospital, Sidcup, where injured soldiers' faces are reconstructed; there are harrowing descriptions of the treatments and how the public react to disfigured men.

The incest is broadly hinted at, and another sex scene - very relevant to the plot - is described only briefly.

One of the characters is Henry Tonks, who in real life sketched the injured soldiers. His biography, Henry Tonks: Art and Surgery, by Emma Chambers, is said to be "a thought -provoking examination of the aesthetic and ethical questions" of making portraits of severe disfigurement. The Author's Note gives

this link

to some of Tonks' portraits together with photographs and case histories.

I'm not sure that the book itself is one I would want to read again, but it does present an interesting aspect of the war and one seldom addressed in fiction.

Moonraker