Noonday gets into the spirit of the Second World War
‘SHE WAS A DAB HAND AT GIVING BIRTH TO THE DEAD’
Noonday by Pat Barker Penguin Canada 320 pp; $24.99
There are ghosts that haunt the streets of London in Pat Barker’s novel Noonday — a narrative twist that should not be. Ghosts and related supernatural phenomena do not belong in Barker’s fictional genre, a decidedly unromantic, gritty historical fiction in which everything that is gruesome and bloody- minded comes from the living, not the dead.
There’s enough, and more than enough, earthly horror to go around in this tale set at the height of the wartime blitz in London and featuring a coterie of highly talented artists. Elinor Brooke and Paul Tarrant are a married couple, both tapped by the government mandarin for the arts, Sir Kenneth Clark (a real historical figure), to paint idyllic scenes of wartime Britain — a form of middle-brow propaganda. Brooke and Tarrant are also respectively an air-raid warden and ambulance driver — occupations that plunge them into the heart of the inferno. Their friend, a critic and artist himself, Kit Neville, is eaten up with jealousy — Clark has not tapped him for patriotic use of his paintbrush.
Of a different order of being, almost, is another major character, a working- class spiritualist medium, Bertha Mason. She functions as a conduit from the spirit world, a grossly obese woman who lives an existence of almost unparalleled misery, even for wartime London.
A fifth character is the blitz itself, a force driving the human protagonists to unrelieved exhaustion. It is also an occasion for Barker to display her prose style at its sharpest and most durable. Here is Barker describing a characteristic street scene: “Shocked people huddled in doorways or wandered around in the middle of the road, purgatorial shadows with their white, dust-covered faces and dark clothes. Some, in pyjamas and dressing gowns, limped along on bloody feet.” Here is Barker conveying in a few words the effect of breathing in a world of rubble, a Dantesque circle of Hell: “Grit was everywhere, between his teeth, in his nostrils, in his eyes.”
Barker does not usually employ highly figurative language, but when she does, she laces it with ingredients of the grotesque and the humorous, with some measure of success. Here she describes a young boy struggling to pull a sweater over his head, “almost as if the sweater were giving birth to him.” Sometimes her efforts are pure grotesque, as when she writes, “With a slight shock he saw the moist, puckered anemone of the baby’s mouth tugging at a huge brown nipple.” This is better, certainly, than “lips purred like a cat’s arse.” And that in turn is not so bad as, “Nightmares crawled across each other like copulating toads.”
Worst of all — there is really no excuse for this — is Barker’s metaphor of a re-surfaced memory as something that “bobbed up like a turd in a sewer.” It might be argued that this repulsiveness of metaphor suits the subject matter in more ways than one — but that seems to me to be a variant of the mimetic fallacy, not to be indulged in. (Even if it is true, as I suspect, that there is a high tolerance for repulsiveness among today’s readers.)
Meanwhile the novel — the final volume of a trilogy, consisting of Life Class, Toby’s Room and Noonday — roots itself solidly in character. The first episode is the most wrenching part of the narrative, chiefly because it is centred on a boy, Kenny, who has been sent off to the country for refuge from the bombing of the city. His rural refuge happens to be the home of the Brooke family, members of whom take a dislike to him (he’s sneaky and pilfers food). Kenny thereupon runs away to see his mother in London — a mother who has no use for him either.
Paul, who pursues the lad and agrees to drive him back to London, can only guide the boy to a fetid, over-crowded underground shelter in the city. The subsequent fate of Kenny — the shelter is hit during a raid, with the horrifying loss of everyone inside — subsequently haunts Paul literally and provides Barker with a way of introducing him to Bertha. The woman is part fraud, of course, but part of her also seems genuinely attuned to the spirit world. “She was a dab hand at giving birth to the dead,” Barker writes. “The dead came to her, sought her out and there wasn’t a bloody thing she could do about it.”
An e nti r e novel could have been constructed around this plot development, but Barker chooses instead to focus mainly on the amorous entanglements of Elinor and her two suitors, that is to say her husband and the couple’s friend Kit. The story, unfortunately, doesn’t grip the reader, mainly because the characters involved in this triangle aren’t that compelling. Why these three choose to jump into bed with each other remains something of a mystery.
What does engage the reader is Paul’s attempt to do the right thing in other realms of his life. Paul leaves Kenny below in the shelter, with great reluctance, for example. “He didn’t feel he could just walk away,” Barker writes. In similar fashion, he realizes he can’t help the then terminally ill Bertha Mason. There is nothing he can do for her — but “somehow he couldn’t just walk out and leave her like this.”
The feeling that we “can’t just walk away” from other people in distress certainly is the seedbed of compassion and maturity.
Paul also comes up with a formula for living with the war, when the temptation to sit simply in a daze is strong — the formula is to “look outwards, to notice and remember.” This is easier said than done, even for someone with an artist’s eye. Sometimes the outward reality is too shocking or chaotic for details to emerge. At one point, Barker writes, “Paul tried to look back at the events of the night, but everything before Bertha and after Bertha was a blur.” Paul does experience an awful lot of blur.
Barker, however, ends the novel on a strong note, a surprise twist, that goes a long way toward redeeming the narrative as a whole.