The depiction of war (and other types of violence) is so casual in our culture that we need to be reminded by artists of all kinds what suffering it inflicts on individual lives and what that suffering really feels like.  War kills and maims individual people. Individuals just like me and just like you. It destroys the homes of individuals, robs individuals of their loved ones, their health, their security, and sometimes their sanity.  War is organized fighting between groups or nations, but what are nations and groups if they’re not collections of individual lives?

War and its scorching impact on the individual is the subject of so much of Pat Barker’s work.  Noonday completes her latest war trilogy, concluding what was started with Life Class and Toby’s Room.  The first two novels were set during The Great War.  Noonday finds the same characters twenty-five years later in London during the Blitz, but the long and dark shadow of The Somme can still be felt.  War in Barker’s novels is a live, looming presence – something hot, fetid, and suffocating.  It insinuates itself into people’s thoughts, feelings, and actions just as devastatingly as it destroys bodies and buildings.  It paralyzes the mind and spirit as well as the body.  Her description of London in 1940 is searing.  Corpses strewn on the rubble after the nighttime air raids.  Orphaned children wandering the streets.  The crowded bomb shelters.  The terror, the resignation, the exhilaration, and the routine heroism of individuals in war.

There’s some unusually powerful writing in Noonday, but it’s a flawed novel.  The plot relies too much on coincidence and Elinor’s and Paul’s characters don’t develop or rise from the page as realistically as they did in the earlier books. The introduction of Bertha adds almost nothing to the story and feels tentative. But Barker’s singular achievement here, just as in her previous Regeneration trilogy, is the truthful and necessary depiction of war and the havoc it wreaks in the lives and loves of real people.