Although she came to prominence in the 90s, I only started reading her last year, having made an impulse purchase in an airport. Her greatest strengths include the way she describes people in wartime who feel fatalistic because they have no control over their chances of staying alive. They are living every day as though it could be their last. She has a great insight into the sexual hang-ups of her male characters, and the way women had to deal with predatory men.
The trilogy involving Sassoon, Owen and Rivers contains some of the best writing I have read on war, and it's particularly impressive on the dialogue between Rivers and his patients. You can appreciate how Rivers is ahead of his time (a liberal in a brutal psychiatric system) and how he is both opposed to the war yet loyal to his job requirement of getting the men back to the front line. I would like to have seen a bit more of Owen because we mainly see Owen through the eyes of other people, who seem to find him rather clingy (Sassoon's puppy), whereas Owen's poems project a far more powerful personality than that.
My main disappointment with Barker was that I felt the ending of Noonday was just too dark; in particular, Eleanor did not deserve what happened to her. The modern day novel Double Vision has some great dialogue but as with Noonday, it feels unresolved at the end. The identities of the attackers are not revealed and we don't know how the book's central relationships are likely to work out.
The trilogy involving Sassoon, Owen and Rivers contains some of the best writing I have read on war, and it's particularly impressive on the dialogue between Rivers and his patients. You can appreciate how Rivers is ahead of his time (a liberal in a brutal psychiatric system) and how he is both opposed to the war yet loyal to his job requirement of getting the men back to the front line. I would like to have seen a bit more of Owen because we mainly see Owen through the eyes of other people, who seem to find him rather clingy (Sassoon's puppy), whereas Owen's poems project a far more powerful personality than that.
My main disappointment with Barker was that I felt the ending of Noonday was just too dark; in particular, Eleanor did not deserve what happened to her. The modern day novel Double Vision has some great dialogue but as with Noonday, it feels unresolved at the end. The identities of the attackers are not revealed and we don't know how the book's central relationships are likely to work out.