Customer Reviews
Subtle, surprising - By: Philip Spires, 02 May 2008 
Double Vision by Pat Barker is a novel that defies description. Within its pages there is war, crime, murder, rape, love, hate, sex, artistry, creativity, duplicity, anger, tenderness, inspiration: a dictionary might have enough words to list its subtleties. What it has aplenty is feeling & emotion, an ability to convey its characters' innermost thoughts in an almost tactile manner, as if sculpting them for a hand to explore their surface. At times, Pat Barker's characters surprise even themselves.
At the heart of the book is a series of relationships between four individuals - Justine, Ben, Kate & Stephen. The two men used to work together as a team. They have covered wars & conflict throughout the world. Stephen was the writer, Ben the photographer, who would always insist on getting that one last shot, the one that the eyeless onlooker would miss, the one whose poetry would convey the true horror, the one whose horror, perhaps, might stir conscience. But one day, an Afghanistan, he pursued his perfectionist brief one shot too far and, over-exposed, another's eagle eye picked him out.
The loss felt by Stephen will never be adequately described, especiallly by himself. His partner's death puts him in limbo & he retires to write. Ben's sculptor wife, Kate, is left both numb & destroyed by her loss, a loss which becomes everything & nothing. A commission to create a giant Christ for a prime site in a churchyard is both pressing & unexpectedly therapeutic. She wants him naked. He must be clad. But then an accident damages her arms & she must seek help from a gardener, Peter, who is clearly much more than a pruner of roses. Exactly what Peter might be adds a sense of tangible mystery to parts of the book, but these serve only to highlight the fact that he is perhaps the only one of the characters with a recorded & therefore accessible past.
Justine is the vicar's daughter. At nineteen she was ready to go to university, but illness disrupted her plans. Being ditched by a boyfriend did not help. And so academe was deferred by an enforced gap year. She `does' for Stephen's brother & his wife, specialising in caring for a difficult, demanding child. When Stephen lodges with the family, but in a separate dwelling a hundred yards from the house, he & Justine meet. He is old enough to be her father. So what? Their relationship develops through the book, their frequent sexual encounters both rich & surprising. Pat Barker's ability to tease out emotional reaction, to crystalllise it but at the same time to keep it fluid makes the story of Stephen & Justine exciting, exhilarating, contradictory, impossible & accepted in one. Whatever people's ages, whatever their motives, whatever the consequences, either real or imagined, people still need love, can sense its promise, can invite it, even when they know it could hurt, humiliate, destroy.
Double Vision is thus a complex story of how a group of friends & acquaintances interact with history, reality, their hopes & fears in a smalll community in the north-east of England. There is a strong sense of place, a keen eye for detail in a rural landscape that is at least partly hostile. Not that other landscapes are not hostile. Memories of war & its consequences haunt some of the characters. Failed relationships taunt others. Unrealised dreams snag away at the fraying edges of what might have been. Death turns lives upside down, lives that go on to new ecstasies of joy, creativity or even plunder.
At the end of the book you know these people intimately & intuitively. But your knowledge & understanding of people is like a photograph. It is valid only for the instant in which it was taken. As memory, it solidifies an ever changing reality into an illusion of permanence, like a sculpture captures a moment of movement, a moment that never happened. Life goes on. This is a beautiful book.
Not what you expected, so much the better - By: K. W. van Kooten, 18 Dec 2006 Although I can see what other reviewers mean, I don't agree with their ratings & comments. One of the many good things of this book is the open ending. There is a threatening atmosphere built up, & things turn out very differently than you might have expected. After the book's ending many things might happen, perhaps even things you feared would happen in the course of the book. Yes, life goes on. People change & will change, & some of those people are in this book, with scars, open wounds, strange ways of looking for healing of those - known or only hinted at - wounds. There is a Stephen, a Peter, a Robert, an Alec in me (being a man), & even a Kate, Justine or Angela. This is the best novel I read for months, as good as other Pat Barker books, & I hope I will be able to find books by Pat Barker I haven't read yet.
Lazy stuff from such a famous author - By: , 16 Jan 2006 
I enjoyed the first three quarters immensely, & then it fell to pieces. Not the standard expected. It then began to read more like a first novel. The credits of her research indicated that she had put alot of academic research into this project. Where was it? Perhaps the computer corrupted & she lost large chunks of worthwhile prose.
We started off with Kate & developed her as a meaningful character, but then she seemed to get lost. Whose book was it? Stephen's, I suppose, but he was very thinly drawn. The character balance was very choppy. Peter & the statue business was never fully explained. I think, reading between the lines, that Pat Barker got fed up with this novel & ditched it, rather than putting in the work she intended. Very poor stuff.
Hmmmm - By: primitivegrrl, 01 Apr 2005 
I reallly enjoyed the first 3/4 of this book & Pat Barker is a tremendous writer - I reallly cared about the characters especiallly Stephen & Kate which is a testament to Barker's skill. However, I feel Barker just kind of gave up at the end, there wasn't a satisfying conclusion (maybe that was intended), & it left me feeling a little cheated. I think this will be a book that I'll never be sure if I enjoyed it or not. Hmmmmm.
Strangely unfulfilling - By: , 23 Mar 2005 I must agree with the other review on this book. Barker's characters were interesting to begin with, & I read on quickly in hope of finding out how she was going to bring such a disparate group of people together. Sadly, the conclusion was both confusing & disappointing, & when I closed the book I just felt a bit blank & dissatisfied. However, there are certainly moments of good writing in the novel & some interesting observations. Just a shame, as the other reader agrees, that she didn't truly plumb the depths of the smalll world she created. My impression was that it could have been a big, meaty novel & ended up being something much less than that. Still, it did win the booker prize, & I did read it in 2 days (on the bus & in the evenings) - so there is something to be said for its readability.
