Fiction
The Ghost Road
By Pat Barker. William Abrahams/Dutton. 278 pp. $21.95.
Among the characters in this astonishing novel, which just won the United Kingdom's top literary award, the Booker Prize, is a physician, struggling to help shell-shocked British soldiers recover their sanity. Overwhelmed by their suffering, he finds himself fearing that the tales they tell him "would become one story, the voices blend into a single cry of pain." Set during the last days of World War I, "The Ghost Road" follows the efforts of several characters to come to terms with the horrific effects of the war on their lives and their souls. Lt. Billy Prior, a "temporary gentleman" elevated from the ranks of the working class by his battlefield commission, discovers that the only place he feels alive or at home is on the front. Hospitalized following his collapse, he fights stubbornly to get back to his troops, away from the seedy precincts of the home front, from a country that seems to him to be filled with "drifting, dispossessed people," a society in a condition "of absolute free-fall."
Ms. Barker, the author of several gritty novels about the modern British working class, including "Union Street" and "The Century's Daughter," is an audacious writer. "Ghost Road" is the third volume in a trilogy about the British experience in World War I ("Regeneration" and "The Eye in the Door" are the two earlier volumes). The novels adroitly mingle historical characters with fictional creations: Dr. William Rivers, charged with rehabilitating shell-shocked soldiers, did exist. And while Billy Prior is invented, one of the fellow officers in Billy's regiment is Wilfred Owen, the extraordinary poet who died in the last major campaign of the war.
Although the literature on the war is vast, Ms. Barker's view of life on the front manages to be startling and convincing; she catches the awful "immobility, passivity and helplessness" of trench warfare, the "morose disgust" that came from "living in trenches that had bits of human bone sticking out of the walls," a world in which the stench of corruption is inescapable. It's as if she has reinvented the genre of the war novel, having dug down through dense layers of stereotypes and recovered something of the war's true horror. Billy Prior -- fatalistic, intelligent, isolated from everything but his experience of war -- is a remarkable creation. In her portraits of Billy and his fellow soldiers, Ms. Barker has recreated the singular experiences of individuals who reveal, in their particular stories of grief and horror, the war's true cost and tragedy.
The Education Of Oscar Fairfax
By Louis Auchincloss. Houghton Mifflin. 225 pp. $22.95.
A certain irony trails Louis Auchincloss's long career as a writer (he is the author of 50 books, including 36 previous works of fiction). His portraits of the upper reaches of American society, of the old East Coast aristocracy and their haunts and habits, has been so assured -- and, often, so unsparing -- that he has frequently been described as primarily a novelist of manners, and politely dismissed. But as this precise, moving novel reminds us, Mr. Auchincloss is, more importantly, a moralist. He may write about well-heeled attorneys, influential businessmen, aristocratic educators and socialites, but he's after something more than a realistic portrait of that world.
Oscar Fairfax, born in 1895 into "one of the very few American families who descended in the male line from a pre revolutionary British peer," grows up well aware of the "charm of belonging to an establishment." After graduating from Yale he joins his father's Manhattan law firm, and over the span of a lengthy career watches it become one of the largest and most influential firms in the city.
But he also grows up with the conviction, impressed on him by his father, that the family's "seemingly impregnable social position was something of a myth, a relic." Goodhearted, liberal, honest, energetic, he sets out to do good, to be of use. More than that, because he nurtures "a hobby of believing in people," Oscar frequently attempts to exercise a benevolent influence on those around him. He becomes the mentor of a bright, penniless young man, seeing him through college, prodding him into becoming a lawyer. During the 1930s he attempts, for the best possible reasons, to convince a Supreme Court Justice to support the New Deal's extraordinary legislation. Misreading his only son's interests and character, he repeatedly presses unfortunate courses of action on him.
None of these efforts turn out well. Oscar's morality, while well-intentioned, is inflexible; it never admits the complexities of human nature. His education, then, is finally in the need for a humane morality, one that is wise enough to accept how varying and surprising human needs can be.
Mr. Auchincloss packs a remarkable amount of incident into a slender narrative, all of it told in the terse, elegant prose that has become one of his trademarks. Once again he is writing about the upper classes, but once again he is dealing, in a highly original and moving manner, with questions that transcend class and time.
