Book Review: Double Vision by Pat Barker - Page 2

Double Vision is thus a complex story of how a group of friends and acquaintances interact with history, reality, their hopes and fears in a small 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 and 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 Double Vision you know these people intimately and intuitively. But your knowledge and 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.

Article Author: Philip Spires

I was a child in Sharlston, then a mining village, and then Crofton, near Wakefield, UK. I went to London University and then did two years as a VSO in Kenya. I then taught in London for 16 years before moving to Brunei technical education. …

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