Paul is disillusioned with his art and leaves the Slade after a year but keeps in touch with Elinor and Kit (a former student who is now exhibiting). When war comes Paul is turned down for active service but enlists with the Belgian Red Cross, something Kit has also done. Elinor wants to continue painting and refuses to go into nursing like other girls.
Up until the war enters the story I found the book quite modern. Perhaps it is the art background but at times I felt I was reading something quite up to date. But once Paul leaves for the front line you know you are in the middle of a war. The descriptions of the injured, the conditions and facilities the Red Cross work in is all so real and pulls you in.
Throughout the book there are other insights into war - a mutual friend, Catherine, who is German, encounters the displeasure of neighbours as things are thrown at their windows. Her father is interned in a former Workhouse. There is the propaganda spouted and the posters plastered everywhere. This was also the age of the war artists and war poets and both Kit and Paul in the story paint what they see.
During the story Elinor and Paul become close and with some dodgy paperwork Elinor goes out under the disguise of being a nurse to stay with Paul but a near-miss with a barrage of bombing sends Elinor home and it seems that over time Elinor is becoming more remote. When Paul is injured and sent home he takes with him his paintings and shows them to his former art teacher, Henry Tonks who was also a surgeon and has gone back to the hospital. I didn't realise this until I finished the book and was reading the research done by Barker, that Tonks was a real person whose job later was to make drawings of patients before and after plastic surgery. He worked with Henry Gillies who was pioneering new methods of plastic surgery. The images were never shown in his lifetime but I am sure I have seen some of these at an exhibition some years ago.
The book left Elinor and Paul at a crossroads and doesn't tie up what happens to them after they meet again in London, but books don't have to tie everything up in neat packages. Elinor views the war totally different to Paul. She wants to paint nice things and not think about/talk about the war, even though her own brother is fighting. Paul wants to express his view of war in his paintings.
The book has made me want to read more of Barker's books. Locally there is a play of one of her books - Regeneration - being put on and I am tempted to go along to see it. This wasn't a long book, 247 pages, but very real and immediate, especially the scenes near the front line and the casualties they encountered.
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