Brotherly love

Twenty years ago Pat Barker won acclaim with Regeneration, her novel about shell-shocked army officers undergoing treatment at the Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital for soldiers during the first world war. Her new novel is a close scrutiny of parallel atrocities of 1914–18. As in Regeneration, some characters are based on real-life figures.

Several scenes are set in Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, where the pioneer plastic surgeon Harold Gillies worked to rebuild the smashed or scorched faces of soldiers who had been fighting on the Western Front — ‘1,000 young men with gouged-out eyes, blown-off jaws, gaping holes where their noses had been’, as a visitor finds. Henry Tonks, Professor of Drawing at the Slade Art School, collaborated with Gillies by producing pastels showing patients’ injuries and the effects of repeated surgical interventions. The Tonks portraits (some of them horrifying) can be found online at www.gilliesarchives.org.uk: it is not the least of Pat Barker’s achievement in Toby’s Room to use her scrupulous gifts to depict the gruesome world of the Sidcup hospital and to honour its patients and staff.