The Weight Of The World

By Richard Lacayo

Any novel that features an artist working on a 15ft. statue of Christ should be approached with care. There's a lot of potential here for being trapped under a collapse of heavy symbolism. You might also think twice about a book that takes up the moral dilemma of photojournalists who chase after suffering that they can observe but not mitigate. Some ironies have been worn smooth by overuse. And beware all stories in which a world-weary middle-age man finds happiness in the arms of a girl roughly 20 years younger. There are only so many happy fictions a reader should have to believe.

So Double Vision (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 258 pages) ought to be a must to avoid. It's anything but. Granted, it has all those things, plus 9/11, Slobodan Milosevic and a good many predatory birds. But it's also the work of the subtle British novelist Pat Barker, whose dry-eyed manner and nuanced view of good and evil made her Regeneration trilogy, about World War I, a triumph. Her spare but still sometimes resplendent writing, her gift for menace--it's all in this book, and it makes you want to follow her even when she gets lost in the tangles of her multiple ambitions.

The sculptor is Kate Frobisher, who is recovering from both a serious car accident and the death of her husband Ben, a photojournalist killed in Afghanistan. Ben had been working there with Stephen Sharkey, a writer who witnessed 9/11 in New York City and has returned to the rural northeast of England to write a book about the depiction of war and to nurse the lingering emotional wounds of a marriage that coincidentally died on the same day the towers fell. Settling down not far from Kate, Stephen finds comfort in the arms of Justine, the much younger daughter of the local vicar. Kate, meanwhile, takes on Justine's ex-boyfriend Peter as her studio assistant, only to discover that Peter is a very unnerving young man.

Barker gives us a wounded and burdened world, where the spirit of violence is at large everywhere, from ground zero and Sarajevo to smaller-scale bloodlettings and betrayals in England. Though Peter figures just occasionally in the story, he will be its primary enigma, a troubled, potentially violent man who leads us to Barker's central quandaries: By what formula can evil be understood? By what means can we avoid being complicit in its schemes? The questions are teased out expertly. Her dialogue is as sharp and spare as ever. But Barker may be too anxious not to frame the answers in obvious strokes. Her tale proceeds intriguingly, only to end by teaching us a trick we didn't come to learn: how to leave a large question simply hanging in the air. --By Richard Lacayo