Hamish Hamilton, 2003, 314 p

Artist Kate Frobisher, whose war photographer husband, Ben, was not long ago shot in Afghanistan, is driving home one winter’s night when her car skids on black ice and comes off the road. Her injuries mean she will need help to complete the commission of a sculpture of Jesus for the local church. The vicar suggests Peter Wingrave, a handyman currently unemployed. Meanwhile foreign correspondent Stephen Sharkey, Ben’s colleague, has split up with his wife and comes to live in a cottage owned by his brother in the same village.

The set-up reminded me a bit of J L Carr’s A Month in the Country, which featured an incomer haunted by war experiences (in his case The Great War) uncovering a mural in a rural church. Barker’s book is longer, though, and a trifle more complicated.

Wingrave turns out to have a peculiar interest in the sculpture and a past which includes something dark plus a relationship with the vicar’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Justine. Stephen and Justine, who is having a pre-University gap year enforced by illness and looks after his autistic nephew when the parents are at work, soon start seeing each other despite their age difference.

Stephen is haunted by his memories – especially that of a dead woman in Sarajevo – yet he is intent on writing a book about them using Ben’s photographs as illustrations. He reflects on the responsibility of being a witness, “There’s always this tension between wanting to show the truth, and yet being sceptical about what the effects of showing it are going to be,” a tension which the artist Goya also felt. Goya, he knows, “visited circuses, fiestas, fairs, freak shows, street markets, acrobatic displays, lunatic asylums, bear fights, public executions, any spectacle strong enough to still the shouting of the demons in his ears.”

The background of the aftermath of the foot and mouth epidemic is well drawn but despite seeming foreshadowings like that, events do not take the course they would normally imply. Barker handles her characters well enough, these people feel individual (even if the affair between Stephen and Justine is problematic. Is taking up with a much younger woman really a suitable salve for a troubled mind?) The connections between the lives of the protagonists of the two main strands, Kate and Stephen, are not really present, though. Only Wingrave provides any overlap between them, and that is tangential – not to mention a little forced what with his being Justine’s former lover.

Pedant’s corner:- “iced-covered” (‘iced-over’ or ‘ice-covered’ not ‘iced-covered’,) a north-east of England local refers to ‘the haar’ being what a ‘cartload of southern poofs’ would call a sea-fret (haar is in fact the word used in Scotland – especially east Scotland – for that meteorological phenomenon.)