Looking back, I realise that Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy was responsible for a shift in the direction of reading. Those books made me realise that war books weren’t just about men and fighting. And that I could learn a great deal about the world and humanity through books that considered war and its consequences.

Since then I’ve read and learned a great deal. But I haven’t read any of Pat Barker’s work, because nothing has called me in quite the same way as that trilogy. Until now …

Toby’s R More...

Toby's Room is the latest excellent novel by Pat Barker. I have read most of Pat Barker's novels and they never fail to satisfy. Barker creates interesting characters and her best works (the Regeneration Trilogy)occur during the First World War. In these books and in Toby's Room her fictional characters interact with actual historical figures in coming to grips with the horrors of modern warfare. Barker writes less about battles and combat and more about the impact of those conflicts on combatan More...

The bitter irony of war is that it defines life at the same time as it destroys. For those in uniform, following orders is the one raison d’etre when all reason has been lost in the bloodied muck of the battlefield. For those left behind, doing for the war effort becomes the channel through which fear and pride flow into the morass of uncertainty.

How does war change us? Does it redefine character? Does it halt the trajectory of our lives and set us on a different path? Does it show in stark rel More...

Barker's Regeneration trilogy are among my favorite books. But now it just feels like she's just treading the same, well-worn path.

All the topics touched on in the regeneration trilogy and more in a third the time , without losing any power, I guess a reflection of maturity as writer. The book covers wwwi, incest, homosexuality, death, lies perception, trauma , women's role in the 1910s and more . Chapter 11 is one of the best single chapter I've read in any book it just took the previous chapters build up and with great clarity and poetry made sense of it all and set the book spinning in its intended direction.

In Toby's Room, Pat Barker offers a lot of her best: the ability to show what it meant to be contemporary during the days of the First World War. Toby's Room doesn't just put you close to the battles and in the hospital - it shows the delicate reactions of the people whose hearts jump or skin prickles. No internet, no TV, and no quaintness. There is something special about Barker's gift for creating literary vitality. You see everyone in relief, and when she doesn't force a plot turn or a thesis More...

I read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy in the early '90s and was blown away by it. Contemporary fiction with a WW1 background has long been an interest of mine, and those books were a brilliant exposition of the ravages of war and its effect on the soldiers who fought in it, but also gave insight into the early days of psychiatric treatment, and provided a fascinating fictionalized look at the literary process through the real-life characters of Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke.

In Toby's Ro More...

British novelist, Pat Barker is best known for the Regeneration Triology, focused on World War I. Toby's Room covers some of the same territory...the years leading up to the war when it was all but unimaginable...and the years of the war when it also was all but unimaginable. Toby's Room is a superb novel offering a full account of what it was like to be a young person in England during those times. Barker's focus is on Elinor and Toby, younger sister and older brother, in a milieu of other well More...

I generally avoid books about war and its aftermath. The horror and futility. However this book was chosen by a member of our book group and I had to read it.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. The characterisation is absolutely flawless - the dramatis personae are so utterly believable, I recognised these people. I almost felt this was a narrative of my own life set in another time and place.

Ultimately this is a story of loss, as all war novels are, and the coming to terms (or not) of what has gone, in t More...

Most novelists who write a book that revisits the lives of characters who have featured in an earlier work of theirs would usually do so in sequel form. That is not the case in this instance. In her novel "Life Class", Pat Barker introduced us to art students Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville as the First World War was about to begin. The same three characters feature in this story, "Toby's Room". The events depicted take place at a slightly earlier and a slightly later time in their l More...

I love Pat Barker, and haven't read anything by her since the Regeneration Trilogy. "Toby's Room" takes us back, through Barker's deft storytelling, to World War I, with artists, rather than poets, at the center of the story. Again, Barker mixes actual historical figures with fictional characters. In this case the actual historical figure is Henry Tonks, renowned surgeon, artists and art teacher, who is particularly known for having produced "pastel drawings recording facial injury cases at Alde More...

The story opens with a powerful and shocking description of the incestuous relationship between Toby and Elinor, in the years directly preceding the First World War. Elinor is the main protagonist, and after the opening sequence is training in art at the Slade in London, where she unusually joins female medical students in their anatomy and dissection classes. Barker spares no detail of the dissection process, and this links in with later themes in the novel, which describe the early plastic sur More...

I liked the cover of this book and picked it up knowing nothing abut it. Turns out to be another war story, this one takes place in England just before WWI then jumps four years to 1917. the story focuses on Elinor, an art student under real life teacher Henry Tonks at The Slade. Part One, in 1914, frames her through her relationship with her older, adored brother Toby as well as her experience at school. Part Two takes place in 1917 after Toby has been sent to France and she senses he will not More...

There have been a great many powerful and emotional books written that focus on World War One, its devastation and its grim impact on all who endured it. Can yet another novel written in its shadow find new perspectives to explore that move readers?

Pat Barker has written with deep sensitivity of the wartime experience of men, and it turns out that she is able to meet the challenge of finding new dimensions to probe -- through a remarkable juxtaposition of art and the battlefield. Elinor Brooke i More...

I have huge respect for Pat Barker and devoured her "Regeneration" trilogy, but have been a little disappointed in subsequent offerings. I'm afraid "Toby's Room" hasn't changed that at all.
Still writing about the tragedy of WW1, I feel this novel and it's somewhat surprising opening events doesn't really add to Barker's canon on the subject.
The characters, with the possible exception of Neville, are insubstantial and, while Neville is fleshed out a little more thoroughly than the rest, even the More...

Perhaps I need to let this book simmer in my mind longer, in order to truly appreciate it. I finished "Toby's Room" in a day, spurred on by the intense and unexpected events occurring in the very first pages of the novel. I was shocked at the matter-of-fact descriptions of the defining event that ripples through the rest of the story. I was fascinated with the characters in the beginning, for their actions and reactions were so different than anything I had expected. I was taken in by the main c More...

Toby’s Room, by Pat Barker, Narrated by Nicola Barber, Produced by Audiogo, downloaded from audible.com.

This story begins with Toby and Elinor Brooke, brother and sister. They are very close and even look alike. And they do some sexual experimenting on one occasion. Toby apologizes, and they never speak of it again. In 1917, Toby ships out to France as a doctor in WW I. One of the people shipping out with him is Kit, who wants to be an illustrator for the war. Kit does not want to actually fight More...

A "companion" to her previous novel, Life Class, (and, for my money, a better book) this novel returns to the era of WWI, a subject which has provided Barker fodder for many of her novels. Medicine, art, medical technology, psychology, and the effects of war conflate in this story of Elinor Brooke, a young upper class art student. Her relationship with her older brother Toby has always been very close, and when Toby, a medical officer, does not return from the battlefield, Elinor becomes obsesse More...

Oooh I do love a bit of Pat Barker.

Toby's Room revisits some of the characters we met in Life Class - fortunately for me reading the first isn't essential because I can never remember what happens in books once I read them.

The name is almost misleading as Toby isn't always the centre of attention in the book. Instead the focus is on those around him, Elinor, Kit Neville and Paul Tarrant and how they are left to deal with the hand that they have been dealt by World War I.

Guilt seems to be a majo More...

Combining the themes of 'My Dear I Wanted To Tell You' and 'The Absolutist', this is a return to the impact of the First World War for Pat Barker. The novel focuses on the death of a Medical Officer, and show the impact this has on his family as a whole, but especially on his sister, with whom he had had an intimate relationship prior to an incident in 1912. A secondary, but interwoven, storyline is that of the offical War Artists commissioned to produce approved and 'official' images of the fro More...

Pat Barker is, as always, an excellent storyteller and a master of symbolic language. In this novel, she revisits the era of the Regeneration Trilogy, and creates it as convincingly as she did then.

I'm giving Toby's Room only three stars on a first reading, primarily because of the frustration I felt at Barker's choice to make Toby so opaque that he's insubstantial. Admittedly, her point is that no one knows him, save possibly a friend who's glimpsed once, but he drives the narrative from offst More...

I made sure I'd read Life Class before reading Toby's Room because I knew it was a prequel of sorts and that most of the characters in Life Class would reappear in Toby's Room. While this novel may not be Pat Barker at her absolute best, it's still worth reading, I think. Paul, Elinor and Neville feature in this novel as well, but its territory is less WWI than it is the human heart, the need to know and the need for closure, and its themes are the power of truth to wound as well as heal and the More...

I love Pat Barker -- I think she's one of the strongest and best writers we have among us today - so, not surprisingly, I loved this book. (Which is not to say I love all her books equally - the one before this, Master Class, i found extremely disappointing, though in a way it's a prequel to this book).

This is a very emotionally intense novel, and very interior in some important ways. I still love her WWI trilogy the most of her books (Regeneration, The Ghost Road, the Eye in the Door), but this More...

I don't usually bother finishing a book I'm not enjoying (it's my way of making sure reading remains my favourite thing to do, I suppose) but I have such admiration for Pat Barker's writing that I felt a sense of duty to complete this.

The Regeneration trilogy are among my favourite novels, and I think Barker's unflinchingness a far better treatment of World War One that Faulks' more decorous approach in Birdsong. I also enjoyed her subsequent novels, Another World and Border Crossing. Toby's Roo More...

I read this far too quickly becoming engrossed and mesmerised by the suspense of the main narrative but also by all the layers within the story: the examination of an independent female artist's life in the early twentieth century, family and identity, being/appearing to be foreign in the time of war, the nature of love. Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy are my most admired novels of the First World War. I loved the way she included 'real' people, 'celebrities' into her novels without irritation More...

The book starts in 1912 so before Life Class (the book which was written before this one which is not quite a prequel). This section of the book introduces the key themes and characters of the book to follow. It then moves in time to 1917 where the rest of the book is set.

It tells the stories of Elinor Brooke, (a former art student at the Slade) her lovers, friend and brother-how they all inertwine and how the war impacts on then and their realtionships with each other. The main theme is Elinor More...

It is a wonderful book. Very nicely writen. Extremely poignant story. Very reality like in the way the characters behave because in the end you tend (or at least I did) to put yourself in every person's shoes to try to understand if you would have done the same choices. Because maybe with a different choice along the way the outcome wouldn't have been so dramatic. Or perhaps it would have been worse. But then again that's how life works.
Also it gives you some insight to the lives of British peop More...

This author has focused her fiction in the peri-WW I era in England, and this book is no exception to that rule. As anyone who has watched ‘Downton Abbey’ knows, WW I was a sea change for England. The was not only a colossal waste of life and resources. It represented a shift in the importance of class in England, as well as the roles of women in society. That is the cultural and social backdrop against which the story takes place.
The book is entitled ‘Toby’s Room’ but it is really about Toby’s More...

I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads. It was definitely a page turner. It didn't really matter that I hadn't read the first book (Life Class) - Toby's Room has the same characters but I'm fairly certain it tells a very different story. The main storyline revolves around discovering the mysterious circumstances surrounding the "Missing, Believed Killed" telegram that Elinor Brooke and her family receive about her brother Toby. I liked parts of the story (The sections about the e More...

The war displaces lives , alters people and changes things drastically. Is it the loss of a soldier that is more painful or is it the return of a soldier permanently disabled or disfigured that is more unbearable? This novel will surely put this question right in centre stage.

Pat Barker,famous for her Booker prize winning Regeneration trilogy is back with a war time novel. It's dark, grotesque but still tender for the reader. The sadness in the novel is not too forceful and the narrative keeps More...