Noonday by Pat Barker review – love triangle loses its way in the blitz

Away from the fields of Flanders, Pat Barker’s characters fail to convince in the last part of an otherwise well-researched wartime trilogy

The second world war, in our literature, somehow lacks the pity and fear so remorselessly inspired by the first world war. Strangely, the global conflict that saw the Holocaust, the Normandy landings and the bombing of Hiroshima remains somehow less terrible than the events still known as “the Great War”.

The poets, who imaginatively colonised Flanders in their response to the slaughter in the trenches, have a lot to answer for, as Pat Barker must know only too well. She made their landscape and suffering her own in the Regeneration trilogy. But that was in the 90s. Now, after one or two dud rounds (Double Vision in 2003 was not a success), here she is challenging her own mastery of the frontline, and moving from the poets’ war to the people’s war. Barker’s Life Class trilogy, which culminates in Noonday, is set on the home front of the second world war and, in particular, the London Blitz, a subject that’s lately begun to attract a lot of attention in fiction and non-fiction, from Lara Feigel’s The Love-charm of Bombs to Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch.

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