Double Vision

by Pat Barker

Book Overview

A gripping novel about the effects of violence on the journalists and artists who have dedicated themselves to representing it In the aftermath of September 11, reeling from the effects of reporting... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140270752
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Penguin UK
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.8" x 5.2"

Customer Reviews

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DOUBLE VISION By Randall Ingermanson Review by Laura V. Hilton Dillon Richard is a brilliant and meticulous engineer at CypherQuanta, but his boss has just announced that the company is going under unless he can come up with a computer program in three weeks which is guaranteed to make all other computers - except theirs - worthless. Rachel Meyers is a quirky, erratic biophysicist who has developed a quantum computer that will change the world . . . if Dillon can write the program. Then CypherQuanta will be worth billions. But someone is determined to steal the secret . . . Keryn Wills is a mystery writer and part-time chief financial officer at CypherQuanta. She needs Rachel and Dillon to complete the project, but she doesn't want them to be friends. After all, she wants Dillon for herself. Now time is running out and there are three secrets that must be solved. Will they manage to unravel the mysteries before time runs out? And, since both women are after Dillon, who will he choose--girl-genius, Rachel, or calming Keryn? DOUBLE VISION is a real page turner. My husband grabbed this book before I did and he pronounced it a keeper. Now my son is anxious to get his hands on it. I found the characters adorable, I could identify with each of them, and I couldn't wait to see who Dillon would choose. The computer/physics/engineering stuff went right over my head, but it's clear that Randy Ingermanson knows this topic. The faith message in DOUBLE VISION is expertly woven in and isn't preachy. I enjoyed reading DOUBLE VISION and recommend it highly. $12.99. 382 pages

Subtle, surprising

Double Vision by Pat Barker is a novel that defies description. Within its pages there is war, crime, murder, rape, love, hate, sex, artistry, creativity, duplicity, anger, tenderness, inspiration: a dictionary might have enough words to list its subtleties. What it has aplenty is feeling and emotion, an ability to convey its characters' innermost thoughts in an almost tactile manner, as if sculpting them for a hand to explore their surface. At times, Pat Barker's characters surprise even themselves. At the heart of the book is a series of relationships between four individuals - Justine, Ben, Kate and Stephen. The two men used to work together as a team. They have covered wars and conflict throughout the world. Stephen was the writer, Ben the photographer, who would always insist on getting that one last shot, the one that the eyeless onlooker would miss, the one whose poetry would convey the true horror, the one whose horror, perhaps, might stir conscience. But one day, an Afghanistan, he pursued his perfectionist brief one shot too far and, over-exposed, another's eagle eye picked him out. The loss felt by Stephen will never be adequately described, especially by himself. His partner's death puts him in limbo and he retires to write. Ben's sculptor wife, Kate, is left both numb and destroyed by her loss, a loss which becomes everything and nothing. A commission to create a giant Christ for a prime site in a churchyard is both pressing and unexpectedly therapeutic. She wants him naked. He must be clad. But then an accident damages her arms and she must seek help from a gardener, Peter, who is clearly much more than a pruner of roses. Exactly what Peter might be adds a sense of tangible mystery to parts of the book, but these serve only to highlight the fact that he is perhaps the only one of the characters with a recorded and therefore accessible past. Justine is the vicar's daughter. At nineteen she was ready to go to university, but illness disrupted her plans. Being ditched by a boyfriend did not help. And so academe was deferred by an enforced gap year. She `does' for Stephen's brother and his wife, specialising in caring for a difficult, demanding child. When Stephen lodges with the family, but in a separate dwelling a hundred yards from the house, he and Justine meet. He is old enough to be her father. So what? Their relationship develops through the book, their frequent sexual encounters both rich and surprising. Pat Barker's ability to tease out emotional reaction, to crystallise it but at the same time to keep it fluid makes the story of Stephen and Justine exciting, exhilarating, contradictory, impossible and accepted in one. Whatever people's ages, whatever their motives, whatever the consequences, either real or imagined, people still need love, can sense its promise, can invite it, even when they know it could hurt, humiliate, destroy. Double Vision is thus a complex story of how a group of friends and acquaintances interact wi

Double vision may mean taking a second look.

Pat Barker gets right to the point - she is a direct story teller. Even though she is extremely skillful as a writer, with a wonderful skill for description of person and place, she believes in telling a comprehensible story with beginning, middle, and end and none of that ambiguous hanging ending that can be too arty and frustrating. Well what was this story about? Well it is about as many themes as there were primary characters. It is about grief and recovery from grief. It is about starting love over again with mature eyes. It is about recognizing that your ego blinds you to dangers. Kate has lost her photographer husband in Afganistan, yet she moves forward, she continues to create, and she continues to be brave. Steven has seen it all and experienced it all as a war correspondent and now a newly divorced man. Yet he allows first unexpected lust and then unexpected love to be kindled in a relationship with a young woman, Justine, 20 years younger than himself. Alec, the Episcopal minister and father of Justine, appears to be the humble wise man of God, but in fact he is an egotist who thinks he can really help ex-prisoners make a change in their lives, yet his ego is so big he puts his daughter, Justine, in danger. Peter is an ex-prisoner around 30 years old, who killed a woman when he was 10. Pat Barker plays a game with the reader in that she gradually reveals disturbing information about Peter, making him into somewhat of a Patricia Highsmith type of villian, but by the end of the novel, we see that he is a catalyst. He revealed to Kate her inner courage; he is Justine's ex-lover who decides to break up with her rather than reveal his past; he is Stephen's competition; and he is the instrument that brings Alec into true humility from his egotism. He is not a Highsmith or Hitchcock villian as Barker would lead us to believe in the early clues she puts in our path in the first chapters. The book is packed full of literary skill.

Poetry and menace

Themes of individual loss and trauma seen against the remote brutality and atrocity of war preoccupy the main characters of Barker's nuanced, engrossing novel. Poetic, atmospheric prose combines with the small mysteries of behavior to create a duality of beauty and menace. This undercurrent of tension ebbs and flows, like a low-grade fever threatening to erupt over efforts to cope with love and grief and issues too large to grasp and hold.Grieving sculptor Kate Frobisher is the widow of Ben, a photographic journalist who traveled the world's wars. He was killed by a sniper just after photographing a still life of abandoned Soviet tanks in Afghanistan. As the book opens, Kate loses control of her car on a winter night and suffers injuries to her neck and back, which prevent her from resuming work on her latest commission - a monumental Christ figure for an outdoor promontory, which will be viewed from afar as well as up close, presenting profound technical difficulties for the artist, who must make the statue work from two very different vantage points.Stephen Sharkey, a colleague and close friend of Ben's, has come to the countryside to write a book on war, perception, and the journalists' effects on what they see. He will be using Ben's photographs in his book. He and Ben were in New York on 9/11 and Stephen is reminded that life goes on in all its mundane triumphs and tragedies when he calls home to connect with his wife that night only to discover her infidelity. But it's not until after Ben's death that he quits his job, gets a divorce, and starts his book.Stephen's working retreat is a cottage belonging to his physician brother, Robert, near Kate's old farmhouse. Robert and his wife, Beth, have a son with Asperger's syndrome, cared for by Justine, the 19-year-old daughter of the local vicar, a man of deliberate conscience who takes in former convicts. Justine, recovering from an affair with one of them, Peter, a rather aloof, handsome enigma, takes up with Stephen, who finds himself rejuvenated, if a little self-conscious. Peter, recommended by the vicar, has become a temporary assistant to Kate, who dislikes having anyone around while she is working, but requires the physical aid.Each has suffered (or will suffer) some trauma, or at least setback, that affects their perceptions and progress through life. It's only the war-ravaged dead for whom the violation is final, although witnesses, perpetrators and those who interpret the images of atrocities to the wider public immortalize their suffering. Stephen ponders the novel's overt themes -perception and violence - while negotiating his way through an affair with a girl young enough to be his daughter. " `Why won't you watch the news?' he asked [Justine]. It staggered him, this indifference to what was going on in the world." Justine, parroting her previous lover, says she can read the papers. " `It's the voyeurism of looking at it, that's what's wrong.' "With Kate, Stephen discusses the filmm

"We live our whole lives one step from clarity"

In alignment with her previous novels, Pat Barker explores how people have been fractured by violence in her latest novel, DOUBLE VISION. In the post-9/11 world Barker finds more manifestations of violence to write about. Each character in DOUBLE VISION has experienced some traumatic event that has resulted in a double vision of sorts. One eye is turned back to the past and the other is looking forward from the moment that violence shattered their life. They will never be the same.In the north of England in the countryside near Newcastle Stephen Sharkey moves from London to the North after resigning from his post of a war correspondent. He settles down in his brother's empty cottage to write about his experiences in various war-torn locations. But although he has removed himself from the danger, he continues to be plagued by nightmares and flashbacks of his horrific war experiences. Meanwhile Beth, the wife of his deceased colleague who was shot by a sniper in Afghanistan, struggles to recover from an automobile accident. She lives only miles from Stephen's cottage, but she endures her own double vision of how violence ruptured her life and cut short the life of her husband. In addition to the two main characters there are others who suffer from their own double vision. There is Justine who interrupts a home robbery and is beaten up and Peter who has suffered some secretive misdeeds that landed him in prison at a young age. Not only have the characters suffered from violence but also the landscape. Barker included numerous references to violence of the Foot and Mouth epidemic that has resulted in pyres to extinguish the affected livestock and the resulting decline in tourist trade and local economic commerce.Barker performs a good exploration of how contemporary violence affects individuals and the land but I feel that she could have reached deeper into the individual darkness of each of her characters. This is a slim book at roughly 250 pages therefore there is adequate space to expand without dire consequences. There are also some characters that were not fully developed such as 10-year-old Adam. Otherwise DOUBLE VISION is a satisfying read. 3.5 stars.