Toby's Room

Toby’s Room is a 2012 novel by British author Pat Barker. Set before and during the First World War, the novel focuses on Elinor Brooke, a student at the Slade School of Art in London, as she turns her artistic skills to help with the medical reconstruction of faces disfigured in combat. Toby’s Room is a sequel of sorts to Barker’s 2007 novel Life Class, as it focuses on the same characters. However, the later novel’s chronology straddles that of the first: its two parts cover a period of time before and a period of time after the period covered in Life Class. Barker is best known for her highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy (1991 – 95), which also examines medical responses to the traumas of the First World War.

At the beginning of Part I, set in 1912, Elinor, a student in London, returns to her parents’ home for a weekend, where she is joined by her older siblings, Rachel and Toby. Elinor and Toby have an intensely close relationship. As children, they used to walk to the old Mill, even though it was forbidden by their parents; this weekend, they decide to go there again. As they explore the Mill, they begin to touch each other playfully and fall into an embrace. Toby kisses Rachel passionately.

When she does not return his passion, he immediately apologizes. Rachel is horrified, but she agrees not to tell the rest of the family about Toby’s transgression. Nevertheless, she cannot stop brooding about it, and that night she goes to his bedroom to confront her older brother. She finds him asleep. When he wakes, he pulls her into his bed.



Elinor’s mother tells her that Toby had a “papyrus” twin, who died in the womb. The corpse of the fetus—a girl—was slowly crushed by Toby as he grew until it was flattened to the thickness of papyrus parchment.

Still horrified by Toby’s behavior and guilty about her own reaction to it, Elinor returns to her studies in London. Her tutor Henry Tonks, the Slade professor of fine art, notices that she is distracted.

Elinor has signed up for an anatomy class at a local teaching hospital, in order to improve her drawing. Toby—who is studying medicine—had agreed to tutor her, but she no longer wants to see him, let alone spend time alone with him. She starts the class anyway. She is surprised to find that she is not disgusted or upset by what she sees: on the contrary, she finds the study of anatomy very absorbing.



As Toby’s final exams approach, he begins to neglect his health to a worrying extent, becoming very ill. Elinor agrees to nurse him, and they repair their relationship slightly. Elinor agrees again not to reveal Toby’s transgression to their family.

Part II is set five years later. The First World War is underway and Elinor is living at her parents’ house. Like the contemporary novelist Virginia Woolf (who makes a cameo appearance), Elinor has decided that since women are excluded from the political process, the war is not her concern. However, Toby is serving in France as a medical officer, and Elinor has a sense of foreboding: she believes he will not return.

Soon enough the bad news arrives: Toby is “Missing, believed killed.” Elinor presses for more information, but the War Office will provide only a vague account of Toby’s disappearance. When his belongings are returned, Elinor finds a half-finished letter, in which Toby seems to say that he knows he will not return. She writes to Kit Neville, a fellow Slade student who fought alongside Toby, to ask him if he knows anything about her brother’s death.



When Kit fails to reply, Elinor asks another ex-Slade student (and her former lover), Paul Tarrant, to help her track Kit down. They find him at the Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup, where he is one of many soldiers being treated for disfiguring facial wounds. He refuses to tell Toby’s story.

Elinor also finds Tonks at the hospital, where he is sketching the soldiers’ wounds to help surgeon Harold Gillies plan his reconstructions. Elinor is determined to get the truth out of Kit, and while she waits, she joins Tonks in his work. As she wrestles with the question of whether what she is doing is art or medicine, she gradually comes to rival her intimidating former tutor, forcing him to see her as an equal.

The novel enters Kit’s point of view as he undergoes facial surgery. Under anesthesia, Kit remembers the circumstances leading up to Toby’s death. Toby, the commanding officer of Kit’s unit, repeatedly endangered the lives of his men by taking unnecessary risks. When Kit caught Toby having sex with a stable boy, he decided to report him. Toby’s commanding officer gave Toby a choice: a disgraceful court-martial or “doing the right thing.” Toby walked suicidally into No Man’s Land.



After a long and painful recovery, Kit tells Elinor the truth about her brother’s death. To his surprise, Elinor takes the news well, seeming to find a measure of peace. Elinor’s parents’ home is sold, and she begins to feel free of her family history. Instead, she looks to her promising artistic future.

Toby’s Room explores how artists respond to trauma, both personal and political. The novel was hailed as “dark, painful and indelibly grotesque” by the New York Times.