BOOKER prize winner and North- East novelist Pat Barker has returned to the First World War, which she dealt with so masterfully in the Regeneration Trilogy.

In the spring of 1914 we meet a group of art students at the Slade School of Fine Art in London - middle class Elinor, Kit Neville and working class Paul Tarrant who's wondering what he's doing studying art. There are complications of love, love affairs, class and idealism and a lot of drinking at the Café Royal.

Then the war starts and we are plunged abruptly into a different novel, and, like the characters, into a different world.

Elinor almost refuses to acknowledge the war. She is determined to see it as irrelevant, which could be brave and bold, or just stubborn and selfish. She moves in the circle of Lady Ottoline Morrell and continues steadfastly to work on her art as if the war weren't happening, despite her correspondence with Paul and Kit.

Both men volunteer for the Red Cross and when Paul arrives at the field hospital we are plunged straight into the nightmare images of war. The blood, the screams, the mud, the mutilations. The agony and the exhaustion. A deserter kept alive only so that he can be shot, a man whose penis has been shot off, a mother smothering her young son who had lost both his arms... what is the relevance of art in all this?

Kit, who ends up nursing German prisoners, makes a name for himself as a war artist, but Paul's pictures are of the broken men, the men with their smashed bodies, missing jaws. Images too graphic, too real to be shown. And that's a dilemma we have yet to resolve in today's wars. When we send young men to war, how much can we bear to look at what it does to them?

This is an incredibly powerful book. It almost assaults the senses. The smell of coke and sweat in the artists' studio... the silence and dust motes in an empty house... the chill flesh of swimmers... the fug of the ladies' cabin and, of course, the field hospital which is described so vividly you can almost smell the bleach and gangrene.

Almost 90 years after the First World War ended, it still fascinates us, stirs our pity and admiration and raises unsolvable questions. Partly, of course, because of all that it inspired - the poetry, paintings, novels that grew out of it that still cause us to think. Life Class shows us we still have plenty to consider.