Regeneration

I love the way Pat Barker has woven fact and fiction in this novel - introducing real characters like the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, into the narrative, revealing the trauma suffered by the survivors of the trenches in World War I. I must now read the rest of the trilogy.

The Regeneration Trilogy: I read these books in the late '90s, after Ghost Road was first published. I was in love with the British war poets of WWI at the time and this fit right in. I don't remember many details, but these books were great reads. Very athmospheric, accessible and captivating main characters, I suffered with them every step of the way.

P.S.: The movie is also very good.

In Regeneration Pat Barker tackles the psychological problems--and their treatment--involved with what we would call PTSD today--shell shock then--and fictionalizes the experiences of such men as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owens to do it. The novel begins with Sassoon's historically accurate declaration against the war, and follows him through his sojourn at Craiglockhart, a facility for the rehabilitation of men with psychological issues resulting from their war experiences. There, he meets Dr. Rivers, also a figure from history, who struggles with the fact that his job is essentially to decide whether a man is sane enough to go back to the insanity of the trenches.

I liked this examination of a different side of the war--that of the emotional casualties--and probably would give it 3.5 stars if I could--what keeps it from a higher rating is that I never felt much urgency about the storyline. It's possible that it would be better to rate the trilogy (of which Regeneration is the first installment) as a whole rather than piecemeal--I do like Barker's writing, and I plan on reading at least the second book (The Eye in the Door) before I quit. If it's at least as good as this one, I'm sure I'll tackle the entire trilogy. I just think it's off to a bit of a sluggish start.

06/02/2025: reread on audio this time. i will say that i rather prefer this book in print form — it’s slow paced, so many scenes are just conversations where there are a vast many ideas you just want to sit with for a bit, and audio doesn’t give you the chance to do that, it just goes on. i was eager to hear simon russell beale read this (fun fact: he played robbie ross in terrence davies’ biopic of sassoon, benediction - regeneration is so much more true to sassoon’s life, both the film and the movie — i’m actually reading a book about junior officers at the moment as well, which quotes an anecdote from sassoon which is incorporated here.)

actually — the historical rigour of this series amazes me. sassoon didn’t keep diaries at craiglockhart, or at least they were lost, but from what i can tell the pieces of this time of his life was put together incredibly well by barker from what we do have from letters and his memoirs. her world is so immersive.

(if you couldn’t tell, rereading this in late 2021 set me on a Trajectory from which i will never recover from.)

(also, billy prior searching for a “little treat” after his medical. he just like me fr)

15/02/24: WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW i have SO MUCH MORE to say about this book now but how did i not notice how fukcing funny billy prior was. also, knowing a lot more about sassoon and owen's lives -- it's interesting how few liberties that barker takes with both of them. like, yes, sassoon really did tell owen to sweat his guts out writing poetry; they really did spend their last night in edinburgh in stitches over bad poetry. in some ways, regeneration weaves the myth of sasson and owen.

prior. billy prior. sharp-boned, spitting alley cat. prior, who scowled, probably to hide his pleasure. i have such a deep affection for characters who are prickly and tough to hide their vunerability, and prior definitely fits into that mold. (and as i mentioned before, i LOVE his humour!!!!) because prior's like, one of the few completely fictional characters (burns's case is, unnamed, in a list of shell shock cases, in one of the sources i have lost track of), i can Project onto him.

"there's not much of a plot" 19 year old me who only read YA did not understand this book lmao ... its character driven. also the reason you may night have remembered owen or sassoon is that they weren't COs - this book presents a much more nuanced view of being against the war than i could have understood back then. sassoon was against the conduct of the war, but not a pacifist; both him and owen disagreed with how the war was fought, but both went back to fight because they believed it was their duty to.

also, the dynamic between siegfried sassoon and robert graves is hysterical, they have such a weird friendship, and i don't know how much of it comes straight from the sources, but having read sassoon's first diary entries about graves, i can believe it lmao

04/12/23 n.b. but i read this book in 2017 for school when i was 19, and now i've read way too many wwi books and want to go to grad school to study literature of and concerning the first world war. i think theres some kind of slippery slope lesson here but im not quite sure what it is other than i desperately need to revisit this trilogy because girl i have so much to say now

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I had to read this for school, and I'm glad I did because it was interesting, if slow and with a clear message: war is bad. This novel focuses on Rivers and a group of patients with shell-shock at a ward during World War I. It's a look at early techniques in psychiatry and how absolutely horrible war is. Regeneration also includes many historical characters; Rivers himself was real, Sassoon was a conscientious objector and of course, the poet Owen is also present.

There are a handful of other characters that stand out: Burns, who can't eat due to his trauma, and Prior, who is selectively mute. It's an interesting demonstration of how war trauma affects people. My complaint is that at times it felt like the novel was written simply to showcase the horrors and aftereffects of the war; there wasn't much of a plot other than that.

I feel like how Baker uses fictionalized versions of real characters to tell a story lessens its impact. Now, I actually have read a history book about Britain's anti-war movement, and I can't remember reading about Owen or Sassoon, but this book makes me want to revisit it. Is it better to read a fictionalized version of events that gets the message across, or a history book that tells many different sides? I guess it's just preference.

A simply stunning book. Unforgettable encounters between the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, the war hero who has laid down his weapon and refused to lead more men to certain death in the carnage of trench warfare, and the psychiatrist who has been assigned to cure him. Compelling conversations about war, life, death and madness. RD Laing would have loved it.

I find it a bit difficult to rate this book. In terms of subject matter-mental illness brought on by the First World War-it is one of the most important in history. In terms of the way it was written, it's not the best book by any means. In terms of character, it's quite interesting but lacking. In terms of exploration, it ventures no farther than the shrubbery.

The writing was mediocre, in all honesty. The flow of paragraphs was often rather disjointed, though one could attribute that to the whole theme of the novel. I did enjoy the writing and found it readable, though it did not necessarily draw me in nor did it convey to me the acute and substantial severity of the subject matter. It did explore some themes that, even now, people would find difficult to speak about, but often it felt slightly brushed aside in favour of dropping the name of another literary figure.

I feel the characters were-although for the most part based on real-life people-rather flat and dull. Even those of them who were critically traumatised by their time on the front-line, there always seemed something background about them. It was interesting to have real-life people as characters, though I am always wary about such things. Biographies are all very well, but fictionalised accounts of their lives or even small parts of their lives should be tentatively approached. I cannot comment on how accurate any portrayals of the WWI poets were, but that matters little since I don't feel like I learnt all that much about them, in any case.

The one character whom I found had developed substantially during the novel was Rivers, the psychiatrist treating the mentally war-wounded. His was a character of depth and layers and that was intriguing, but never fully explored. We got inside his mind and sat there rather comfortably, with closed doors all around. More of those doors should have been allowed to open.

I suppose, the prose reflected the mental state of the characters in some respects. I feel like more could have been done in parts, or at least tied-off. I believe this is a good novel since the subject matter is no easy one to tackle, but it lacks various things that could have made it so much more.

The meagre plot between patient Billy and a factory-working girl Sarah was a shambles and only seemed to be there for the fact that it was the only thing that resembled a true plot-line, but did help in giving an outside-the-hospital view of the patients, which I think was one of the key elements of the book and was taken straight from various sentiments from WWI poets.

It gives a glimpse beyond the poetry, which is probably just as important as the poetry itself, but I would say that biographies would tell a much better story, despite them being true life accounts.



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A realist novel, set in an officer's psych ward during WWI, revolving around a couple of real poets, a fictional obstinate young officer, and their interactions with a Freudian shrink. Barker makes some interesting observations about about the war, pacifism, heroism, responsibility, duty, etc. without terribly fleshing any particular idea out to my satisfaction. The writing is dry and the dialogue can be quite stilted. that might be a good thing as when Barker lets her writerly gifts take hold of the narrative, you get this, one of the most disturbing sex scenes I've ever read:

[He probed:] the whorled darkness of her navel, and then on down, down, across the smooth marble of her belly into the coarse and springy turf. His nostrils filled with the scent of rock pools at low tide. He slipped his hands underneath her, and lifted her, until her whole pelvis became a cup from which he drank

What the fuck.
This passage elicited a simultaneous guffaw and wretch, which sounded akin to, "BLAURK".
I also have to note that this is the second time in as many months where I have heard reference to the smell of a woman's pleasure chest to stale tide pools. It now haunts my dreams.

Regeneration was a Booker Prize nominee described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication. It is the first of three novels in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, the other two being The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995. The novel is loosely based on the history of psychology and the real-life experiences of British army officers like Siegfried Sassoon being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Barker attributed the immediate inspiration for Regeneration to her husband, a neurologist familiar with the writings of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and his experiments with nerve regeneration.

Some of the themes in the novel include madness, homosexuality, loss of masculinity and the idea of regeneration itself. Madness is exhibited through symptoms such as mutism, fear of blood, and Sassoon's angry anti-war declaration. “I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” Because such behavior is deemed unacceptable Sassoon is given the label "shell-shocked" to discredit his views. Rivers eventually questions whether it is "mad" for these soldiers to have broken down in war or to blindly follow the orders which they are given. Rivers also questions whether it is right to treat this "madness" only to send soldiers back to the war which made them mad in the first place.

“This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.”

Love between men is another theme explored as in war the bond between men is a desired quality, and Sassoon is condemned for the love that he shows towards his fellow men. The idea of a loss of masculinity runs throughout the novel. Anderson has dreams where he wears female corsets; Rivers contemplates the feminine qualities needed for his caring profession. Sassoon describes a male soldier who loses his genitals in a war accident and also contemplates the idea of an "intermediate sex"; the boundaries between the two traditional genders are becoming increasingly blurred as soldiers begin to lose the qualities which are, for them, essential in their identity as 'men'. Rivers also remarks on the fact that soldiers serving in the trenches – confined, powerless, forced to do nothing for long stretches despite intense stress – suffer similar symptoms as do women during peace-time.

“Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived”

Many patients also refer to Rivers as a father figure; one of River's former patients, Layard, refers to Rivers as a "male mother". It is through this compassion that the soldiers are able to "regenerate" – the motif of the novel from which the title is taken. Rivers explores the fact that his role in helping the soldiers to express their painful experiences means that he requires the skills and traits typical of a woman. He dislikes the idea that nurturing is a uniquely female trait. Rivers also throughout the novel is constantly trying to be a 'fatherly figure' to his patients. This is emphasized by the job that he does. The combined effect of the thematic material and the lucid style of Barker make this a superior historical novel.