I found this a fascinating book!! I am really interested in anything about medicine and so found the description of early psychological treatments of WWI veterans very interesting. Also, that the whole trilogy is based on fact, on the real life meeting of the poet Sigfried Sassoon and his doctor during his rehabilitation W.H.R. Rivers. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Complete marginalia >> http://bookishlittleme.attymonique.co...

"I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." - Opening statement, Siegfried Sassoon's "A Soldier's Declaration", July 1917

I haven’t read the sequels yet. With that caveat –
 
Trying to think of anything else I’ve read that grapples this directly, and this thoroughly, with what it means to exist, and to act, within a fundamentally broken system.
 
Rivers is sending Sassoon back out to fight in a war with no point, and no end. Sassoon is going to go back to the front and lead his men into violence without purpose that will likely end in their deaths. And yet this book allows for so much space for individual humanity within those constraints.
 
Interesting how carving out that space is the project of so much of human existence – and also the project of historical fiction.
 
This book’s writing is so compelling, the characters so real, the historical facts so horrifying, the narrative gaze so kind and yet so unflinching.
 
Partway through reading this I (attempted to) read a Marvel fic on ao3. It was a couple thousand words of mostly really phenomenal character work set inside 100k+ words on SHIELD organizational dynamics, frankly, and what it was saying was this: SHIELD is morally upstanding, and the violence they engage in is morally justified. But if it’s not, it mostly is, and the exceptions are just bad apples. But if it’s not, and they’re not, at least Coulson is morally upstanding – Coulson, as an individual officer and authority figure, is a good person who always does the right thing. But when he isn’t (and he definitely, within the parameters of the fic itself, isn’t) it must just be that he cares too much about doing what’s right.
 
It was sad to see how much work went into a story that was so fundamentally hollow. It’s sad that even if they understand the basic wrongness of the system within which they exist, so many people still fall back on this glorification of individual leaders, officers, authority figures.
 
When I understood the premise of Regeneration, that’s what I thought it was going to be – “WWI was bad but these individuals were heroes/perfect/infallible/trustworthy.” The fact that that wasn’t the case was such a relief! When Sassoon walked out on the Board so that he wasn’t late to tea, and had to wait until the next one... Or the Yealland sequence, which was particularly, is this too dark, shocking (lol) (lol) (vomit) – Rivers just standing and watching silently, not intervening – what that does to a person!
 
There’s something so gratifying about seeing these characters (these people) try to navigate impossible situations without losing their, for lack of a better phrase, personal sense of ethics.

Anyway, damn! This was done so well! Really didn’t expect this book to be this directly relevant and yet here we are!

Agony in the Garden 1917

Historical fiction is the antithesis of murder mystery. We already know who done it, how it was done, and why. The only possible plot involves the psychological drama which lies behind the action, not the motive but the motivating forces which establish the dramatic tension that leads to a motive.

So from the start the reader knows the outcome of Regeneration: Siegfried Sassoon goes back on the line. He needn’t have gone back to the front; he was already a decorated hero who had been assigned a post in a training command. How and why he manages to put himself there is the substance of Barker’s story.

The story has a dynamic, a flow of forces which has an uncertain result until the end comes. It starts in medias res at the point that Sassoon has already committed himself to a Christ-like course of action. Or rather to a Christ-like aspiration since he has been thwarted by his friend Robert Graves, an anti-Judas, from presenting himself before a courts martial of fellow officers, the equivalent of the prefecture of Pontius Pilate.

Sassoon’s emotional state is at this point profoundly confused. As a platoon leader he has an intense loyalty to the men he commands, which is amplified by an equally intense need for the camaraderie that he finds with them at the front. However he also has an overwhelming revulsion for the horrors he and these men have experienced. And that revulsion is then associated through a sort of psychological transference with anyone who has not experienced those horrors yet remains enthusiastic for the war effort.

So Sassoon hates more or less everyone except his fellow soldiers - senior officers, non-combatant soldiers, opinionated civilians of all ages and professions, and the civilization of which they are parts. It is this hatred which has driven him to throw his Military Cross into the Mersey and to write and publish his Declaration condemning the war - much in the spirit of Christ’s righteous anger at the merchants of the Temple. Sassoon recognizes that both actions are futile. But, even more to the point, they prevent him from exercising the fraternal love he has for his fellows. If he succeeds in being publicly judged, he will be permanently separated from them.

The process of ‘regeneration’ is therefore one of clarifying the criterion for correct action in what is an intolerable situation. This is Sassoon’s agony in the garden. Each gospel account of Christ’s contemplation of the motivation for his own self-sacrifice provides sparse and different details. Barker’s account could well be the missing content of these gospel stories. The essential issue of both the gospels and Barker’s fiction is not what to do but why to do it.

n  n

It is through his poetry and the poetry of his friend Wilfred Owen that Sassoon finds the proper criterion for action. Both elements - the writing which objectifies the situation, and the relationship with Owen and others which corrects and amends the creative object - are necessary for the discernment of what constitutes Reason in a patently unreasonable world. Fortunately, unlike Christ’s friends, Sassoon’s didn’t sleep through his efforts.

I am captive to the thought that Barker’s title refers not merely to Sassoon’s struggle but also is a Joycean double entendre for the agony of an entire generation.

I really loved this. The writing, story and characters were very well done. I have always had an interest in stories written about soldiers coping with battle fatigue and shell-shock, as it was known of in the First World War. These men are able to evoke an empathy in me that I feel very deeply and so it was with this book, a fictionalized account of the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and their time in Craiglockhart War Hospital as they were being treated for shell-shock. The author truly breathed life into each of these characters and it was interesting to see the way the doctor treated each of the men in his care with compassion, understanding and space and yet, with the end goal of sending men back to, in all likely hood, more suffering and possibly, death, bringing its own sort of trauma.

So, I think I got a false impression of this book when it finally crossed my path. Having read it now, and trying to think up a bullet point type description of it, most of what I can come up with is not really my sort of thing. It’s focused on the effects of World War I on soldiers, though the major characters are all officers, and upper class, to which my most positive response is, well, at least it’s not WWII. It’s classed as “literary fiction” too, never a favorite. And Barker won the Booker prize for the third book in this trilogy, and “Booker Prize” is right up there with zombies, necromancers, and “family sagas” in the lol, fuck that shit category for me. The point of view floats around too much for me too, I prefer sticking to one or two characters.

Despite all that, Regeneration started out really strong, and is much better than I’d have expected had I gone in with knowledge of all the above. And yet, those things, and a few others did ultimately drag it down a bit for me. It’s not a long book, but it took me more than a week to get through. I read the first half in two days, but dragged out the second over another six.

Going in, I had expected the gay angle to be more front and center. Several of the characters are gay or bi, including the real historical figure who seems like he’s going to be the main character initially, but the sexuality of the characters ends up treated in a very low-key sort of way. Worse, for my enjoyment, I think was the handling of POV. I already mentioned it shifts between rather more characters than I’d prefer, but the bigger problem is the distance it maintains. By the end of the book, I still didn’t feel I’d learned anything more than some cursory facts about the characters. It’s not entirely objective, we get a little ways into the characters’ thoughts, but it never connects, never feels deep. Maybe that was a sort of timidity on Barker’s part, the most important characters here were mostly real people, perhaps there was a limit to how creative she was willing to get with them.

One result of this shallow enagement: when, at the end of the book, one character is feeling guilt over whatever roll he feels he had in the decision another has made, and there’s debate whether he had any, I was annoyed. Because, these two characters effect on each other is arguably the most significant arc in the story, but through the course of the book we were shown hardly any of the interactions during which this influence presumably took place, and we’re talking months of story time. What was on the page simply did not justify the angsting we see at the end from this character.

On balance, I did enjoy the book, but I don’t think it’s something I’d reread, unless, perhaps, to try and understand why it worked as well as it did for me despite all the ways it’s not my sort of thing. I would be interested in trying other books by Barker, and even the next in this trilogy if I can get my hands on it cheaply, but it’s not a priority for me.

4.5/5

It's been a long time since I've read the Regeneration trilogy, recommended and lent to me by a friend I was living with at the time. I thought they were great -- poetic, powerful, intriguing in their exploration of shell-shock and poets and protest (WWI) and the life of protagonist Billy Prior (fictional character working with historical psychologist William Rivers, who treated both Seigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen for ptsd during the war).

Perhaps I'll read these books again at some point.

Interesting as always to look at goodreads reviews. Mixed, with an occasional out-and-out hateful review, but mostly positive and some very informative.

Several recommendations and mentions of other books dealing with similar subject matter (in other gr reviews) including:

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild

The Regeneration trilogy is probably Pat Barker's finest work, but it is difficult to review them individually so long after reading them.

My performance of a Sassoon poem can be found here - The Poet As Hero

“Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.”

Regeneration is a story inspired by true events of World War One. Centres around the now famous war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and his inspiring of Wilfred Owen, the story takes place in a hospital called Craiglockhart, for those suffering shell shock, PTSD.

It is a story of intricate characterisation, the horrific consequences of war, and the internal conflict each character faces. Everyone faces different tribulations and struggles that appear impossible to overcome, yet they can unite over their experiences, and it is what forges them into brothers.

“You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.”

Sassoon is the central character. He wrote The Declaration, which criticised and discredited those causing the war, proclaiming that it could have been ended, and was not fuelled by incessant greed. Yet, he faces the trial of facing heavy opposition who can send him far away, and the guilt of leaving his men on the front line.

It Is a story of moral dilemmas that plagues all, especially that of William Rivers, the doctor, who wishes to ‘regenerate’ those in his care, but only to send them back to the front line, to almost certain death. This was emphasised by the subtle and smooth prose that allowed ideas, themes and undertones to evolve and naturally present themselves to the reader, depicting realistic and believable mentalities to the characters.

“A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance."

Regeneration was a haunting yet revealing story that was brilliant in presenting both the horrors of the war, but the reasons of why people fought, and how it formed bonds and inspiration. Focusing on Sassoon, it was amazing to find out how and why he used poetry in the way he did to portray such powerful visions of the reality of war.

A powerful war story that focuses on the traumatic impact as a result of the horrendous things most people in WW1 saw.

4.5/5

Fascinating

I've been meaning to read this book for 25 years and it didn't disappoint. I was surprised that the central figure is the psychologist William Rivers - I'd always assumed that it was Siegfried Sassoon.

Rivers is a wise, compassionate, and rational protagonist. I really liked him. His musings on masculinity and the ethics of military rehabilitation were really thought provoking.

The prose is sparse and incisive and the overall result is an incredibly moving portrayal of trauma, healing, comradeship and duty, with a clear anti-war message and compelling characters.