The novel was a combination of fictional and true accounts which are loosely based on “the history of psychology and the real-life experiences of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh (The War Poets at Craiglockhart)”. It consisted of four parts centered mostly on three characters (Rivers, Sassoon and Prior) but also delved on mental struggles of other discharged soldiers suffering from their experiences while in the battlefied; and how individuals cope and move on from these burdens.

The protagonist Siegfried Sassoon declares that the war the British are fighting for is no longer a justifiable course of action, and he laments that they no longer have a true cause that empowers them through their service as soldiers. This he used as inspiration and form of catharsis in the various poetry he writes. He was dispatched to a mental ward in the care of the psychoanalyst W.H.R Rivers who was a recognized doctor in his field. In the hopes of ‘curing’ him from his ‘pacifist’ ways, the readers are taken into a very intimate scrutiny of the psyche of different characters other than Sassoon. There is also Sergeant Burns who struggles to eat food after a bomb explosion threw him head-first into a gas-filled belly of a corpse that caused him to swallow some of the rotting flesh; Anderson, a former surgeon who now goes into a catatonic state in the presence of blood; Willard, who insisted that his spine is damaged although there is no physical evidence to show it, but it has rendered him unable to believe he can walk; and finally, Billy Prior, with selective mutism and asthma, whose arrogance and refusal of treatment from Rivers explores the power struggle between patient and doctor. Other supporting characters include Wilson Owen, a fellow poet who has hero-worship for Sassoon, and Sarah Lumb, Prior’s girlfriend who works at a factory that handles bomb detonators. With so many enigmatic characters, this work of fiction was able to deliver an intensive and humane look on the turmoils of war in a more psychological aspect and how they translate to the physical manifestations.

"The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay" ~W.H.R. Rivers

THE CHARACTERS

My personal favorite character is Rivers because the doctor has steel nerves especially during the last portions of the book where he observes a fellow colleague, Dr. Yealland, perform electric shocks on a patient with mutism. His detached demeanor does not reflect the intense nature of his intellectual mind which allows him to see things clearly and more sensibly; recognizing that the men under his care need treatment which will open them up emotionally, rather than come up with an ultimate cure. This makes him serve noble intentions even if he himself is haunted by the hopelessness of some of his patients’ inner worlds.

Sassoon’s poetry are rich with allegory, and their passages in the book—as well as the process in which he revises and improves them—are entertaining to read. Sassoon’s stand against war does not directly make him a pacifist, and that paradox is what kept me reading because I wanted to know exactly why Sassoon was able to fight in a war he never believed in at all. Meanwhile, Prior’s personality is the most intriguing of the three. He is more able to act on his feelings no matter how ugly they are as oppose to Rivers who is still professionally responsive and Sassoon who retreats to his poetry. Still, he carries the most bondage of them as well, unable to adjust to an ordinary life outside of his experiences in the war.

I enjoyed reading and comparing the states of minds among Rivers, Sassoon and Prior, as well as the relationships and emotional bonds formed within. Both Sassoon and Prior see Rivers as a father figure but with a maternal presence. But Sassoon and Prior’s responses to this are essentially different. While Sassoon accepts Rivers because he was filling in a hole left by his own father whom he never knew, Prior subtly retaliates every time Rivers tries to understand him because Prior’s own relationship with his real father—who only visited him one time in the ward—was already fractured to begin with. As chemical as Prior and Rivers are because of the tension between them, Sassoon’s ways of relating to Rivers and vice-versa are more explorative because both men respect each other even if their ideals are barely similar.

THE THEMES

The most invigorating aspect of this book is that it deconstructs gender roles in times of war where masculine fortitude is challenged by the traumatic experiences men undergo when in battle for their lives, while the women back at home has now taken on more assertive and independent roles. Prior makes this observation with Sarah Lumb whom he meets one night as he was drinking at a bar and forms a relationship with her, secretly drawn to her strength and invulnerability that contrasted his own frailty (“women have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space”).

In the middle of the second part of the book, Rivers contemplates the notion that the war was advertised by the government in which men can prove themselves with traditionally heroic male feats, yet the reality portrays that these very same men, once in the battefields, are “crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed,” and that “the war that had promised so much in a way of manly activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passitivity and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down.” Sassoon addresses that the war has questioned the standard roles of men in the society, especially among men of military service, and he realized that such fixed roles of power, strength and infallibility attached to men are the reasons why they were easily damaged in the first place (“You’re walking with a mask on and you want to take it off but you can’t because they all think it’s your face”).

I also read online that there are two sequels that followed this story, and they explored themes of homosexuality in time of war as well. I definitely saw that possibility in my course of reading this novel. The male characters are extremely well-written and their relationships are intricately woven in the story so well that it will not surprise me if that theme may serve as an enrichment to an already layered storytelling which breathes the psychologically sublime.

SUMMARY

Regeneration is the first volume of the trilogy, followed by The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (which I’m still trying to get at least PDF copies of). It was a story of the vitality of change in a collapsing world where the traditional values and roles of men are being deconstructed through the ailments of war and the emerging sexual politics in that period of history. I was happy to read something other than the usual violence and gore found in most works of fiction like this, and that was what made this book so unique and intimate to read. Still, I recognize that this biographical sort of genre on wars is an acquired taste so I’m taking that into consideration in rating this book. I believe that it can beautifully translate in a cinematic adaptation, however, but that would entail a film that relies on the strength of its character dynamics enhanced by symbolic visuals. To anyone interested in expanding their usual taste in literature, this book is highly recommended!

RECOMMENDED: 8.5/10

Although I’ve read a biography about Siegfried Sassoon, the WWI officer, poet and voice of some reason, and one of his own semi-autobiographical novels, I didn’t know or completely missed that ‘Regeneration’ featured him and the pragmatic yet compassionate Dr Rivers who pioneered treatment for shell shock. What a rewarding and fantastic surprise, a bonus to such a rewarding and fantastic read. Loved it. There's also the Terrence Davies film about Sassoon called 'Benediction'. Loved it too.

This novel might not be for everyone who may wish to steer away from graphic, yet realistic writing that depicts the awful physical and psychological impacts of war.

I’m impressed with Pat Barker’s blend of real and fictional characters, her authentic and often piercing prose, plus known case studies and events that help to inform her narrative.

The symbolism between the battlefield and the English at home was not lost on me:

‘Next morning the weather had changed. At dawn there was a strip of clear blue on the horizon, fading to yellow, but the sky darkened rapidly, until, by mid-morning, the clouds humped, liver coloured, and the sea was dark as iron.’

‘His boot squelched on something soft. Looking down, he saw the place was littered with cods’ heads, thirty or more, with blood-stained gills and staring eyes.’

Loved this one! A wonderfully subtle novel about the psychological impact of the Great War. The first novel of three. I am looking forward to the next.

this was just not for me - wasn't grabbed by the writing style and found the whole book tedious and cliched. didn't like that it combined real-life people with made up characters and felt like it was a disservice to siegfried sassoon to be used in this way.

I think everyone in reading group liked it though.... and it did bring up interesting discussions.

It is 1917 and WWI is still going strong. The Craiglockhart War Hospital is an institution where officers suffering from serious cases of shell shock and deemed mentally unsound go to be healed so they can return to the front and continue the vicious battle against the Germans. Dr. William Rivers—a brilliant psychiatrist at the institution—has a cure which is at once successful while being highly unusual for his time; instead of having recourse to violent and painful courses of therapy prevalent in other hospitals, such as submitting the patients to painful humiliation tactics and high voltage electric shocks, he helps his patients cure themselves by encouraging them to face their fears and the horrors they have witnessed in battle instead of attempting to repress them. Even with the advances in psychology brought on by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, such an approach would have still been especially novel in the mainstream, at a time when men were conditioned and expected to be impervious to fear, never acknowledge weaknesses, and generally keep their emotions in check.

Dr. Rivers doesn't question the inherent contradiction in the fact that he is expected to bring these men back to a balanced mental state so that they can in turn continue fighting in suicidal missions in a war with countless casualties. But things start changing for him when he comes in contact with Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero (and a figure taken from real life) who has decided to take a stand by writing a declaration which condemns the continuation of what he is convinced is a war of aggression and meaningless slaughter. Sassoon's hopes of being court-marshalled for his insubordination and thus creating noise and a public outcry around his cause are dashed when he is instead declared mentally unstable—precisely to avoid attracting attention to the issue—and sent to Craiglockhart and Dr. Rivers to be 'cured'. Our good psychiatrist quickly appraises that Sassoon's actions stem from true conviction, and that the best he can do in his case is to help his patient come to accept that he has no other choice than to return to the front, since any further efforts on Sassoon's part to continue campaigning against the war will simply be interpreted as the actions of a man who is mentally unsound.

From the beginning, Siegfried Sassoon, a man of great culture and a published poet, makes no bones about his sexual orientation. He makes mention of an indirect connections to Oscar Wilde and his veneration for Edward Carpenter, a socialist poet, pacifist, and gay activist who's book The Intermediate Sex has been a great influence in helping him find his true identity. There is a running theme in the novel, which is the question of what constitutes 'real' and 'acceptable' manifestations of manhood in a time of war. The question of sexual orientation is intrinsically linked to those concerns, as is best expressed in the following excerpt, taken from a conversation between Rivers and Sassoon, who are discussing the prevailing attitudes toward homosexuality:

Sassoon: 'I thought things were getting better.'
Rivers: 'I think they were. Before the war. Slightly. But it's not very likely, is it, that any movement towards greater tolerance would persist in wartime? After all, in war, you've got this enormous emphasis on love between men—comradeship—and everybody approves. But at the same time there's always this little niggle of anxiety. Is it the right kind of love? Well, one of the ways you make sure it's the right kind is to make it crystal clear what the penalties for the other kind are.'

This is a powerful novel and many of the themes at its core, such as the manifestations of the instinct for self-preservation and what constitutes sanity and mental instability are weighty stuff, and the brilliance of Pat Barker's approach is that she manages to present her subject with a light and even humorous touch, with brilliant dialogue that is absolutely true to life. Her observation of her cast of characters and their complex motivations fully brings out their multi-dimensionality and each of them is a fascinating study of the workings of the human mind.

Craiglockhart, Sassoon, Rivers and other persons, places and events are taken from real life, and the way Barker has woven fact and fiction is masterful: entirely believable and wonderfully entertaining. This book came highly recommended from various sources and I must say I was most impressed. I'm much looking forward to reading the other two books in the Regeneration trilogy during the course of the year. Wholeheartedly recommended. January 2011

This review was written in the late nineties (for my eyes only), and it was buried in amongst my things until recently when I uncovered the journal in which it was written. I have transcribed it verbatim from all those years ago (although square brackets may indicate some additional information for the sake of readability or some sort of commentary from now). This is one of my lost reviews.

Rarely is a book's theme so fittingly captured in a title than it is with Pat Barker's Regeneration. As Dr. William Rivers heals war victims like Burns, Anderson and Billy Prior, its meaning is obvious, but it is also duplicitous -- connecting also to the manipulation of Seigfriend Sassoon and Rivers' own regeneration of spirit.

Barker fills Regeneration with some haunting, unforgettable images: Burns falling face first into the German [soldier]'s exploded stomach; Anderson's collapse at the sight of a nicked cheek (this from having once been a [WWI] surgeon); Prior's eyeball and the question, "what do I do with this gobstopper?"; and the most terrible of all, Dr. Yealland's torutre of Callan -- a cure by negative -- Nazi-like -- reinforcement.

By setting WWI on the home front, the gravity of its horror is more fully driven into my mind than any film I've ever seen has done. It's a time I'm quite happy to have missed -- at least with this life of mine.

Upon finishing the book, my mind was absolutely quiet, almost numb, as if there were too many thoughts to assimilate and I needed to let it all soak in. Like the patients with their experiences, this book can't be rushed, you can't quickly brush past one passage to go the next. Each person's thoughts and memories need to marinate, allowing their individual flavors to meld together, in order to enjoy its overall effect. It is profound and thought provoking, and deserves to be mentioned alongside the best of anti-war literature, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Red Badge of Courage. Pat Barker's Regeneration, first of her WWI trilogy, goes even deeper into the heart, mind, and souls, of not only the men who fought but of the people affected by the Great War.

"They'd been trained to identify emotional repression, as the essence of manliness. Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures. Not men."

The book centers on poet Siegfried Sassoon's stay at Craiglockhart War Hospital, which in part was orchestrated by his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves, to prevent Sassoon from being court marshaled after his declaration against the continued fighting of The Great War. "I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." While there for treatment Sassoon befriends and influences another poet, Wilfred Owen. Their friendship may have started out with Wilfred's admiration of Sassoon, Barker lets us see it blossom into mutual respect.


Wilfred Owen

All this while under the care of respected anthropologist and groundbreaking psychiatrist William H. Rivers. He is a man fighting against the established methods, bringing humane treatment into a world where most did not even believe in shell shock. You can feel how seeing these courageous men break affected him and how he was tormented with the job of having to 'cure' them in order to return to the front.


Dr. Rivers outside Craiglockhart War Hospital

Barker lets the fact that life brought these men together at this point in history shine through in a simple straight forward manner, using her fictional characters to support and explore other aspects of the war and homefront. Through Sarah, a munitions factory worker, we see the female point of view and the changes the war afforded them.
Barker's informative author's note, which I recommend not reading until after you've finished the book, brought a deeper level of understanding and an unwanted revelation. I was disappointed to find out that one doctor actually existed and I really rather wish he's remained fictional. His harsh treatments of the servicemen under his care and later detailing this in a book gave me a new version of Dr. Frankenstein, only this one was sadly all too real. The power of the narrative lies with the patients, the doctors, and the War. Who really changed or helped who? The lines blurred, some were helped, some not, some temporarily, some die and some helped in surprisingly unexpected ways.

"They (women) seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space."

The narrative jumps around between the many characters, in unconnected scenes, and no character list is provided. I made a character list, detailing patients and their mental issues and any connections. Some passages dealing with dissecting symbols in dreams or the psychology behind certain elements can be a bit dry. Religion, homosexuality, and sex are woven through, as well as the importance of father and son relationships, the familial ones and those formed through other circumstances. There are no battle scenes, everything takes place at or around Craiglockhart War Hospital, the war is seen through the patient's memories trying to unlock the brutality and carnage to the body and mind. For readers who don't like to keep track of different characters, or like everything cleaned up at the end, this may not be the read for you right now. This is not a light and breezy read and not to be taken lightly, Barker expects a lot from her reader and doesn't disappoint, a solid 4-1/2.


1917 painting of Sassoon


Sassoon's Military Cross awarded for gallantry in 1916

This book follows the the lives of a few patients dealing with mild to severe PTSD during WWI, at British mental hospital for enlisted men. The effect of treating such patients begins to wear on Dr. Rivers, who is responsible for sending them back to France for active duty or extending their leave at the hospital. As the book progresses and Rivers develops friendships with them, the lines delineating mentally and physically fit or unfit begin to blur along the lines of Catch 22. One of many interesting ideas that this book poses is that PTSD can be seen as a form of unconscious protest against war and that successful treatment of these disorders is a way of silencing that protest against the awfulness of it and training the mind to accept the gore and helplessness. Kind of a twisted position to be in if you're the doctor.

Siegfried Sassoon, an English poet/soldier on leave, argues World War I is useless and is sent to a psychiatric hospital for soldiers. The treating psychiatrist, Dr Rivers, and the soldiers he is working with must come to terms with their very human reactions to the inhuman experiences of WWI trench warfare and what we would now call PTSD. The poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen also make appearances in the story. A well-written, powerful, and hard to put down historic novel which speaks for our own age as well. First in a trilogy

2.5 stars. My problem with this book is that I kept comparing it to All Quiet on the Western Front. Maybe that's not a fair comparison since the two books focus on the WWI soldier's experience in different ways, but as I was reading I couldn't help thinking that Remarque's book is the more emotionally powerful one.

This book is set mainly in Craiglockhart, a psychiatric hospital that treats soldiers with a variety of maladies. The main character, if there is a main character, is Dr. Rivers. Through him we get to know a variety of patients, including Siegfried Sassoon, a young poet who opposes the war. Cariglockhart is a real place and Rivers and Sassoon are actual people, so this book is a historical fiction account that explores the cost of the War.

Some quotes from the book:

"Rivers thought how misleading it was to say that the war had matured these young men. It wasn't true of his patients, and it certainly wasn't true of Burns, in whom a prematurely aged man and a fossilized schoolboy seemed to exist side by side." (169)

"She would never know, because he would never tell her. Somehow if she'd known the worst parts, she couldn't have gone on being a haven for him. He was groping for an idea that he couldn't quite grasp. Men said they didn't want to tell their women about France because they didn't want to worry them. But it was more than that. He needed her ignorance to hide in. Yet, at the same time, he wanted to know and been known as deeply as possible. And the two desires were irreconcilable." (216)

"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 apparent intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace." (222)

Edinburg, Scotland, 1917. Siegfried Sassoon, a 31-y/o poet and a decorated soldier started a protest against the ongoing WWI in France. This protest led him to be labeled as "shell shocked" and be confined at Craiglockhart Hospital under the care of an army psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers. Among the patients in the hospital were those who were truly suffering from the war trauma: another poet, Wilfred Owen who was able to polish his talent in writing under Sassoon; Billy Prior, an on-off mute who had an affair with a woman during his confinement; and Robert Graves, another patient who became his friend. Graves believed that war was unjust and immoral. This belief was in contradiction to what Sassoon believed at the start of his service as an army.

This is the first book of Pat Barker's highly praised trilogy about World War I, Regeneration Trilogy. At first it felt like an small subset of Sebastian Faulks' 1993 novel Birdsong that remains as one of my favorite WWI novels. However, this Regeneration was first published in 1991 so Mr. Faulks might have gotten his idea from this novel. I took me only 2 days to finish up to the last word of page 250 and I thought that I would just give this a 2 stars. However, the Author's Note on the very last page says that at least 4 characters of the novel were real or non-fiction. It Googled them right away. Lo and behold they even had pictures including some colored pictures of the Craiglockhart Hospital! Then the story seemed to come alive in my mind and I could picture the images: Sassoon peeping outside by his hospital room window, Prior and his girlfriend making love, the closet homosexual Sassoon giving pointers to Owen on how to improve his poem, etc. Try reading this novel with Mozart or Beethoven in the background and it will transform you to that era.

The novel is multi-layered. First, it is definitely anti-war. Second, it is about bond between men. Homosexuality was still a taboo during that time (even the novel's approach is tacit). Sassoon, even in real life, was described as latent homosexual. Initially, he thought that he only cared for his subordinates but later he developed deeper relationship with another patient, Owen. Third, it is about the humane approach to treating "shell shocked" patients. Dr. Rivers was using "nerve regeneration" (an approach familiar to the husband of Ms. Barker) while the new doctor was using what seemed to be inhumane approach: electroshock therapy. Lastly, it is about the question on the conscience of Dr. Rivers, who himself is anti-war: is treating patients right when you know that by doing such, he will be going back to the war and be killed?

Well done, Ms. Barker! Your Regeneration has definitely joined Birdsong as my favorite WWI novels!

World War I and World War II were very different kinds of war. If you peak around the edges of history, from an outside perspective, it may not seem so. And admittedly World War I and World War II were notably linked by the repeat performance given by a number of major players who exhibited short fuses and shorter memories over a period of less than twenty years. War is war you may think; people are engaged in mind blowingly brutal acts of killing and survival, reduced to pinprick statistics of life and death within a swarming mass of uniforms. There are many different ways to die and the human mind is unfortunately capable of spilling forth a veritable cornucopia of cruelty and viciousness regarding ways in which to dispatch its fellow man. The 20th century provided a number of chilling showcases for such inventiveness. I think it would be too depressing to enumerate them all here and the goodreads character limit might even kick in before I’d finished to list.

Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy approaches World War I from the other side and instead of leading us across the bloodied fields of Ypres, Flanders, Mons, Loos and the Somme, we start at the Craiglockhart War Hospital outside Edinburgh where men are being treated for shell-shock, trench fever and a thousand connotations of the nervous twitching horror generated by being forced to lie in a shallow trench, largely propped, buttressed and constructed from the frozen or decomposing bodies of your own squadron, friends and family, while you wait to see whether the next shell will ensure your place as part of the trench architecture.

Focusing on the chance meeting of war poets, Wilfred Owen and soldier turned pacifist Siegfried Sassoon on the ward at Craiglockhart hospital, the story also weaves in the ideas of mental and physical healing. As well as examining the roles of man as soldier it fits the conscientious objectors, the fathers, the sons, the homosexuals, the deserters, the pacifists and those too old to fight into the complex machinery of the impersonal war machine. This is a time when mans role in British Society has been reduced to the simple status of soldier or civilian, where you must be able to provide a damned good reason for still being the latter. A surprisingly compelling read with powerful themes and a good start to the award winning trilogy.