Just arrived from UK through BM.

This is the story of Siegfried Sassoon an English poet, author and soldier who was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, and his mental treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital.



He was treated by the psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers who has to decide if it's appropriate to send Sassoon back to the front or not.



From Wikipedia: During the war, he worked as a RAMC captain at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh, where he applied techniques of psychoanalysis to British officers suffering from various forms of neurosis brought on by their war experiences.

A brilliant book by Pat Barker and there are still two more books of this trilogy: The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road

I am not giving this book one star because I find the subject matter troubling or because I'm not used to required reading.

I am giving this book one star because it is overrated, self-serving junk. Pat Barker has plucked from history characters that were perfectly capable of speaking for themselves (we know this because most of them were writers) and forced into them her own flat, inexperienced voice. It seems as though, for many people, the book's politics make up for its nonexistent plot, endless pages of armchair psychology, and woefully thin characters.

For me, it doesn't Regeneration fails on every level. It fails to connect the reader with the horrors of war. It fails to present convincing portraits of the historic figures it borrows. It fails to provide insight into the psychology of returning soldiers. It fails to present any sort of meaningful, cogent philosophical statement aside from "War Sucks".

As a matter of fact, the only thing it has succeeded at is convincing me that the judges for the Booker Prize select its winners by lottery, without actually having read more than a few paragraphs of each title.

The book begins promisingly enough, with a letter written by Siegfried Sassoon denouncing the war, the introduction of Dr. Rivers, and Siegfried's arrival at the hospital. The beginning has you believe, for a few brief pages, that the book will be a deep, carefully executed statement about protest during war time and the underhanded ways in which such protest was silenced. However, the novel quickly dissolves into a turgid pseudo-psychological mess.

Pat Barker is not a psychologist. She has no experience working with veterans and knows absolutely nothing about post-war psychology beyond what she's culled from other books on the subject. Consequently, her characters are sketches; their afflictions are heavily repeated generalizations. The reader is presented with a roll call of "things that are bad that could happen to soldiers" without being given the opportunity to connect or sympathize with any of the patients. This approach has an almost desensitizing effect, which, I believe, is the exact opposite of what Barker attempted to accomplish with this novel.

Regeneration is entirely strung together on these flat psychological portraits and fleeting hints of poetically described gore. The writing is incredibly obvious throughout. If the reader thinks for a moment that a character's actions or thoughts might be a bit confusing or complex, he or she need not worry. Barker spells everything out in great detail. Multiple times. This over explanatory writing style can't even be called a lack of subtlety; it so closely resembles being repeatedly knocked over the head by a bag full of trite, Freudian pop psychology.

In fact, just in case the overall theme of the book would have been a mystery to the reader if it'd just contained the original, historical characters, Barker has invented a character whose sheer purpose is to trumpet her voice throughout the novel. Billy Prior's only purpose is to serve as a foil to the two, supposed main characters of the novel. Until he becomes the absolute focus of the entire book. Sassoon's protest is, for all intents and purposes, completely forgotten for more than half the book when the focus shifts to Prior's making witty statements about the war and observations about psychology, which the other main character, Dr. Rivers, is always incredibly impressed by. Often for pages.

I find it ironic that Siegfried Sassoon the, again, supposed protagonist despises civilians because of their ignorance and because of the callous way that they allow the war to continue. Pat Barker is ultimately as ignorant as any civilian in this book and proves this with her bludgeon-like attempts at characterization.

The love interest for Billy Prior, Sarah, seems more like Barker's slim justification for writing the novel than an actual character. A bad attempt at connecting the civilian experience with the overseas one. There is a particularly annoying sequence where this character is lost in a hospital, runs into amputees, and finds the whole mess senseless, thereby coming to the same philosophical conclusion about the war as Prior, etc. As though getting lost in a hospital is equivalent to getting lost in the trenches. As though Barker's researching Sassoon's war experience is equivalent to Sassoon's having lived through it.

This book is, ultimately, a sorry excuse for literature. People would be much better served reading the actual poetry of Siegfried Sassoon than reading Barker's shoddy attempt at explaining his psyche.

.??? 90s?: i know little about the great war, but the insanity of war, particularly trench warfare, is never more revealed than this book set in an early psychiatric hospital. this is concise, thoughtful, very realistic in a lucid portrayal of the destruction of the human being and all attempts to reconcile the thinking, ideal, enlightenment european man, with the worst possibilities modern technology promises. begins the trilogy, best and easiest to understand...

If there's one aspect of the New Zealand national character that truly fascinates me, it's the maudlin sentimentality with which we view the two World Wars.

Vietnam, Korea, the Boer War (the first we shipped troops off to), even our own Land Wars - not a peep. But the shelves groan with books about the two World Wars. Sky basically has a channel devoted to WWII docos, and we head off in our thousands to Gallipoli and Anzac Day celebrations.

I'm not downplaying the massive social, economic, political and personal effects of the wars, nor the role that they did play in shaping our national identity (although, surely, as a dominion rather than as an independent country). But I do feel deeply uncomfortable with the grief- and gore-porn that constitutes our relationship with these wars.

I guess, in a way, there's nothing more life-affirming than large-scale, safely distant destruction. And somehow the cliche of war as the greatest contest men can take part in still has some power - the noble sacrifice almost more vaunted than the noble victor.

The war scene I still find most moving, since reading it in my teens, is the Iliad's evocation of Achilles dragging Hector's body around the walls of Troy, day after desperate day. It is the ultimate scene of desecration, of despair, of anger at the waste and ultimate futility of war.

Pat Barker's book captures this, through the figure of poet Siegfried Sassoon, who in 1917 was 'boarded' - sent to a mental hospital - to recover after making a public statement against the continuation of the war. It wasn't a statement of fear or pacifism - he was a decorated soldier, and although he had friends who were pacifists, he didn't consider himself one. But he felt that the war should end because it was no longer being fought for its original goals - to stop the expansion of Austro-Hungary and Germany - but was now being fought as a land grab.

I've been humming and hahhing over Barker's book for a while now. I've always vaguely thought of it as a war epic, with all that suggests - beautiful sad women left at home, beautiful sad men sent to the fronts, acts of heroism and sacrifice and tales of loss and redemption, with some grisly bits thrown in to titillate the reader.

But it's not. Instead, it's a carefully observed, well researched, cooly written account of the psychological damage experienced by WWI soldiers and the treatment they received - socially and medically - from the Army. The story moves between poetry and gore without ever making a calculated play for your heartstrings. It unpicks the issue of class - one that New Zealand has never really had to face - with elegance. Like Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, it blends dark humour and ironic detachment with small, genuine moments of heartbreak. I'm looking forward to reading the rest in the series.

sin palabras, un must.
no le doy 1000 estrellas porque solo se pueden 5. menuda obra de arte para hacer leer a todo aquel que diga que ir al frente es un honor y un orgullo. no cari, es un horror que te roba la vida

n  “If you were born in a country or at a time not only when nobody comes to kill your wife and your children, but also nobody comes to ask you to kill the wives and children of others, then render thanks to God and go in peace. But always keep this thought in mind: you might be luckier than I, but you’re not a better person.”

-Jonathan Littell, The Kindly Onesn

This is war. This is not honor. This is not glory. This is not right. This is not just. This is not a game played with lives and loves and delineations of mind and body, a board set with pieces played on the country level for some concept of 'stability' that takes very little to destabilize. This is war.

This is an experiment on a grand scale, a love-fest for the more academically inclined, 'interesting material' in the battered bodies and broken souls spit up out of a gigantic machine that has no rhyme or reason. This is the result of masculinity bred on stories of adventure and physical expertise, on shutting up and slimming down the emotions into unfeeling heroics and righteous fury, on boyhood dreams of being 'brave', let loose in comradeship in the face of corpses spit up in your face and death walking the grounds and laughing at your pitiful attempts to cope and spurring you on to love, but not too much. This is the immovable object meeting the oh so movable minds to the point of triumphing over matter, legs that refuse to move, tongues that refuse to speak, screams and cries and shrieks bleeding out of consciences that cannot reason out why and refuse to consider anything but the 'rational explanation'.

Tell me, what is rationality? What is sanity? What is the standard of normality you will grade these atrocities on with so much undeniable proof shambling towards you on sewn up sleeves, crawling towards you with so many stories to tell, if they can bear to speak them. If you can bear to listen. If you are capable of sticking to the lines and the rules set down by those before you, no matter how much they stretch and bleed and trap you in nightmares that have no single 'trauma' to explain them. As if humanity can only be broken by a singularity of a specific magnitude of horror, calibrated by those who know nothing of it.

Rationality is taking in these fractured relics, these twisted meshes of screams and bones, these tortured playthings of those who have been permitted to control countries, and fixing them. Focusing on the physical, and belittling the mental. Acknowledging the atrocious hypocrisy of the system, and sending those who have suffered the worst of it right back into its jaws. Seeing the similarities between gradations of neuroses on the battlefield and hysterics during peacetime, and doing nothing. Playing god because god help us there is no other recourse left to take that will end in maintenance of our own 'rationality'.

Let us have those who make the decisions be the ones who must watch those who die. Let us have those who send them out be the ones who must put them back together. Let us have those who love war be the ones to come to grips with the futility of rational thought. Let us have those who believe that violence in the name of one's country and conceptions of masculinity is just be the ones who must cope when all the rules are shredded by the reality and life is a trap between barbed wire and the endless sea. Let us have those who want it, have it. Have all of it. Every last and horrific part.

In today's world, the leading cause of death in active duty U.S. military personnel is suicide. We haven't learned much since in the past century, despite those who have seen the terror before them and the terror behind and have as a last ditch effort left us writing, the truth of the matter. When will we look at these accounts and start to think:

n  Nothing can justify this, he'd thought. Nothing nothing nothing.n

Who knows.

n  When I’m asleep, dreaming and drowsed and warm,
They come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead.
While the dim charging breakers of the storm
Rumble and drone and bellow overhead,
Out of the gloom they gather about my bead.
They whisper to my heart; their thoughts are mine.

‘Why are you here with all your watches ended?
‘From Ypres to Frise we sought you in the line.’
In bitter safety I awake, unfriended;
And while the dawn begins with slashing rain
I think of the Battalion in the mud.
‘When are you going back to them again?
‘Are they not still your brothers through our blood?’

-Siegfried Sassoon, 'Sick Leave'n

الرواية مستوحاة من قصة حقيقية لشاعر وبطل حرب انجليزي اسمه سيغفريد ساسون.

تبدأ بالتصريح الذي كتبه عام 1917 وفيه أنه يعتقد أن الحرب يماطل فيها عن سابق نية من قبل من يملكون القوة الكفيلة بإنهائها.

وأن الحرب التي التحق بها بصفتها حرب دفاع وتحرير، قد تحولت إلى حرل عدوان وخضوع.

وأنه لم يعد يحتمل ما مرت به جماعات الجنود من صنوف المعاناة وما عاد بوسعه أن يكون طرفا في إطالة هذه العذابات.

يتم إرساله إلى المستشفى النفسي ليتولى الطبيب ريفرز مهمة إعادة سلامة العقل إلى ساسون من أجل إرساله إلى الخنادق من جديد..

تدور أحداث الرواية في ذلك المستشفى فنتعرف أكثر على شخصية ساسون ودوافعه ومبرراته، وكذلك نتعرف على شخصيات أخرى لضباط وجنود عانوا من اعراض نفسية وجسمية جراء تعرضهم لويلات الحرب..

بصفته قائد فصيلة، لدى ساسون ولاء شديد للرجال الذين يقودهم، ومع ذلك فهو يشعر أيضًا باشمئزاز شديد من الفظائع التي مر بها هو وزملاؤه. ويرتبط هذا الاشمئزاز بنوع من الإسقاط النفسي على أي شخص لم يمر بتلك الفظائع ولكنه لا يزال متحمسًا لجهود الحرب.

لذلك، يمكن القول إن ساسون يكره الجميع تقريبًا باستثناء زملائه الجنود بما في ذلك الضباط الكبار، والجنود غير المقاتلين، والمدنيين المتعصبين من جميع الأعمار والمهن، وكذلك الحضارة التي ينتمون إليها. هذا الكره هو ما دفعه إلى إلقاء وسام الصليب العسكري في نهر ميرسي، وكتابة ونشر إعلانه الذي يدين الحرب.

هذه هي معضلة ساسون التي سنرى خلال احداث الرواية كيف استطاع ان يتوصل إلى حلها...

وكيف استطاع الدكتور ريفرز مع ساسون ومع غيره من المرضى الوصول إلى جوهر مشاكلهم وسبب علاتهم....

** وقد دعم هذا رأي ريفرز القائل بأن التوتر والجمود والعجز على المدى الطويل هي العوامل التي تلحق الضرر، لا الصدمات المفاجئة أو الفظاعات العجيبة التي يميل المرضى أنفسهم إلى الإشارة إليها على اعتبارها تفسيرًا لحالتهم. ومن شأن هذا أن يشرح تفشي القلق العصابي والاضطرابات الهستيرية بنسبة أكبر لدى النساء في زمن السلم لأن حياتهن الأضيق نسبيا تتيح لهن فرصا أقل للتفاعل مع الضغوط بطرق فعالة وبناءة. يجب على أي تفسير لعصاب الحرب أن يتناول حقيقة أن حياة الحرب والخطر والشظف شديدة الذكورية ظاهريا هذه تسبب للرجال نفس الاضطرابات التي تعاني النساء منها في السلم.

**الإسكات إذا مهمة إسكات شخص ما،  فبينما يسكت بيلاند الاحتجاج اللاواعي لدى مرضاه عن طريق إزالة الشلل أو الصمم أو العمى أو البكم الذي يحول بينهم وبين الحرب، ريفرز يسكت مرضاه هو الآخر، ولو بطريقة أكثر لطفا بما لا يقاس، إذ إن التأتأة والكوابيس والرجفات وزلات الذاكرة لدى الضباط هي احتجاج غير مقصود أيضًا، ولا تقل في ذلك عن العلل الأكثر جسامة لدى أولئك الرجال.

The first volume in Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy; and what an excellent start and a brilliant weaving of fact and fiction. I already knew about Craiglockhart and the hospital for those with “shellshock” and breakdown with the pioneering psychologist Rivers. Siegfried Sassoon’s stay there is well documented in Max Egremont’s excellent biography. He is a central part of this novel and his interactions with Rivers and Wilfred Owen (whom he encouraged to write poetry). Robert Graves also pops up; he tried to shield Sassoon from the results of his declaration. Sassoon was highly decorated (he had a Military cross), but he was disillusioned with the war and sent a declaration to The Times;

“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”

It is worth quoting in full and Barker starts the book with it. Sassoon’s friend Graves realized that Sassoon was heading for a court martial and applied to the medical board (Sassoon had been wounded) to persuade them that Sassoon was suffering from shellshock.
Barker tells Sassoon’s story; his homosexuality is hinted at and his talks with Rivers are well imagined. Owen and Graves are minor characters but add a great deal to the novel. As do the fictional characters who are brilliantly drawn, especially Prior.
Barker makes some interesting points about what we now call PTSD. Women had long been pigeonholed as being prone to “hysteria” in its many forms and the men who suffered from the same type of ailment were handled very differently and quietly. The First World War with its horrors and sheer brutality produced men suffering from PTSD and it was the sheer numbers that meant the issue could not be ignored. Barker contrasts the humane and modern approach favoured by Rivers with other more brutal approaches. Barker presents many of the ideas in flux at the time and what is most prescient is the very modernity and relevance to the present conflicts we have been contending with in our generation.
There is a myth that the Great War changed everything and people woke up to the nature of war; we know it isn’t so unfortunately. Barker manages to make it quite difficult to disentangle the strands of fact and fiction she sets up; but she does a very good job of conveying the horrors of war in a subtle way; this is not boring history or historical fiction; it is a mirror for humanity to look into and see the obscenity of war.

A case could be made that the misery and suffering endured by those serving in combatant roles by European soldiers of WWI were the most extreme of any war in history. (I explicitly limit this generalization to soldiers from European countries [including Canada, Australia and New Zealand] because they were in the trenches for four full years whereas American soldiers were engaged in active combat for less than a year.)

This novel is therefore particularly poignant because it provides a psychological study of the consequences of war by telling the story of a British anthropologist serving in the role of a psychiatrist in a mental hospital during WWI who has the duty of rehabilitating mental casualties so that they will be able to return to military service. This setting provides a setting for numerous conversations between doctor and patients during which horrendous memories are being extracted in an effort to facilitate recovery from various types of mental breaks.

Most of the book follows the methods of a Mr. Rivers who uses talk therapy methods we would feel comfortable with today. However, late in the book the book's story visits the practice of Dr. Yealland who's methods would be considered brutal and barbaric to today's standards.

I was surprised to learn from the Author's Notes at the end of the book that all the main characters in the book, both doctors and patients, were based on actual historical characters. Even one of the scenes in the book where a patient makes modifications to the poems of another patient is based on handwritten marks by that character in an actual early draft of poems later published. After learning how closely it follows actual historical records I changed my classification of the book to historical fiction.

Any human society that is mobilized for war by definition is sick; organizing for mass murder can't be good. Therefore this book utilizes a unique handle for exploring the consequences of war on the human mind. It is perhaps a more effective way of explaining the stresses of war than writing about action at the front.

This book is first in a trilogy that continues with The Eye in the Door and culminates in The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize).

Some quotations that caught my attention:

'I don't know what I am. But I do know I wouldn't want a f-faith that couldn't face the facts.' (p83)

'. . . if I were going to call myself a Christian, I'd have to call myself a pacifist as well. I don't think it's possible to c-call youself a C-Christian and . . . and j-just leave out the awkward bits.' (p83)

British society was very class conscious so it is ironic that all classes were forced to share the same trenches.

"One of the paradoxes of the war -- one of the many -- was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was . . . domestic. Caring. As Layard would undoubtedly have said, maternal. And that was the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure -- the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys -- consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. (p107)

I found the following observation interesting because it relates war time mental breakdowns among men with those experiences by women during peace time:

"Pilots, though they did indeed break down, did so less frequently and usually less severely than the men who manned observation balloons. They, floating helplessly above the battlefields, unable either to avoid attack or to defend themselves effectively against it, showed the highest incidence of breakdown of any service. Even including infantry officers. 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."(p222)

Some of the psychiatric treatment methods used a hundred years ago are more painful to read about than the battle experiences. It's pretty well summarized by the following quote where a doctor is summarizing his philosophy of treatment:

". . . The last thing these patients need is a sympathetic audience."(p228)

Thus treatment methods include electrical shock and cigarette burns applied to the tongue.

Perhaps even 4½ stars. This historical-fiction novel centers around the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his psychiatrist Dr. Rivers during his stay at the mental hospital Craiglockhart during 1917.

The central theme is conflict between duty and survival which Rivers recognizes as the basis for most of the cases of "war neurosis", shell shock or as we now call it PTSD. Where do we draw the line between a soldier's duty and a completely reasonable desire to survive? The heart-wrenching part was the fact that many of the men (especially officers) didn't want (at least in the conscious part of their brain) to be posted in a "safe" position because they felt it was shameful to desert their men. The stress of being responsible for others without having any power to control conditions must have been enormous...

This short play is based upon Siegfried Sassoon's stay at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, 1917.

Sassoon had penned a scathing account of the war up to that point. Rather than have Sassoon court-martialed, his superiors ordered him to said Hospital in order for the doctors to persuade Sassoon to alter his opinions of the war.

It was at this hospital that Sassoon met another, future war poet, Wilfred Owen.

An example of one of Siegfried Sassoon's War Poems:

"The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din:
We're sure the Kaiser loves our dear old Tanks!

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home Sweet Home".
And there'd be no more jokes in Music Halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."

In Regeneration, Pat Barker fictionalises an encounter between H. R. Rivers and Siegfrid Sasson in a military psychological hospital. In Craiglockhart, near Edinburgh, there are numerous war wounded, whose experiences in the Flanders trenches of the First World War have left them psychologically, as well as sometimes physically scarred. The symptoms are many and varied. In Sassoon´s case it is possible that the motivation might even be political, rather than psychological.

Rivers attempts to analyse his patients and his own responses to them. He is of the modern school, unlikely to resort to the blunt-edged methods of some of his contemporaries. Description of some of these established treatments read very much like torture. They were, after all, in the cases described, trying to make someone talk. How appropriate.

But Rivers is unimpressed and he pursues his own line. Along the way, he also develops new, ground-breaking treatments of his own invention.

Sassoon befriends a young man called Owen, whom he encourages to write. Another friend called Graves visits whenever he can. Together, Sassoon and Owen work on some of Owen´s writing. The results, they both agree, are improvements.

The power of Regeneration is the relation between its overall idea and its setting. It presents the creative process as a reflection on experience and sets this in an institution where formal reflection on experience is a treatment. Eventually, it is not just the individual patient who benefits from the cathartic process of reflection, but also the analyst and, ultimately, all of us when the relief takes the form of great poetry.