I have returned to this book four years later and listened to it in the Audible version. Four years ago I had sought out the other two books in the trilogy expecting to read them but in the interim have Become almost exclusively an audible reader. And now I have those same other two books in the audible versions and believe I have more determination to follow up with them immediately. My experience in rereading this book did not cause me to change my star rating.

In the intervening four years I have had some significant events in my pseudo-pacifist life. The primary event has been the inheritance and disbursement of $1 million in inherited income. In two years I will have conscientiously and openly resisted paying approximately 1/4 million dollars in federal income tax while redirecting nearly $200,000 to meet human needs. I have participated in the creation of a documentary titled The Pacifist which will hopefully be completed In early 2018. There is a Facebook group titled The Pacifist with some information about that experience.

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I was attracted to this book because the information about it says it has something to do with pacifism, a state of being that fascinates me and that seems like a good goal in life. I have been a pacifist in my mind for a long time although there is not much of a list of any actual actions I have taken that would brand me as a pacifist. I have joined and supported some pacifist organizations, been a conscientious objector to military taxes and done some pacifist reading. I guess I am a fellow traveler but have not been brave enough to get in water over my head. 2013 is the ninetieth anniversary of the War Resisters League www.warresisters.org, one of the oldest pacifist organizations in the U.S.

This book is pathos and humor along with the horror and early 20th century psychology. It is Catch-22 and  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  mixed in with Johnny Got His Gun and All Quiet On the Western Front. And I’ll bet you will see a few moments of  Mash  as well. It is certainly not as well known as any of these classics. But it is a book about war written by a woman.

It is not a long, dense book – 250 pages – although I did bog down on occasion. It is fairly accessible to a wide audience while still having some intellectual challenge. Although Regeneration is fiction, several of the characters are based on real men, two poets – Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen – and a doctor – William Rivers. The setting is a hospital in Scotland that is being used to treat British officers who have mental disabilities as a result of The Great War in France.

We see men who limbs are paralyzed, whose tongues are muted, whose bodies are contorted, whose dreams terrorize, whose lives have been distorted by the horror of war but who have no physiological damage that can be determined by the best doctors. Many are the classic “shell-shock” that most of us have heard about. That and the poison gas is what has hung on from the First World War for many of us. And the staggering death toll of men who lived in trenches but occasionally were ordered to stand up and walk into machine gun fire.

The author suggests that the mental disabilities represent the rebellion of the body against the carnage of battle, the destruction of war. It is the body screaming, “I can’t take it anymore!” The men are hospitalized and their evil spirits are exorcised so that they are fit to return to the front line to kill again and to be killed. The disabilities are the rebellion of the mind to the insanity of life in the No Man’s Land of Somme and Ypres (Flanders). The cure is the likely sentence of death. So the irony in this and any other war is that medicine was a tool that sent men back to war and death. In Regeneration we watch doctors and soldiers struggle with that reality.

“…A few shells, a few corpses, and you’ve lost heart.”
“How many corpses?”
“The point is . . . “
“The point is 102,000 last month alone. You’re right, I am obsessed, I never forget it for a second, and neither should you, Robert, if you had any real courage you wouldn’t acquiesce the way you do.”
Graves flushed with anger. “I’m sorry you think that. I should hate to think I’m a coward. I believe in keeping my word. You agreed to serve, Siegfried. Nobody’s asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the respect of the kind of people you’re trying to influence – the Bobbies and the Tommies – you’ve got to be seen to keep your word. They won’t understand if you turn around in the middle of the war and say, “I’m sorry, I’ve changed my mind.” To them, that’s just bad form. They’ll say you’re not behaving like a gentleman – and that’s the worst thing they can say about anybody.”

And more to the point:

There are many important themes in the book including class distinctions and the importance of poetry, but the most important one is a moral issue: for what are these men being regenerated? The answer is clear: to go back to France and fight again.
Source: http://silverseason.wordpress.com/201...

Ultimately, the book is about the struggle between war and peace. And arguments are made by the author, interestingly a woman, with certainty:

Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which a civilization claims to be based. The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac. The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.
. . .
A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic and unquestioning allegiance. Perhaps the rebellion of the old might count for rather more than the rebellion of the young. Certainly poor Siegfried’s rebellion hadn’t counted for much, though he reminded himself that he couldn’t know that. It had been a completely honest action and such actions are seeds carried on the wind. Nobody can tell where, or in what circumstances, they will bear fruit.
How on earth was Siegfried going to manage in France? His opposition to the war had not changed. If anything it had hardened. And to go back to fight, believing as he did, would be to encounter internal divisions far deeper than anything he’d experienced before. Siegfried’s ‘solution’ was to tell himself that he was going back only to look after some men, but that formula would not survive the realities of France. However devoted to his men’s welfare a platoon commander might be, in the end her is there to kill, and to train other people to kill. Poetry and pacifism are a strange preparation for that role. Though Siegfried has performed it before, and with conspicuous success. But then his hatred of the war had not been as fully fledged, as articulate, as it was now.
It was a dilemma with one very obvious way out. Rivers knew, though he had never voiced his knowledge, that Sassoon was going back with the intention of being killed. Partly, no doubt, this was a youthful self-dramatization. I’ll show them. They’ll be sorry. But underneath that, Rivers felt there was a genuine and very deep desire for death.
And if death were to be denied? Then he might well break down. A real breakdown this time.

Regeneration is the first book in a trilogy and some reviewers have opined that this first book benefits from the further developments in the following books. I thought this was a fine stand alone book but I do have the two follow-on books and expect to read them in due course.

I thought that the content of this book was variable. I lost my way a couple of times but to some extent that was my lack of attention. So I had experiences where I could easily put the book down in spite of being in the middle of an episode but there were other instances where I found the book was a page turner. As I have already mentioned, several of the major characters in this novel were based somewhat on real people. One main character, Prior, was evidently wholly fiction and I did not find his role to be obvious. There is an Author’s Note at the end of the book that starts “Fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not.” It goes on to indicate some of the distinctions. I wondered why this was at the end rather than at the beginning.

There were some five star as well as some three star portions of Regeneration so I take the easy route and award four stars. I felt enough commitment to the book to want to read the second and third books in the trilogy, but I am not engrossed enough to move immediately into book two.

Stephen King recommended book, series, and author. In his book On Writing, published 2000, King says on pages 285-286: "These are the best books I've read over the last three or four years, the period during which I wrote The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-up Book, Hearts in Atlantis, On Writing, and the as-yet-unpublished From a Buick 8. In some way or other, I suspect each book in the list had an influence on the books I wrote."

He continues to say "...a good many of these might show you some new ways of doing your work. Even if they don't, they're apt to entertain you. They certainly entertained me."


Please click here to check out my group:
n   Books Stephen King Recommendsn

I have found all of Pat Barker's books that I have read fascinating, and I especially like the Regeneration trilogy. (Regeneration, The Eye In The Door, The Ghost Road) These novels, about the psychological toll that World War I exacted on some of its (at least temporary) survivors, are wrenching. I've always been fascinated by World War I, especially from the English perspective. What a way to start the twentieth century; and of course, rather than a war to end wars, it was merely an introduction to the horrors that we encountered as the century wore on.

For a heart-rending description of the Europe which the first world war put an end to, check out Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, which I would rate as one of the most affecting books I have ever read.



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Simply fascinating. I'm not a massive fan of war writing, but this was fascinating. A brilliantly written look at war, the mind, healing, and freedom.

i loved this entire cast of characters so dearly, the writing was gorgeous, the poetry was so deftly incorporated & the revisions were written in such a real way, the women in the novel had so much depth, social issues were comfortably worked in, mental health was handled with nuance, oh my god what a book!

Fascinating fictional rendering of an actual British soldier who opposed WWI and his treatment in a mental health facility. Siegfried Sassoon made a public declaration in 1917 stating that the war was unnecessarily being dragged on and killing too many men. He thought the British were justified in entering the war, but they were staying in France as conquerors and not as liberators. His treatment and that of other soldiers suffering from various manifestations of PTSD is illuminating, especially since we view the mental health of soldiers differently now. I know that shell shock was acknowledged at the time, but I am surprised how extensive the treatment of these soldiers seemed.

:(

Taught this novel in freshmen seminar titled "Law and Literature." Majority of class voted it their favorite work, a true testament to Barker's skill, as many of our students tend toward hyper-patriotic and conservative views, but by end of novel, they came to have great sympathy for Sassoon's dilemma of wanting to decry the insanity of the war's absurd strategy and stay loyal to his men. Though Barker's sympathies are pretty clear, instead of knocking down straw-men with two-dimensional characters, she develops them with much sensitivityj and nuance. The book becomes a meditation on maintaining one's voice, literally and metaphorically, in a cacophony of conformity, as much as an indictment of war.

Pat Barker – Regeneration 1991

This is the first novel in Pat Barkers Regeneration trilogy of books, set during the First World War. 'Regeneration' is set within the framework of a mental hospital for officers, centered around Craiglockheart, Edinburgh during 1917. This historical/fictional novel is essentially based on historical figures; W.E. Rivers, a social anthropologist and psychiatrist and his treatment of shellshock victims of the Great War and among his patients are one Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the great war poets, although Owen is treated by a different doctor, but his character interacts with Sassoon, which is historically correct. Sassoon was hospitalised during July 1917 because he had wrote a Declaration against the continuation of the war; he saw that whilst the initial war of 1914 may have been justified, and of course there was great support for it as the Allied nations saw Germany as a belligerent, its continuance became more like a war of conquest by 1917, and the loss of life very severe. Instead of being court martialled, Sassoons friend, Robert Graves (another poet), helped place him in hospital for his own benefit and treatment. Whilst there, he encountered Owen and they strike up a friendship and Sassoon encourages Owen to write more and helps him with his poems. Its odd that post WW1, Owen was seen as the greater of the two, but we do not get impression in the book, and I think this is also factually correct during the war – Sassoon was more widely recognised at the time.

W.E.Rivers job in Craiglockheart was to 'mend' his patients well enough for them to return to active duty. However, on encountering Sassoon and his objections to the continuance of the war, not really coming from a pacifist position but more a moral outrage against the loss of life, he himself begins to question his own motives, his own justification for wanting to treat the injured only to return them back to where they became ill in the first place. Rivers begins to question the established methods used for curing shellshock victims, usually via electric shock treatment. Whilst this method did have some success, the relapse rate did bring it into question, as well as its barbarity and there is a quite a horrific scene in the book where Rivers experiences this first hand.

The novel combines historical fact within a fictional framework. These characters did exist, along with the hospital, and they were all known to be critics of the war; Rivers through his psychiatry and the poets through their experiences of the front line and subsequent literary portrayal. All the characters are at odds with the medical, political and military establishments during WW1. The result being a book which is deeply intelligent, profound, exceptionally literate and very rewarding to read. Highly recommended and very appropriate to read during the time of the 90th year since the armistice.

So good! I reread this, getting prepared to teach it. hadn't picked it up in quite a few years, but a surprising amount had stuck with me. I like how much of the novel is conversation - it makes the moments of landscape and physical description really leap out with importance. A great treatment of history that brings the conversation there into the present.

I have been meaning to read Pat Barker's Regeneration - the 'classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men' - for such a long time, but only got around to it very recently.  Probably her most famous novel, Regeneration has been considered a modern classic since its publication in 1991, and is the first book in a trilogy of the same name.  The book has been highly praised.  Margaret Forster calls it 'a novel of tremendous power', the Sunday Times 'brilliant, intense, subtle', and, fittingly, Time Out heralds it 'a fine anthem for doomed youth'.

Set in 1917 at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in southeast Edinburgh, Regeneration takes as its focus three very well-known figures - Dr W.H.H. Rivers, who pioneered shellshock treatment for soldiers, and two war poets, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.  Robert Graves also makes odd appearances throughout.  Barker has also created, alongside these figures, the character of Billy Prior, unable to speak and only able to communicate on paper, who feels just as realistic.  Rivers' job is to make the men in his care healthy enough that they can be returned to the Front.  'Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds,' the blurb continues, 'the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors' which await them.

Regeneration opens at the point at which Sassoon has expressed his objections to the war in writing, in a piece which he calls 'an act of wilful defiance of military authority'.  In consequence, he is sent directly to Rivers, who receives the news of his arrival as follows: 'Can you imagine what our dear Director of Medical Services is going to say, when he finds out we're sheltering "Conchies" as well as cowards, shirkers, scrimshankers and degenerates?  We'll just have to hope there's no publicity.'

Justine Picardie writes that 'what gives the novel its authenticity is Pat Barker's impressive ability to capture her characters' voices and moods.'  Indeed, Barker has a wonderful understanding of each of her characters, whether historical figures, or invented ones.  Her interpretation of them made them feel highly realistic, and at points in conversations - particularly those between Owen and Sassoon - I had to remind myself that I was not reading a piece of non-fiction. 

There is such humanity to Barker's examination, and I very much enjoyed the little glimpses of surprise in the behaviour of her characters, which often seem to be at odds with their public personas.  When Sassoon first arrives at Craiglockhart, for instance, Barker writes that he 'lingered on the drive for a full minute after the taxi had driven away, then took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and ran up the steps.' The descriptions which Barker gives of her characters do not just remark on the superficial; rather, they tend to have a lot of depth to them, and often err on the chilling.  She describes Sassoon in the following way: 'Light from the window behind Rivers's desk fell directly onto Sassoon's face.  Pale skin, purple shadows under the eyes.  Apart from that, no obvious signs of nervous disorder.  No twitches, jerks, blinks, no repeated ducking to avoid a long-exploded shell.  His hands, doing complicated things with cup, saucer, plate, sandwiches, cake, sugar tongs and spoon, were perfectly steady...  So far he hadn't looked at Rivers.  He sat with his head slightly averted, a posture that could easily have been taken for arrogance, though Rivers was more inclined to suspect shyness.'

Other reviewers have commented upon the language used in the novel, believing it to be too simplistic.  However, this was not the impression which I received.  There are a lot of poetic descriptions, and the dialogue particularly is filled with nuances and undercurrents.  The more stark, matter-of-fact language which has been used at odd times serves to highlight the horror of wartime.  Given the nature of the book, I felt as though the balance which Barker struck between these descriptions and the examination of her characters was perfect.  The moments of dark humour, which can be found from time to time, also worked very well.  

Regeneration is very well situated historically, and scenes are vividly set in just a few sentences.  One of Barker's particular strengths here are the comparisons which she makes between wartime and civilian life, particularly with regard to way in which she shows how quite ordinary things can be triggers for what soldiers had experienced in the trenches.  When a character named Burns is travelling on a bus, to give one example, she writes: 'A branch rattled along the windows with a sound like machine-gun fire, and he had to bite his lips to stop himself crying out.'  She also demonstrates an impressive emotional range in her explorations of isolation and freedom, wellbeing and mentality, nightmare states and hallucinatory moments, and the profound effects which each of these things can cause.

There is, of course, much in the novel about medical experimentation, and how best to treat such troubled men.  Thoughts of, and explorations around, masculinity, have been cleverly woven in.  Barker makes it clear from the outset that the methods which Rivers has adopted in his radical treatment plan go quite against the moral, 'manly' values instilled in him, of demonstrating only strength and valour.  He, and too his patients, were not expected to show any signs of weakness.  Of this, Barker observes: '... he was already experimenting on himself.  In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of kindnesses for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing.'  She goes on to write: 'The change he demanded of them - and by implication of himself - was not trivial.  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.'

I had a feeling that I might regret leaving it so long to pick up Regeneration, and I am.  It is a stunning novel, compelling from the outset, and filled with moments of harrowing beauty, and poignant reflections on conflict and its worth.  I already have the second book in the trilogy, The Eye in the Door, on my to-read pile, and am very much looking forward to continuing with it sooner rather than later.  I imagine that it will be just as moving as Regeneration proved to be, this wonderful mixture of fact and fiction, in which Barker is constantly aware of the significance of every tiny thing.

2.5
I found it so painstaking to finish that book. I don't know, I just didn't enjoy it. There was no action in it. The way of writing is very boring. Although, I must admit, I like war stories and the story itself was good; it just needed a better way of wrtng in my opinion.