The Regeneration Trilogy

BASTA CON LA GUERRA

Rendo pubbliche le mie opinioni, come consapevole atto di sfida alle autorità militari, perché penso che la guerra venga volontariamente prolungata da coloro che avrebbero il potere di porvi fine. Sono un soldato, e credo di parlare a nome dei soldati. Ritengo che questa guerra, cominciata come guerra di difesa e liberazione, si sia trasformata in guerra di aggressione e conquista. Credo che i propositi per i quali io e i miei commilitoni ci siamo arruolati avrebbero dovuto essere espressi con chiarezza, in modo che divenisse impossibile modificarli, e credo che, se ciò fosse stato fatto, gli obiettivi da noi perseguiti apparirebbero ora raggiungibili per via diplomatica. Ho visto e patito sulla mia pelle le sofferenze delle truppe, e non posso più rendermi complice di chi prolunga questi patimenti per fini che ritengo malvagi e ingiusti. Intendo protestare non contro la condotta della guerra, ma contro le ipocrisie e gli errori politici che stanno provocando il sacrificio di tanti uomini. In nome di chi sta soffrendo, protesto contro il raggiro perpetrato a suo danno, e spero di poter contribuire a infrangere il compiaciuto cinismo con cui quasi chiunque sia rimasto a casa assite al perdurare di tormenti che non tocca a lui patire; costoro del resto non hanno immaginazione sufficiente a comprenderli.

Siegfried Sassoon
luglio 1917

GUERRA MAI PIU'

Absolutely brilliant must-read especially for anyone interested in World War One and shell shock. An unsentimental, raw and intimate trilogy featuring historically accurate figures such as war poets, Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and anthropologist/doctor W.H.R.Rivers. Read it!

Bello, avvincente? Si. Personaggi ben caratterizzati? Si. Scritto benissimo? Si. Tra l'altro di Pat Barker ho amato Il canto delle troiane.
Però. Non ho capito bene il discorso della trilogia, che presumerebbe che i tre libri siano anche distinti. In realtà è un giga libro da 900 pagine, perché sarebbe impossibile capire il secondo e il terzo senza aver letto i precedenti. Detto ciò mi è piaciuto anche se la lunghezza è stata un elemento di fatica nella lettura. Inoltre alcune cose che l'autrice dà per scontate in realtà ho dovuto guardarle su google (tipo il processo che ha coinvolto Maud Allan); forse per un'inglese sono ovvie ma sicuramente non per un'italiana. Rimanendo sul discorso "trilogia", mi è piaciuto molto di più il primo libro rispetto agli altri due e forse sarebbe stato già completo/sufficiente in sé.
Per questi motivi do solo 3 stelle.

The Regeneration Trilogy ;

storytt3/5
characterst3/5
writingtt4/5
audio/papertAudio.
reread?ttI might.
Recommend it? Not to everyone, just the ones who are interested in war and rebuilding stories.


Verhaal:t 3/5
Karakters:t 3/5
Schrijfstijl:t 4/5
Papier/audio?t Audio.t
Herlezen: t Misschien.
Aanrader?t Niet aan iedereen, wel aan degene die van (na)oorlogsverhalen houden.

A powerful reading experience, this is a book that one will be thinking about for a very long time. The writing is superb, the use of small, lovely details (sunlight reflecting on eyeglasses, rose petals, bubbles on the legs of a man resting in a fishpond, things seen only by starlight' etc., there are many more examples) against the backdrop of the vulgarity that was WWI, serve to make the book all the more moving. A sentence as simple as this is astounding within the context of the overall work: "Then they were moving forward, hundreds of men eerily quiet, starlit shadows barely darkening the grass. And no dogs barked." The fact that the author was born in 1943 and the first volume of the trilogy initially published in 1991 and yet captures the historical and, more importantly, human aspects of the time of WWI in such detail is astonishing. The reader would expect she had lived through the war herself. This is the kind of book, beautiful and terrifying, that one is thankful for.

It was with great anticipation that I turned my inquisitive reading mind towards Pat Barker’s 1st WW extravaganza The Regeneration Trilogy. The paperwork version, of this former booker prize winner, boasts just under a 900 page word count and demands some serious attention and dedicated reading time. Having recently reread and loved Sebastian Faulks monumental Birdsong, I was hopeful that Regeneration would provide equal if not better stimulus.
In reality The Regeneration Trilogy (as the name implies) is not one but 3 books namely; Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. It follows the fortunes and life of army psychologist William Rivers, and patients under his professional care damaged by the fallout of WW1. It is hoped that Rivers can repair not only their damaged bodies but more importantly their disturbed minds, broken by the sights and sounds of the bloody battlefield they have so recently been exposed to. One such eminent patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon who was sent for immediate medical attention to River’s war hospital, when in reality he was a conscientious objector. Other worthy notables were poet and author Robert Graves, and the tragic wartime poet Wilfred Owen.

Quite simply Regeneration is much too wordy, and it is a constant battle not to get lost in the endless discussions and debates that make up the majority of the 900 pages. The exception however is in the persona of damaged soldier Billy Prior. By his actions, and his live for the moment nihilistic approach, we come a little way to understanding the crude approach adopted by physicians, in their treatment of soldiers, many years before the emergence and world recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It's hard to imagine a more beautiful, more sublime or complex series of books than these by Pat Barker. I said in a recent conversation that they don't even feel as if they were written by a particular person, but that they just appeared, fully formed, to show us all that we need to know about how humans attempt to deal with tragedy; to live with the unlivable. War and its aftermath come to occupy the same place and time in these three books, inextricably linked in a society that does not yet understand how this can be.

These are wonderful books that took my breath away and left me with something deep and human to think about for a long, long time.

While it's technically three novels, The Regeneration Trilogy is one story, and for convenience comes in a one-volume omnibus. Any of the parts could be read on its own—there's enough brief recap that one could be aware of the events of the other volumes without having read them, and as the trilogy is character-based rather than plot-based it won't befuddle anyone who jumps in at the middle. However, to do so would do the story an immense disservice. Read in its proper order, Regeneration forms one of the great war stories of our or anyone's time, an epic that takes place almost entirely on the home front as it depicts the final years of perhaps the largest blunder in military or geopolitical history.


W. H. R. Rivers doesn't carry a gun, but he sees just as much of the effects of World War I as any soldier. That's his job, in fact. He's a psychologist, and his job is to restore the traumatized, shell-shocked men under his care to some semblance of normal life. Among these patients are Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who refuses to fight not because of pacifism but because of the sheer stupidity of the conflict; Wilfred Owen, a sensitive young man attempting to come to terms with his feelings on the conflict through writing; and Billy Prior, an involuntary sadist who's disconcerted by his sexual proclivities and serves as a counter-analyst to Rivers himself. As the war drags on, and more and more of his patients are returned to the front only to be torn to rags, Rivers struggles to restrain Prior from returning to active duty. However, Prior himself finds his self-disgust increasing the longer he stays away from physical harm, and despite Rivers' protestations begins to believe it's his duty to die in France.


A lesser author than Barker would have become bogged down in the "celebrity cameos" of her story, pointing the reader to the historical characters with many a nudge and a wink, and the novels would quickly have become cloying for it. Barker is smarter than this, and treats Rivers, Sassoon and Owen as no more or less than fellow players along with their purely fictional counterparts. A reader who is not at all familiar with the historicity of the characters would never know that they were anything but Barker's inventions (I myself had no idea that Rivers was a real man until I did some research into the novels' background), and this is a good thing. The story within which the characters find themselves would at any rate be compelling even if it were completely fictional. The sheer horror of the experiences that have landed Rivers' men under his care is far better seen in their symptoms and neuroses than it could ever be if simply depicted in the present tense. The significant amount of time spent with "shell-shocked" soldiers is incredibly effective at turning the Great War from a historical abstraction into a concrete reality; they are, of course, suffering from the same post-traumatic stress disorder that is now known and diagnosed today, and the similarities between veterans of the two eras is heart-wrenching. Equally as compelling is the interaction between characters; Rivers and Billy Prior spend the entire trilogy in a game of cat-and-mouse that is never entirely hostile but never entirely friendly, probing each other for weaknesses and explanations and daring the other man to slip first—the fact that this is intended on Rivers' part as a cure makes the game no less a battle. Nearly as interesting is the paradox of Sassoon, a man who considers it his duty to be with his men but refuses to fight in what he considers to be a pointless conflict. Barker uses her men as microcosms of much vaster societal and psychological issues of their day, but never loses sight of them as individuals.


One thing that Regeneration most definitely isn't is a slog—its 900 pages fly by. However, the weight of its material is near-tangible. Many other novels have been written about World War I, by authors whose talent is undeniable. Barker's, I think, is the one that will go down as the definitive one. It strikes a perfect balance between the factual and the fictional, the human and the abstract, the individual and the era. Truly an incredible achievement.