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.

I read these books in the late '90s, after Ghost Road was first published. I was in love with the British war poets of WWI at the time and this fit right in. I don't remember many details, but these books were great reads. Very athmospheric, accessible and captivating main characters, I suffered with them every step of the way.

I’d had this on my to-read list for a while and finally picked it up the other week; after watching the new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front and being largely unimpressed, I’d briefly considered rereading the book, then idly wandered my shelves until I found this, remembered it was set during WW1, and decided to try something new instead.

GOOD DECISION. This trilogy was excellent in every way and is entirely to blame for the massive book hangover I’m nursing at the moment, glaring balefully at all the other books in my to-read pile and grumbling, “Why aren’t you just more Regeneration, dammit?” I admit I know very little about the real-life WW1 era British events and characters frequently referred to, so I initially spent some time feeling like I was at a lively dinner conversation where I kept missing crucial bits of information. But once I found my feet (some very intrigued Googling on the side may have helped) – good god, does Barker ever know how to do characterisation and dialogue. It’s no exaggeration to say that I was glued to the page for the majority of these books and hardly wanted to surface. Apart from All Quiet on the Western Front (which is more narrow in scope and quite different in tone), it’s easily one of the best books I’ve read about the era. The writing is unsentimental but still guts you in a number of ways. The characters are complex and deeply, deeply human. It’s an excellent glimpse into the medical realities of the era, especially with respect to the treatment of shell shock and the fledgling emergence of talk therapy. It’s also casually, complicatedly queer, which always helps. It’s been a while since a book hit me just right at exactly the right moment and I’m clinging onto the feeling as long as I can. I’ll not quickly forget those final fifty pages, sitting in the peaceful late-autumn sun and reading fictional diary entries from September – November 1918 with my heart in my throat, willing the characters to hang on another 6 weeks, another 4, another 2. Bloody fantastic read. Thanks for the rec, Anna! <3

تاريخ القراءة الأصلي : ٢٠٠٥
اختلاط عظيم للتاريخ بدراما الناس وعبورنا نحو الأبدية

Some notes taken whilst reading all three parts of this trilogy consecutively. Overall, they give a very interesting perspective on the First World War and on groups of people that would normally not be given a voice.

Regeneration
Dr William Rivers is treating victims of shell-shock, including Siegfried Sassoon, who strikes up a friendship with Wilfred Owen. All this is factual. But there is also a character called Billy Prior, entirely fictional, who forms a relationship with the fictional Sarah Lumb. These are the main characters. The story gives an emotional perspective on war and the effects of war. We see many people trying to avoid the impact of war: generals who don’t visit the front line and are staggered when they discover how people are dying, people in Britain taking days out to the seaside and almost pretending that nothing is happening. And then soldiers whose brains can not cope with what they see and who hide away in the only way their minds can conceive of - shell shock, neurasthenia, with physical symptoms that vary.

There are many interesting comments on the role of women in the war, including a section that explains Rivers fascination with understanding how it is that war induces in men the same kind of mental illnesses that peacetime induces in women. In many ways, it is a commentary on the society of the time that made women feel trapped and threatened.

An absorbing study of the First World War from the perspective of the officers. It is very easy to read and the pages fly by. Wikipedia has a good summary:

The novel is thematically complex, exploring the effect of the War on identity, masculinity, and social structure. Moreover, the novel draws extensively on period psychological practices, emphasising River's research as well as Freudian psychology. Through the novel Barker enters a particular tradition of representing the experience of World War I in literature: many critics compare the novel to other World War I novels, especially those written by women writers interested in the domestic repercussions of the war, including Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Barker both drew on those texts of the period that initially inspired her and makes references to a number of other literary and cultural works and events. These give an impression of historical realism, even though Barker tends to refute the claim that the novel is "historical fiction".

It is an excellent novel. One weakness, for me, is its portrayal of working class people (who talk funny and it feels odd reading it) who seem rather two-dimensional and stereotyped. Well worth reading, though.

The Eye in the Door

Where Regeneration concentrated on real events (Siegfried Sassoon’s time with Dr Rivers, including his meeting with Wilfred Owen) but introduced us to fictional characters (most significantly Billy Prior), here Barker concentrates on the fictional characters, fictionalises other historical events and brings in actual historical events with much less focus. The Eye in the Door is much more of a fictional story where Barker gets to play with her main themes (the way people deal with the horror of war being one of those).

The idea of disassociation is important to this second part of the trilogy. Primarily this is explored in Prior’s story which expands on the quote from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that opens the book. But both Sassoon and Rivers experience a form of disassociation as the war takes it toll on them.

For quite some time as I read this, I struggled with Prior’s story as the Jekyll and Hyde part of it seemed over the top. It all comes together by the end, but I spent a large part of the book thinking it was too much. Prior is clearly damaged by the war (or perhaps the damage was done before the war?) and his mental state is the main story here.

Food for thought from this book includes discussion of the way those left at home while young men go off to fight (and die) try to avoid thinking about the war (this was a theme through Regeneration, too):

Soldiers home on leave had to be given a good time; they mustn’t be allowed to remember what they were going back to, and this gave everybody else a magnificent excuse for never thinking about it at all.

It also includes an interesting section on Rivers’ work with Head on physical nerve regeneration. It refers to the first two phases of recovery: protopathic and epicritic. It is hard not to try to map the first two parts of this trilogy onto those phases. The protopathic is characterised by extreme reactions but an inability to locate the specific source of the discomfort. The epicritic, the second phases, allows location of the source of the discomfort. And it is true that this second volume of the trilogy feels like it is more focussed, more specific about the pain and damage that war is causing to a generation of young men.

Overall, I found this second part of the trilogy slightly less successful than the first part. This was at least partly due to the time it took me to be comfortable with Prior’s story. But it is still true that Barker is shining a light into a dark place with her stories of the sexual and political dissenters in the war, and she is giving a voice to those who often do not have one (as she went on to do in The Silence of the Girls in 2018).

The Ghost Road

The final part of the Regeneration trilogy is by far the most ambitious structurally. It mixes narratives of Rivers (present in all three parts) in both the book’s present, caring for his patients as he has been doing through the whole trilogy, and reflecting on his experiences in Melanesia with Billy Prior’s experiences going back to and then enduring the final phases of the war. This juxtaposition of Rivers’ memories and Prior’s experiences in the final weeks of the war builds into a powerful combination, but it asks the reader to do a lot more of the work than the first two parts (which is probably why this part won the Booker prize).

I found this final part of the trilogy more powerful emotionally and, because of the way it lays different story lines against one another, more thought provoking. It was my favourite of the three books.

Although it is clear that these three books form a trilogy, with the repeating characters and themes and the continuity of the story, they are actually all very different in terms of structure and style. Reading them one after the other, the changes in approach are very noticeable. This isn’t a criticism, more an observation, because I was sort of expecting to read three books that were more similar to one another.

Interestingly, and, for me, helpfully, I was working on this photograph while I was reading this book. Although it might not look like it, this is a single (multiple exposure) image taken off my camera and manipulated in Lightroom. I think that some of my work on this picture was influenced by my reading of this trilogy of novels. It is essentially a picture of the recently erected war memorial in my home town, but with a new background applied by merging exposures in the camera (the actual memorial is a hollow shape stood in front of a whitewashed wall).