pg 417: “Weet je nog dat ik je in de veestallen vroeg wat je gedaan zou hebben als je een deserteur in Hetties bijkeuken gevonden had ...?”

What a totally absorbing read it was. I was extremely impressed with Pat Barker's skilful weaving of fact and fiction and liked the author's notes at the end of each book that explained which events were historical fact. I learnt a lot. I didn't realise that there was an organised anti-war movement - I knew about pacifists and 'conchies' but had always thought of them as isolated individuals. I found the character of Beattie Roper, wrongly imprisoned for plotting to kill Lloyd George particularly interesting - this was loosely based on a genuine 'poison plot' which I think I remember from the Jeremy Paxman series. Rivers came over as a very compassionate man who cared deeply for his patients - but having to treat them in the knowledge that 'success' meant a return to the front, something he was opposed to. I also liked the inclusion of the war poets Sassoon and Owen. However I didn't warm to Billy Prior - all those seedy sexual encounters with men and women - yuk! - but I still wanted to know what happened to him and was pleased that in the end he came to respect Rivers, with whom he developed a father/son type relationship (as did Sassoon). The parts of the books I enjoyed best concerned Rivers' treatment methods and the psychology behind them - all those different manifestations of shell shock. There were some shocking and harrowing scenes - Yealland's inhumane electric shock treatment and Hallet's horrific injuries. But to me the most shocking event was Billy's betrayal of his childhood friend the pacifist 'Mac' while inhabiting his alternative personality - a betrayal he had no recollection of making. That was my 'oh no' moment! I found the Eddystone section quite strange and couldn't really see the relevance of it at first - but on reflection I think it was used by Pat Barker as a contrast to Western civilisation - one which was dying out because it could no longer go to war (by headhunting on adjoining islands). I thought it was extremely well written with the author able to convey much with a few well chosen words. It did remind me of Birdsong at the end where Billy comments that he and Owen are Craiglockhart's successes because they don't remember, think or feel.

This is a remarkable literary work, certainly the finest prose I’ve read in quite a while, with memorable characters and scenes, recounting the horrors of World War I both on the battlefield and in the hospitals and wards after the battle.

It is framed by the real lives of historical characters and the historical anthropology of Dr. Rivers, an early neurologist and physician to many damaged young men coming out of the conflict.

Barker’s adept shifting between Dr. Rivers experiences in Melanesia and his ministrations to the psychologically damaged provide the main through-line of the 3rd tale, The Ghost Road.

But in the earlier stories, the narrative circles back to Rivers’ early family life in which among other people, Charles Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, makes appearances. Dodgson’s obsession with Rivers’ sister is only one of several forbidden fruit of the story.

While the Melanesian society on the surface appears primitive, you cannot escape the feeling that war has its grip on the human condition to a degree that supersedes time and place.

Nobody who lived through WWI can possibly conclude that civilization has progressed much in the few thousand years since homo sapiens first appeared.

Review applies to The Ghost Road only.
Any review of Barker’s mesmerising, harrowing yet tender novel will seem inadequate without putting it into the context of the two volumes that preceded it in her Regeneration trilogy.
Yet this was the one that won the 1995 Booker Prize, its predecessors having failed to make the short-lists of ’91 and ’93. Perhaps the judges were inclined to make theirs a cumulative accolade, but even in its own terms, this stands out as one of the most rewarding of all the winners.
In it, Barker achieves the terrible apotheosis of all that has gone before. It matters not that we know the outcome.
But the context hardly brings relief. Wilfred Owen et al. die on almost the last day of the First World War in what is virtually a suicide mission to cross a canal, a pointless exercise given the peace negotiations then in place.
Men, as Lt. Billy Prior wryly notes, are being ‘sacrificed to the subclauses and the small print.’ The working-class officer has earlier put his upper-class colleagues in their place with their clashing ideas of capitalist exploitation or national heroism. The war continues, he says, because no-one knows how to stop it. And as for the latter, it’s ‘Patriotism, honour, courage, vomit, vomit, vomit.’
Running parallel to the war, to which Billy and his fellow mental hospital inmates are being prepared to return, are images of other lives, far removed. The first in the novel’s opening pages are from a Scarborough fairground, with its coconut-shies, rifle range and haunted house ‘where cardboard skeletons leapt out of the cupboards with green electric light bulbs flashing in the sockets of their skulls.’
We know, because we have seen it and will see it again, the almost comical gulf in perception between those innocents sharing its frights and the observation of any returning soldier.
The more common reference however is to the head-hunters of the Solomon Islands where the psychiatrist Rivers did his anthropological research, among the skull houses, and the ever-present ghosts, spirits that are given voice to ask the questions the living have been unable to ask.
Compassionate and intelligent, taking readers into the darkest regions of experience in mind and body, this as-it-were behind-the-scenes look at what was then the greatest conflict mankind had seen, will remain one of the greatest accounts of what it felt like for some of those who were there.

What a lovely man Rivers was. Pat Barker’s descriptions of his own struggle with mental health and his conscience over the treatment of his men made for a truly memorable read. Yealland, on the other hand .... barbaric, torturing monster! Such an insight on the times they were living in.

A must read for anyone remotely interested in what war might mean psychologically and physically for the soldiers who fight it and particularly anyone interested in this time and place of late WWI Britain. The writing is nothing short of gorgeous. When I found out that some of the main characters are actual historical figures I was even more impressed and the book took on new layers of meaning and importance.
This is a masterpiece of historical fiction.

Captivating

Barker takes us into a side of WWI and its aftermath that is seldom seen... interwoven lives of women and men dealing with the trauma of "the Great War", the war to end all wars...

This work of fiction works with materials supplied by those who actually experienced the First World War. The main figure in the first volume is one Siegfried Sassoon, an officer in the British army who defied orders and was then shipped to an asylum ("Craiglockhart") for examination. The reader is treated to the contest between medical authority and the patient who suffers.

One especially enjoyable moment in a discussion between Dr. Rivers, the examining physician and the patient, one Siegfried Sassoon. We must remember that Sassoon, the one I am speaking of here and now, and the one you are reading about here and now, was awarded a medal for gallantry. Whatever happens, gallantry will be on the line. This recalls the classic conflict between glory and shame. This is the one, the other I am not speaking about right now. Now it is Sassoon sipping tea and broken by the war and protesting to the senseless loss of men. Recounting a dream, Sassoon tells Rivers: "It was just when I woke up, the nightmares didn't always stop. I used to see corpses. Men with half their faces shot off, crawling across the floor." This relation immediately connects the reader to the suffering patient as we suffer through more pages of agony.

In other words, Barker's work is a mirror to our own "missing faces" due to the Covid-19 pandemic that causes people all around the world to lose half their "public" faces.

This haunting, elegiac trilogy of novels about World War I focuses not on adventure and heroism but on the deep scars that the trauma of war leaves on the psyches of soldiers.

The first book, Regeneration, is about the efforts of Dr. William H.R. Rivers, a real life pioneering psychiatrist, to help officers hospitalized for "shell shock." His patients include a man who has been unable to eat since a decaying corpse exploded in his face, getting into his mouth; a man who cannot speak and cannot remember anything from his last three days on the front line; and the real life writer and decorated veteran Siegfried Sassoon, who has no symptoms of illness but was committed after publicly denouncing the war. The sequel, The Eye in the Door, follows one of the fictional characters, Billy Prior, as he attempts to adjust to civilian life after being taken out of active service, again with help from Dr. Rivers. Prior's loyalties are severely tested when, while working for military intelligence, he is sent to arrest an old friend of his, a socialist activist leading an underground network helping men avoid the draft. In The Ghost Road, Prior, wracked with guilt over being at home while his fellow soldiers are suffering and dying, volunteers to return to active duty. He serves with another real life figure: Wilfred Owen, who won a medal for bravery and later became famous for his anti-war poetry. As Prior and Owen march again into battle, Dr. Rivers fights a severe fever that triggers hallucinations of traumatic events in his own life, which sheds light on his determination to help others heal.

The writing in this series is clear, spare and never sensational or pitying, even when describing the gruesome experiences of the soldiers and the disturbing post trauma behavior they exhibit. Lt. Prior and Dr. Rivers are the central characters across the three books, and each is fascinating. Both are intelligent, empathetic, and full of inner conflict, although on the surface very different. Lt. Prior is a moody, sarcastic young man from a turbulent working class household who doubts he can control his inner demons; Dr. Rivers a soft-spoken, gentle scholar from a genteel family who feels compelled to try to understand the dark side of the mind. The best moments in the story are when these two extraordinary characters play off of each other.

I am commenting on this trilogy as a whole although I actually read the three books separately, during the period of 2014 to 2018 when I was attempting in my own very tiny way to pay tribute to the soldiers of the Great War of whatever nationality they may have been.
Pat Barker's writing is extremely skilfull, insightful and, above all, moving. It was a fascinating experience to discover the beginnings of treatment for "shell shock" or PTSD and the fact that the author included real historical figures in the account added even more power.
However, I am giving four stars instead of five as I did not particularly warm up to Billy and his sexual encounters as depicted in "The Eye in the Door."

I just finished the first book of the trilogy, entitled "Regeneration." I have mixed feelings about it. The story focuses on the treatment of World War I soldiers who have experienced psychiatric breakdowns and disorders as a result of the horrors of war. There is also an underlying discussion of the morality and ethics of war itself.

On the one hand, I enjoyed learning a little bit about the emerging views of post-combat psychiatric trauma, and I appreciated the fact that several of the characters were based on actual, historical people (especially, the two central characters -- the doctor and the soldier who protested the war).

However, I found the writing to be somewhat dry and too intellectual. A story that was relating the emotional response to the horrors of war was itself, not emotional enough. Perhaps this was a reflection of the doctor's view that most of the mental problems were due to soldiers' repressions of their war memories. Or perhaps it's a reflection of the stiff, uptight British culture. Or perhaps it's just my perspective as a result of having just read the beautifully written and emotionally gut-wrenching "Gods Go Begging," which covered some of the same ground in such an amazing way (of course, that was the Vietnam War, not WWI).

Whatever the case may be, I didn't find "Regeneration" itself to be as engaging as it should have been. I'm not sure if I will read the second and third volumes in the trilogy or not.