hese three novels—­Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995)—offer an unflinching look at World War I. Starting with the real-life psychiatric treatment of poet and British officer Sigfried Sassoon for shellshock, Barker shows how the war ruined but failed to replace nineteenth-century norms of gender, class, sexuality, and honor.

In giving this volume a three star rating I am judging the trilogy as a whole. The first book in the series is by far and away the best. All the characters are beautifully drawn and believable. The situations feel authentic and you get a real sense of gaining some understanding of how the First World War impacted on the lives of everyone. Sadly in the later volumes the fictitious character of Billy Prior becomes less and less believable as Barker uses him to explore the prejudices and ills of society at large including domestic abuse (so Billys father beat his mother), class issues (Billy is an intelligent boy from a working class background), the backlash against pacifists (Billy works in a government post which seeks to identify those aiding deserters and at the same time spent much of his childhood with a woman who became a prominant pascifist), homophobia (Billy is a bisexual - if he'd been straight forwardly gay then bringing in a female love interest to explore the changing role of women would have been difficult but as a bisexual the author gets to play with some many more conflicting issues). In the end the central character looses any sense of being a real character and feels more like a useful tool for the author to use to gain access to her pet hobby horses. The is especially clear in the use of the psychological fugues which Billy suffers (fugues of the duration and form that Billy experiences are beyond rare and for a character already overburdened with baggage this take things past the point of realism which the first book had managed to attain). The final scene in the Ghost Road capped of everything with a weak ending that felt lifted directly from every hackneyed Hollywood war movie you've ever seen - I could almost hear Barbers adagio playing in the background. In short and extremely promising start spoiled somewhat by the authors desire to make too many points through the use of one character.

Good anti-war novel as a three piece. Unpopular opinion: not her best work :-/

I read this trilogy after finishing "To End All Wars" by Adam Hochschild, which looks at WWI history from the vantage point of England. Since I seem to be on a roll with WWI, I decided to listen to Pat Barker's books that deal with the same period. The novels take place mostly in England, and the two main characters are the psychiatrist Rivers (a real person) and one of his patients, Billy Pryor (fictitious). By weaving the action around this pair, Barker is able to explore the terrible waste of the war, not only in lives and limbs but also in minds. Among other historical characters who enter the novels are Siegfried Sassoon, the poet and officer from an aristocratic family who scandalizes everyone by refusing to return to duty in protest of the continued slaughter, and Wilfrid Owen, one of the best-known poets of the war, who was killed in action shortly before the armistice was signed. The novels raise interesting questions about what it means to be civilized, how we confront conflicting loyalties, and the difficulty of maintaining personal decency and integrity in a context of senseless violence, mass self-deceit, and blind nationalism. I found them quite thought-provoking.

Jaren geleden al gelezen en heeft veel indruk gemaakt. Door de herdenking van WO1 komt de herinnering aan dit boek terug. Helaas heb ik het boek (nog) niet digitaal. De papieren versie blijf ik bewaren.

This was a harrowing, disturbing, and very sad read.
I first read Regeneration separately, then the following two- The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Read in this handsome trilogy compilation.
I was not such a fan of the slightly pornographic nature of her specific details surrounding Prior’s sex life and that milieu, but her writing has an immediacy and vividness that is incredible. On the whole it was really incredible, especially read so closely together in a binge session.

This book is actually three of Pat Barker's previously printed as individual books, and then combined into a trilogy. Barker is a wonderful writer and researcher, and many of her characters are real English officers/soldiers of World War I, who experienced terrible wounds of both the body and the mind. Dr. Rivers, an English pyschologist, has it his duty to help men recall what they experienced and face it. He too is an authentic doctor. The Trilogy takes us back and forth from the hospital wards, to the war, and back again. Barker introduces her subjects in the first part, and then in the second part, hones in on one or two of them, and of course, Dr. Rivers, who has his own demons to contend with. The third part, The Ghost Road, brings one of the men, Prior, to the forefront, along with Dr. Rivers, who remembers all his study in Melanesia as a younger man. Its effect is quite stunning.
I think I would understand more of what is being discussed, if I reread the book for a seond time, now that I know the main characters. However, the thought is wonderful, the reality is something else.

-- Just finished "The Re generation Trilogy" -- what a fascinating book it was!!!! Although I was rather disappointed after reading "Regeneration" which is the first book in a trilogy: It would have been more enjoyable if the book was more focused on the characters's 'background'.

I , however, started to enjoy Barker's writing style from the second part onward: very descriptive and powerful. The use of small, lovely details against the backdrop of the vulgarity that was WW1, serves to make the book all the more moving.

Barker uses a handful of historical figures and a few fictional characters to get into the psychology of the young Englishmen who fought in the trenches of France.



Book1: It is about Siegfried Sasson (soldier and famous poet) who protested the war in 1917, and for this, he was sent to the mental hospital. receiving treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital during WW1, which is ostensibly true, but it gives the wrong impression about who the book is really about. More than Sasson or Robert Graves or Wildfred Owen, all of whom make appearances, this book is really about Dr. William Rivers who was to restore the sanity of the men there confined and return them to duty.



Book2: Central to this second story of Trilogy is Lieutenant Billy Prior, released from treatment for shell shock by Dr. Rivers. Prior is a working-class officer, in Intelligence when he longs to be back at the Front, investigating anti-war pacifists, most of whom he grew up with as a child, bisexual, and the strains of this shatter his psyche and he suffers from memory lapses, blackouts and even a split personality.

The Western Front only makes a physical appearance in the final novel -- this is the trilogy about the mental scars of war, about the evelution of mental health care, about sexuality and national pride. This is my favourite book of the trilogy.



Book3: Final book in the WW1 Trilogy: this focuses most on Rivers, the psychiatrist, as he recalls his experiences in Melanesia working with a tribal healer, mixed in with his daily round of work with distressed soldiers. This alternates with Billy Prior's diary as he recounts his return to trench warfare after his treatment for shell-shock by Rivers.



-- MUST read!!!

I saw this book reviewed on Instagram and decided to order it. It actually 3 books in one so it’s a weighty book of 900 pages. At school I studied the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, so it was interesting to read more about their lives and their experiences of WW1. The book is well written and very descriptive. It’s a heartbreaking read at times, but with some positive sides too. I didn’t feel that the more intimate relationships needed to be written in as much detail, but that is a personal preference. This is why I have 4 stars instead if 5. It was a very interesting read and I would recommend it.

amazing read

I read all three novels in this Regeneration series in one reading event, as though they were one book. And this may be the reason that (a) Books 2 and 3 made such sense and the characters in particular were recognisable, following on immediately from the previous book, and (b) I was ready for the series to be over by the time I got to the end of Book 3.

I ordered this trilogy online following reviews that said Pat Barker knows WWI better than any other living writer. A previous novel I'd read which referenced WWI intrigued me, and I was keen to read more. And indeed Pat Barker is an insightful and intelligent writer, even if her creations aren't always likeable or easy to relate to.

In this "uber novel" (as I thought of the trilogy, reading one book after another as I did), we follow two main characters, Captain Billy Pryor and Dr Will Rivers, as they journey through WWI from their respective positions as active soldier and army psychiatrist. These vantage points give them intersecting but differing points of view, and intersecting but different courses of action. Billy Pryor isn't the most likeable man on the planet, he'd probably be described as "complex" in a modern novel. Dr Rivers is a likeable character, even if he gets a bit fuzzy around the edges at times, and difficult to define. Perhaps both those elements of character are deliberate.

We do get some scenes from the front, some war action, but it isn't as direct or confrontational as I might have imagined it was going to be. It's ghastly, and paints a picture so vivid you can see it in your minds' eye very clearly (at least I could). But this isn't what I'd call a "war novel". It's a novel set in war time, involving people engaged in various activities to do with war, but it's about so many other things than the war.

I'd call this a character-driven (set of) stories. There is action, things do happen, and the pace was good... but it was all about the characters. Not being English, I found many of the references to those quintessential English qualities - the class system being the biggest - quite challenging (to understand, to relate to). I think if you're English, you would relate to this book very differently to if you aren't.

Quite a beautiful series of books in their own way, although I couldn't recommend them to my father, say, because of all the homosexual sex, quite directly described, and alluded to (or at least I think it was being alluded to - that's how oblique the references were!) when it wasn't being graphically brought to life before our very eyes, as it were.

Not a set of stories to rip through in an afternoon, I found it took quite some time to get through all 3 novels, which says something to me about the quality of the writing. I appreciated this series of stories more than I liked it.

This one is going to stick with me for a while. A beautifully written, somber look at the effects of war on those fight in it and their families back home.