I picked this up at East Avenue Books, opened it when I got home and basically read it for a couple of weeks with breaks for the Scandi FF. During the early stages I speculated on the gender of the author. Great male characters, indicating a male hand? But then we got to the women and, well, how could a chap have written them? Eventually I gave up and looked online, where I found her own comments.

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Union Street (1982), Blow Your House Down (1984) and The Century’s Daughter (1986) were all set in the north-east and published by the feminist imprint Virago. By the end of the decade she was feeling claustrophobic, complaining that she “had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working class, feminist – label, label, label – novelist”. Particularly irksome to her was the recurrent question of whether she could write men – “as though that were some kind of Everest”.

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Her response was to leave Virago and begin work on her name-making Regeneration trilogy, which recentred her reputation in the predominantly male arena of warfare – “or more generally speaking violence, because there’s criminal violence in my work and some domestic violence too, though basically it’s about the trauma of war”. In The Guardian 2019

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I love that disdainful 'as though that were some kind of Everest'. Billy Prior is one of literature's immortal characters, and I wonder if a man could have written him?

Prachtig boek over de Eerste Wereldoorlog en de psychologische effecten.
Rivers, dokter, antropoloog en psycholoog, en diverse soldaten met hun ervaringen passeren de revue.

It’s impossible to know how to begin a review of The Regeneration Trilogy. The trilogy, made up of Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, are among the classics of historical fiction about World War I, much-awarded, much-praised. I want to be articulate and witty about why I loved it and convince people to read it but I could never do it justice.

The trilogy blends real figures with fictional – at the centre of are Billy Prior (fictional) and the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers (real), though war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen also feature heavily – and takes as its themes memory, trauma (both in the trench and at home), the horrors and the futility of war.

I purchased the trilogy eight years ago and have always been ashamed at how long it took me to read it; I am even more ashamed now that I’ve read it. Half-way through the first book, I had the same feeling I had when watching AMC’s The Terror: the sense that I was witnessing the slow march towards tragedy, that everyone I was meeting was dead from the start, that they were already ghosts, marching down a path with Death in the lead and in the rear. That, ultimately, they were nothing but cogs – if even that – in the face of industrial warfare. That they were nothing as the gaping maws of empires consumed vast swathes of Europe.

This might sound obvious in the context of historical fiction – historical fiction is, in effect, a genre of the dead – but rarely is that overwhelming, overmastering sense of doom present.

I was going up with the rations one night and I saw the limbers against the skyline, and the flares going up. What you see every night. Only I seemed to be seeing it from the future. A hundred years from now they’ll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts.

What matters is less what is good or strong or brave but what comfort can be gained. Barker doesn’t hold back – Rivers’s role of healer is at odds with why he is healing his patients. His task is to get them well again so they can become part of the great machine of death again. Sassoon’s protest against the war is questioned by his feelings of loyalty to his men, left in France while he is safe. Prior’s determination to get back to the Front is a question of how sane he is.

What Barker represents is a microcosm of the war. We do not see the Somme or Passchendaele and only one battle is represented on page, we see instead the horrors relived by the survivors and what the future they have.

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who’d been there.

Barker also diverts from the story of the war to talk about the societal effects back home. Women are stepping up into the workforce, women are dealing with bereavement – Sarah Lumb, a “canary girl” works on the munitions and has lost one fiancé to the war already when she meets Prior. We also sees glimpses of women suffering from the ugly effects of war (these glimpses are expanded by Barker in , albeit about an entirely different war). In The Eye in the Door, Barker shows us the pacifists and conscientious objectors trying to end the war through any means necessary by giving us Beattie Roper, a character loosely based off Alice Wheeldon who convicted of trying to murder Lloyd George in 1917.

The paranoia around the need to “snuff out” pacifism is matched by an anxiety around women’s expanding roles and homosexuality – Barker depicts some of Maud Allen’s controversial performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome and Noel Pemberton Billing’s poisonous Black Book. It’s possible to criticise Barker for not centring these stories – but then, it would be a very different book if she had and I don’t believe that one or the other is intrinsically more valuable than the other. I like that Barker provides these glimpses – there’s so much more going on than what we can see but it deepens the world Barker does depict in detail.

Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making. You learned to ration your commitment to them. This moment in this tent already had the quality of remembered experience. Or perhaps he was simply getting old. But then, after all, in trench time he was old. A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks.

The final volume, The Ghost Road, takes us on the last piece of the path with the dead and the living ghosts. Barker is a sparse writer; she does not tell us what grief is but shows it with a few words sketching out a memory. This works in perfect tandem with her narrative – her narrators do not have the time or energy to spare and the bodies pile up, as they do in a war, particularly war on an industrial scale that had never been seen before. The ending is a kick in the teeth. I cried. But I also cry like a little baby about everything relating to World War I so maybe I’m a bad metric.

It would remiss of me to finish this review without mentioning Billy Prior. In some ways, he doesn’t make sense as a character – he does too much! He’s too involved in everything! But as an individual, he feels real and vivid. He’s tremendous character, flawed but intrinsically likeable. I loved him. Nor does his involvement really centre him a story in which he never belonged, for this story is the story of war.

It's rare a book makes you grieve for the characters. This one does.

Returning to this trilogy some 25 years after first reading it, I am reminded how astonishingly good it is. It was The Ghost Road that won the 1995 Booker prize, but each volume in the trilogy stands out as exceptional writing and compulsive reading. It is a First World War novel, but one in which the Western Front is only shown to the reader in the last fifty or so pages of the final novel. What the book does deal with, and incredibly successfully, are the physical and psychological wounds of warfare. By showing us this, the wastefulness of war is made all the more manifest without the overly-gory descriptions of trench warfare.

Regeneration concentrates on Siegfried Sassoon and his time at Craiglockhart hospital. The Eye in the Door tells the story of the fictional Billy Prior and his dissociated personality. The Ghost Road continues Prior's story but now with a greater emphasis on the historical figure of the psychologist and anthropologist W.H. Rivers who is really the main protagonist in all three novels. The Ghost Road interweaves Rivers treatment of Prior and others with his earlier studies of the Torres Straits Islanders, the carnage of the Western Front being interwoven with the islanders treatment of their dead and their deep faith in the Spirit world, something that Rivers and others appear to have lost in the futility of the war.

The trilogy gives the impression of very detailed planning and wordplay. In Regeneration we read of a ganglion of railway tracks, the nerve-centre of a communication network that ultimately takes the soldiers to France. References to The Waste Land, In Parenthesis and various other WW1 poems can be found littered throughout the book. The sex scenes are not for the easily shocked. I see their value in the overall plot more now than I did on the first read.