currently crying at the kitchen table

Wilfred :(

The Regeneration Trilogy: 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.

P.S.: The movie is also very good.

n  I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.n

I have a hypothesis that the muddled history I've internalized of whether The Lord of the Rings is a single work or a trilogy has something to do with the fact that reading Regeneration the way I did meant that its sequels were destined for five stars regardless of intervening time or space or change of tune. Of course, the sequels could have really fucked up to the point that this fate was broken and denied, but in this case, Barker kept up her streak of leaving the reader broken in her wake. A warning, perhaps, but with the subject at hand, to be denied would be the more dangerous route, as that would involve withholding some amount of the truth, a mechanism which must occur if ever one is to convince others to go to war. Not revolution, mind you. Not rebellion, nor mutiny, not even resistance. War.

n  By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.n

I have my doubts about the reception of Barker's other works, especially the ones that also take place in merry old WWI-era England. On the one hand, the writer in the Regeneration trilogy has her finger on its pressure point in the ways that forgo all talk of being 'of the times' that it's nearly impossible for that to have all evaporated by the time the first words began forming for another project. On the other, it'd be a downright shame, as while I've already committed to finding a nice three-in-one edition to reread every ten years or so, I've grown tired of going over the same old territory in various media. Sticking to the same author is hardly adventurous, and I don't think I'll be dislodging R.L. Stein off my most read authors list anytime soon, but many-tomed classes in the vein of Austen and Shakespeare have given me an appreciation for bibliographical evaluations. If Barker isn't worth this endeavor, I don't know who is.

n  I suppose what one should be asking is whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.n

The strange part is that this trilogy doesn't treat with war at its most creative. This isn't Haiti in 1812, or South Sudan in 2011, or anything lending to postcolonial or anti-settler state. You can't even make an argument for genocide, or at least not on any level other than the peripheral. The statement made by one of the characters that poison gas and trenchfare was the worst the twentieth century had to offer was made by a brain firmly in its present, the skill of an author rather than an imagination and thus the sort of hubristic perfection no one alive would ever want to be able to afford. Some things, however, never go out of style: post-traumatic stress disorder, homophobia, biphobia, toxic masculinity. One could make an argument for racism, but as far as fictional ethnography written by a white author goes, Barker was more than willing to hand off the baton to someone who has the right to talk about such things.

n  We have to die, we don't have to worship it.n

At the end, I have to say, I regret the ending. It wasn't a horrible ending, practically the best one, but a better one than that would have been to never end, which is so overwhelmingly selfish a statement that I can only make it after having gone through each of the three books in the order intended. Due to the matter of various prizes and places on esteemed lists, as well as the way in which the writing is constructed, this is one of the more pulled apart series, some reading the first and no other, some heading straight to the third, the oft-neglected second suffering from both middle sibling syndrome and the mystique of the loner piece of literature, without sequel and thus without close compare. Even I wasn't the most orthodox about my road to completion. After leaving the first in the series to itself for three years and rushing through the following two in the last month, I'm nearly drunk with the bone-raking pathos of what I remembered and what I've just experienced. One way of reasoning it out is that the books were there when I needed them. The power of them, though, suggests that I was there when they needed me.

n  A curious, old-fashioned romantic poet, though I don't know why I say that, there's plenty of them about...But then they don't all quote, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' as he did, quite without embarrassment, the other night while I was getting ready for bed. I said very sourly indeed that a more appropriate quotation for this stage of the war might be: 'I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more...' His leap across the room was rather remarkable. He'd slapped a hand across my mouth, and we were staring at each other, dumbstruck, before either of us had time to think, his face chalk-white and I suspect mine as well, each trying to remember what the penalty is for smacking an officer in the gob. Quite possibly death.n

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, although the rules preclude this, 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.

Barker's final volume of the "Great War Trilogy" does an admirable job of bringing the series to its expected but none-the-less tragic conclusion. Although The Ghost Road deserves the five stars I awarded it and the Booker prize, it does so in large measure because of what has come before. Barker has created a trilogy in which each volume points the way forward toward the inevitable ending, but in which the final volume suffuses the whole with a new level of meaning as the reader reflects on the first two volumes with a deepened understanding after (even while!) reading the third. It is difficult to comprehend how we continue to send young men (and now young women too) into the meat grinders of war after war from which even those who return alive and physically whole do not do so undamaged by the experience. It is futile to imagine that literature has the power to end war, but this series of fine novels makes a powerful argument that war is itself insanity and that our jingoistic politicians and those who elect them are doing violence to our society that will affect generations to come. Works such as this are necessary to remind us that the essence of war is not in flags, parades, and uniforms but in the cries of hideously wounded men crying out for their mothers as the world explodes in mud and blood around them. It is important that we remember.

I'm embarrassed to see from my Goodreads posts that I read the first two books of this trilogy nine years ago and didn't get to the third until now. But within two pages I was firmly back in Barker's recreation of the final days of WW I with Billy Prior, William Rivers, Wilfrid Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon, only the first of whom is fictional. I only learned last month on the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day that there were more casualties on that day, even when commanders knew that hostilities would end at 11:00 am, than there were a quarter century later on D-Day. Barker doesn't mention this specifically, but she certainly presents a vivid picture of the last weeks of vicious and pointless fighting. For a large portion of the book, chapters alternate between these scenes and others which record Rivers's memories of his field-work among Melanesian head-hunters ten years earlier. The contrast between their societal structure, sense of honor, treatment of the dead, and belief in afterlife with those of civilized Europeans in 1918 form a good deal of the emotional impact of the book.

I stopped reading through the Booker prize winners a few years ago because there were too many bad experiences compared with the good ones. This one again increases that ratio.

How do you review a book that you found … average?

A book that you suspect will disappear from your memory as soon as you pick up something else to read? My personality goes quite well both with rants about horrid books (Thank you, Coelho, writing a review on The Alchemist was a blast!) and with gushing about books that made me cry and laugh and shiver (yes, Of Human Bondage is still there with me in its entirety, long after closing the book with a sigh of sadness that the 700 page journey is over).

But a historical novel on World War I, with fictional characters I can’t really relate to? Well, I have to admit that I made a mistake. I chose it for winning the Booker Prize (and it happened to fall into my hands), and I was not aware it was the third part in a trilogy. It can certainly be read as a standalone, but I might have a different opinion if I had read the other two in the series as well.

My problem with it is on a different level, though. I love history, and I love literary fiction and poetry. I completely understand why a contemporary author would embark on the endeavour to WRITE historical fiction, to lose herself in historical documents, primary sources, objects, witness reports, to reconstruct an era through thorough research. I understand Pat Barker. But this kind of novel always leaves me with the feeling that it must be more rewarding to write it than to read it. For I am not very interested in Pat Barker’s reconstructions and relationships with historical characters. I want to go on that journey first hand myself, not explore it in the language of today, through the lense of another history teacher. I want to reread The Poems Of Wilfred Owen, to get to know Sassoon better, or add another Remarque experience to my favourite All Quiet on the Western Front, or even reread sections of the splendid brick of Churchill’s The World Crisis, 1911-1918. I want to read all the fiction that was produced back then, adding nuance and understanding through the voices of that time, as I have so often done before, Of Human Bondage and The Voyage Out forever on my best-of-the-best shelf ever since, joining hands with Hemingway’s and other brilliant authors’ war experiences.

So it is maybe my own fault that I find this rather … uninspiring. It is a solid novel, for sure. But to paraphrase the most significant quote in the story, it is already a ghost in the making in my literary world.

The first Pat Barker book I read was Regeneration and although, I didn’t mind it, I wasn’t to keen on reading the other books of the trilogy. The Ghost Road forms the third part (the second volume is called The Eye in the Door) of these chronicles dealing with the first World War and the famous people who fought in it.

This time round the main focus is on the fictional soldier Billy Prior and real life psychoanalyst W.H.R. Rivers. Here Billy is recovering from his nervous breakdowns caused by the war and wants to return to the front, he also is gay and is forced into a relationship he doesn’t really want to commit to. Meanwhile Rivers is dedicating a lot of time to his patients (Billy is one of them) and occasionally drifts back to his expedition to the Torres Straits where he encountered a life changing adventure which influenced his medical career ( this is where the ghost of the title crops up. It is also 1918 and there is a sense of unease amongst both soldiers and Rivers.

Barker does not focus on battles but touches amongst other topics such as madness and sexuality, however I felt that the most interesting parts of the book dealt with Rivers experience with shell-shocked soldiers or the rituals of the tribe he meets in the Torres Straits. Whenever we approached Billy and his sexual dilemmas I admit that I did feel restless at points.

The Ghost in the Road does focus on complex issues and does avoid the typical trappings of war literature ( bar the last part) but I could not engage myself fully. Could it be because the topic itself does not interest me too much? or was it the wrong time? I don’t know but I am curious to see if the other two books are included in this list as I feel that a re reading of Regeneration and The Eye in the Door could help me appreciate the trilogy a bit more.

A powerful and moving exploration of WWI's devastation seen through the eyes of a psychiatrist ( W.H. Rivers, an actual doctor) who must cure shell shocked soldiers only to see them return to the Front. I particulary enjoyed the sections on his memories of a South Pacific tribe of cannibals who needed their death rituals in order to live life.

My love of the war poets is due to this fantastic series, I think my world changed when I first read Wilfred Owen’s poems.