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I am always up for reading a novel set in the time period I am writing about and this trilogy was during the Great War I guess historical fiction. As the characters were real and experienced the trenches. This was the best of the three and really gave a feel for the time the soldiers spend in France in the mud. It is certainly a deep exploration into the mind of someone dealing with shell shock.

I had picked this book after seeing it as a Booker prize winner which is a big recommendation in itself. This book is the third and the final part of a trilogy that the author wrote with the backdrop of first world war which i found out only after reading this one!! And i guess that is where i got it wrong because i had not read the first two parts so this book was a slow and laborious read for me... i just could not connect with the story at all...

The story was very confusing for me all through and sometime it became difficult even to understand the sequence from one chapter to the next one! I think if a book has been awarded a Booker which is a single-book prize, then it must have merit as a single book without any knowledge of its earlier parts which somehow did not look like a case here although i may be completely wrong too after seeing the average rating(4+) even on goodreads!

pat barker what the hell. I had to go back to work after realizing it was November 2 1918 and Owen is in the trenches? god. interesting that this one won the booker because I think the first was definitely the best; I would’ve loved more medical and psychology stuff but I liked this one in its own way too and I needed to see them all through

I can't decide if it's a virtue or flaw of Barker's ability that by this last volume of the trilogy of historical novels the most compelling character is the only (among major characters) fully fictional one? Though intellectually engaging and vividly written in passages, the sections describing Rivers's experience among Pacific head-hunting tribes pale in comparison to Billy Prior's story. Though reasonably well intergrated within structure of entire novel, the Rivers's sections seem designed more to make a point than develop a character. Rivers increasingly becomes a device for Barker's "message" re cultural basis of violence, Prior continues to surprise, sometimes in ways consistent with his character, sometimes erratic, but always, I thought, credibly -- in other words, like a genuinely complex, independent person. Though I was never exactly bored with Rivers's story, I found myself much more engaged whenever the novel shifted back to Billy.

Despite the cumulative pleasures of following Prior's character develop over three novels, as others have commented, this final volume does not match the power of the first one, Regeneration, suggesting that her Booker Prize was a kind of mini lifetime achievment award for the entire trilogy. Perhaps. And that's ok with me.

Third and last part of the Regeneration trilogy. Earlier, I read the first book and that made quite a big impression. In this part two characters are followed further, but now at the end of the war (summer and autumn 1918): Dr. Rivers in London, still trying to tinker injured soldiers, and Billy Prior, the asthmatic officer who absolutely wants to get back to the war. Rivers looks back on his time as anthropologist in Polynesia, where he had lived in a community of headhunters become lethargic and lustless by the British ban on head-hunting; precisely the same Great Britain now sent waves of young men to a certain death in Flanders and Northern France; the theme of war as a vitalist force. Prior is one of those men who aware his fate and resolutely going for it, but at the same time struggling with his social background (proletarian) and his sexual orientation (bisexual, described in some fairly explicit scenes). Barker has made of this last part a very rich book, with numerous vistas to a greater whole; but to me it is less successful than the first part, that went much broader and gave more depth to the theme of psychological traumas.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker is the final installment in the Regeneration trilogy, dealing with the horrible physical and psychological impacts of war (WWI) on individuals.

Winner of the Man Booker prize in 1995, the novel reintroduces several familiar characters from the earlier novels (Regeneration, The Eye In the Door).

Still determined to assist others despite his own diminishing good health, psychologist Dr William Rivers persists in his determination to understand and provide effective treatments for 'shell shock' (today we would call it PTSD).

One of his long-term patients, the voraciously active bisexual, Billy Prior, is determined to return to the trench warfare of France, despite Rivers' recommendations, believing that it will be better for him than a safe job in England.

The narrative involving Rivers flashes back frequently (sometimes disruptively) to his experiences as a much younger man with the natives of the South Pacific (Melanesia) and Torres Strait. Telling these tales of primitive rituals and beliefs around life and death, Barker allows her character Rivers to reflect and draw parallels with the culture of death and sacrifice that represents the brutal and relentless warfare in Europe.

The story-line also follows Billy Prior, in the days before he embarks for France, and then, through journal entries and letters, his thoughts and experiences as he battles through the grim days as the war draws towards its end in November 1918.

The language is gritty, frequently coarse and crude, which some might find offensive, but Barker has infused an unapologetic dose of realism and frankness into her prose that is apt and powerful. She has refused to dress up or sanitise anything here.

Some other historical characters from the earlier novels, such as the war poets Sassoon and Owen, make brief appearances again. many of the characters are real historical figures, although the events are mostly fictionalized.

This has been an engaging and rewarding trilogy, and while it might not be the very best of the multitude of novels covering aspects of WWI (Her Privates We by Frederic Manning is better), it was an original and fascinating insight into the issues of mental health associated with war service.

I've enjoyed this trilogy and THE GHOST ROAD - a former Book Prize winner is perhaps my favourite of the three books.

What a powerful end to a wonderful trilogy. I enjoyed this one much more than the second book as it brought the focus back to the characters and I felt the balance of their personal lives and the context of the war was perfect.
I absolutely loved following Billy's journey in this trilogy and found him to be a really well-developed, flawed and believable character.
These books took me on an emotional rollercoaster and I will definitely be revisiting them in the future.

Billy Prior and Rivers were engaging, complex characters whom I loved spending time with. In particular, Prior's sense of humour and Rivers' calm rationality made this trilogy much more enjoyable to read than I was expecting (I'd built them up in my head as Weighty War Tomes).

The clever switch to first person journal entries when we finally got to the Front after 2 and a half books lent an urgency and intimacy. And interspersing these entries with Rivers' feverish memories of the South Pacific islanders and their approach to death meant that the dread kept building and building.

I wasn't as moved by the ending as I expected to be. Which is more to do with my mood than the book, which was very skilfully crafted to be devastating.

'Shotfarfet.'

So mutters a horribly wounded Craiglockhart patient to his family and fiancée, as Rivers stands helplessly in attendance. ... his speech was incomprehensible. The wound to his lower jaw made it difficult to determine whether this represented a deficit in the power of using language, or whether the failure to communicate was entirely or primarily mechanical. He showed some understanding of speech, however ...

He suddenly realizes what the man is saying through his mangled face. "It's not worth it."

Barker has used the following epigraph.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance.

'Roads', Edward Thomas

At some sort of recent moment I developed an urge to rewrite and complete my reviews of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy; and a few days ago, having reached the point where a review of the hauntingly-named finale, The Ghost Road, had become the final step, it occurred to me that this book probably deserved something better than what I'd done for its predecessors – which was to make up reviews consisting of vague memories, a quote or two, and extracts from Wiki articles about the books. (I think the "deserved something better" probably connected to the fact that Ghost Road was the one book of the three that won the Booker when it was published.)

So, I read it again. Got through in two or three evenings. When I finished, wiped the tears out of my eyes and patted myself on the back, murmuring "well that was a good plan."

The Ghost Road is definitely about ghosts. But hardly like Stephen King would approach it.  And there are other sorts or spirits which join that dance down the road: the ghosts of the living, the younger selves of characters which only exist in the memory, before those selves were altered inexorably by the horrors of that War which, failing to "end all wars", instead succeeded monstrously in ending so many selves, millions physically, more millions spiritually, ghosts of both these millions, dancing and marching. They are joined by spirits which inhabit the myths and minds of Melanesian natives, natives which Dr. Rivers had studied years prior with Arthur Maurice Hocart, and which in this novel keep coming back to him, weaving in and out of the narrative. Arthur Maurice Hocart matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford in 1902. He graduated with honors in "Greats", a degree combining Latin, Greek, ancient history, and philosophy. After his graduation in 1906 he spent two years studying psychology and phenomenology at the University of Berlin. With this broad and idiosyncratic training in hand, he was picked by W.H.R. Rivers to accompany him on the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Solomon Islands in 1908. Their ethnographic work on 'Eddystone Island' (today known by its local name of Simbo) and in nearby Roviana, stands as one of the first modern anthropological field projects, and was the inspiration behind sections of Pat Barker's novel The Ghost Road. Some of the data from the expedition appeared in Rivers' History of Melanesian Society in 1914, but most of their work did not make it into print until 1922, when Hocart began to publish a series of articles describing the core material. from Wiki On Eddystone Island, Rivers and Hocart struggle to communicate with these natives, one of them, Njiru, becoming Rivers' ultimate source to his people's myths and legends. His people, by the way, a culture defined by head huntering. Banned now with extreme penalties from taking heads by the colonial British, and astoundingly, as Rivers realizes, decreasing in population, dying out as a culture, marrying less, because all their spiritual traditions connected with this head hunting, and intermeshed with every other aspect of their daily lives. So the ghosts of this culture, the ghosts of the spirits which ruled it, joining the march. One of these spirits is that of Ave, whom Njiru consents to explain to Rivers shortly before he, Rivers, is to depart from the village. "Ave lives in Ysabel. He is both one spirit and many spirits. His mouth is long and filled with the blood of men he devours. Kita and Mateana are nothing beside him because they destroy only the individual, but Ave kills 'all people 'long house'. The broken rainbow belongs to him, and presages both epidemic disease and war. Ave is the destroyer of peoples. And we realize that Ave has ruled the world, metaphorically, at this dreadful time in Rivers' life, producing the broken patients he's been treating, destroying peoples en masse, and now, at the end of the story, conjuring up the destruction of the next apocalypse, the Spanish influenza, Pestilence taking over from War, bringing new recruits to the Danse Macabre. Even the ghosts of the future, futures which will never be for those killed and shattered in the war, are summoned to the road, as are the literary ghosts of Barker's trilogy: Sassoon, Billy Prior, Wilfred Owen, Rivers.


This book is a most deserving winner of the Booker. As one review said, it is "deeply eloquent".



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Previous review: Regeneration
Next review: Memory of Fire I: Genesis
Older review: Invisible Man

Previous library review: The Eye in the Door
Next library review: Another World

The Ghost Road is the third book in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Set in the closing months of World War I, its narrative focuses around Billy Prior, who has been treated for shell shock, and his psychiatrist, William Rivers. As the novel begins, we learn that Prior is strangely oblivious to personal danger. He has already done three tours of the Western Front, and now, having recovered, is intent on returning to the war. His only concern is that he must pass his physical, despite his asthma. Rivers remains in the ward, treating men with broken bodies and broken minds; everything from head wounds to soldiers with psychosomatic symptoms. His patient, Wansbeck, believes his body emits a terrible smell that doesn’t exist. Moffat can’t move his legs although there is nothing wrong with them. To help these men, Rivers experiments with creative treatments, partly inspired by his experiences as an anthropologist in Micronesia ten years before.

Barker’s novel is a curious blend of the real and fictional. William Rivers, a real-life anthropologist and psychiatrist, is best known for having treated Seigfried Sassoon, the war poet, in Craiglockhart War Hospital. The novel’s many digressions to Rivers’ experiences ten years before on Eddystone, Micronesia, are based upon his published papers and notebooks. Sassoon is an extremely minor character in this third novel, although he plays a major role in the first in the series, Regeneration. Wilfred Owen, Sassoon’s friend and poet, also features in several scenes, including his death only a week before Armistice. Robert Ross, former lover to Oscar Wilde, also associates with the group, all of them homosexual, risking arrest. Prior, who is fictional, has formed a bond with these men. His own homosexual urges are peppered with desires for women, including his fiancé, Sarah.

This is a powerful novel. Its focus is not just upon the horrors of war, which is what we have come to expect from this kind of narrative. It has plenty to offer on that score as we follow the misfortunes of many of the characters during the months before Armistice. But it also explores death and ritual, and the role of violence in maintaining civilisation. Skulls are a prominent motif throughout the narrative, whether they appear in an X-Ray examined by Rivers in his ward, or feature as the damaged skulls of soldiers suffering horrible wounds, or appear in the Skull House on Eddystone, Micronesia. In Rivers’ estimation, skulls are either of the spirit or the intellect. Like Hamlet considering the skull of Yorrick, Rivers considers the skull of Homu, taken from the skull house and presented to him by Njiru, his equivalent man of medicine in the island society:

This blown eggshell had contained the only product of the forces of evolution capable of understanding its own origins. But then for Njiru too the skull was sacred not in or of itself, but because it had contained the spirit, the tomate
The Ghost Road is not strictly about war, but about its effects. The skull is merely a container for the spirit in Njiru’s culture, but it also houses the organ of the intellect according to our own. And that organ, subject as it is to shock and injury, is fallible. Like Rivers’ patients, it may tell them that their reality is not what it is. It is subject to the vagaries of memory and of emotional trauma. Rivers, himself, cannot remember a picture of an uncle recalled to him by his sister, whose leg is cut off. But it is from the moment he is slapped on the leg by his father – the association of that slap with the memory of his uncle’s leg – that Rivers traces his difficulty with stuttering. Billy, too, has suffered severe memory lapses following his shell shock.

Barker’s approach to the subject of war is not through its visceral horror, but as an anthropological lens turned against the dominant narrative of Western civilisation. This is achieved through the parallel stories of Rivers’ experiences in Micronesia and Prior’s experiences of war. For instance, Rivers recalls a practice on Eddystone whereby boys who were born out of wedlock were raised by a leading man on the island. He would be treated with all kindness and raised as a son of the family. But when he reached puberty, he would lead a pig to a sacrificial stone, whereat his adoptive father would raise a club and crush the boy’s head. Another skull. Rivers links the custom to the story of Abraham and Israel in Genesis, in which Abraham trusts in God when he believes he is called upon to sacrifice his son. In that story, God provides an alternate sacrifice at the last moment and stays Abraham’s hand. For Rivers, The two events represented the difference between savagery and civilisation.

But the delineation is not so simplistic in the novel. On Eddystone, Emele elects to endure the tradition of Tongo polo, a kind of imprisonment in which she must sit in a crippling position after her husband, Ngea, dies. Traditionally, the only reprieve for a wife in this situation was for the men of the island to return with a head from a neighbouring island. They were head-hunters, and its associated traditions gave the culture of the island vitality. When Rivers comes to the island, the British have stamped out the island’s traditions and have imposed harsh penalties for any who maintain them. The islanders are too afraid to defy British rule. Instead of a head, they kidnap a young boy and bring him back, whole and alive, to release Emele. But without their traditions, the island culture witnessed by Rivers is in decline. It is no longer potent, nor purposeful.

Yet Western Civilisation, as represented by the British in Micronesia which imposes these civilised restrictions, has itself forgotten the mercy and faith represented by the story of Abraham .....

My review is too long for Good Reads. If you want to read the complete review, use the following link:

https://readingproject.neocities.org/...

An incredible finale to an amazing trilogy. This trilogy about the psychological impacts of the Great War is impressive! The Ghost Road and part one: Regeneration were the best. In 'The Eye in the Door' , the character development of Lt. Prior was somewhat 'off'. It was a bit too much to handle. The final installment made up for a lot. The stories of both Prior and Rivers were fascinating. They came together in the end in a powerful and horrifying understanding of the impact of war, and the futilty of (this) war, but also gave a clear understanding of the double standards civilized nations upheld in those days ( and nowadays, no doubt) about what was civilized and what not. This trilogy is highly recommended!