Compared with (previous war novel read) “Empire of the Sun,” this WWI novel actually evades the battlefield, to the benefit of everyone, I suppose. No—this one is more “Best Years of Our Lives” with raunchy sex and modern yearnings for release, than, say, other bloody epics like "Gone with the Wind" or "The War at the End of the World" (I just noticed these are not WWII novels. Still). The men in "The Ghost Road" are basically hydra heads—they converge in their collective destroyed psyche—they all survive that same dire illness: the aftereffects of constant murder & despair. I will be frank, war novels are not my cup o tea. Too much description usually gives me a headache, the panorama is so vast and awesome and the characters can often be thought of as pawns. But this account is semitrue, taking exquisite care with the characterizations, which are rich despite the spare prose. Think of this as an emblem of MASCULINITY of war. Even Prior, a gay character (read: breath of fresh air for this genre), can separate sexuality & camaraderie. This truly has something to say. It's a very rich, enlightening, must read.

phenomenal and horrific - 4 stars because it doesn’t top #1 in the trilogy, booker prize or no. the historical details were fascinating, including rivers’ time with the head hunters; barker, as ever, did a fantastic job on weaving historical fact, fiction, social commentary and masterful characterisation together. there’s no doubt the horrendous ordeal these men were subjected to was inhuman and yet by submerging yourself in their stories it’s clear the forces at work were too huge to be fought against by any individual. barker does justice to the nuances dividing conscientious objectors, civilians, and those who fought, detailing the righteous anger and bitterness that results from a society pushed past its breaking point.

The third and final book in the trilogy follows the perspective of Billy Prior and Dr. Rivers. In the beginning, Billy continues to be a not very likeable character but as the story progresses he becomes more sympathetic, perhaps because he’s so very human, with a mix of good and not so good characteristics that are very much a product (and a rebellion), of the times and expectations placed on him. The conclusion takes us into the last push before the war ends, and it’s harrowing and inevitably, a terribly sad ending, showing with eloquence, what was started in the beginning of the trilogy, the pointlessness of war.

The narrative also follows Dr. River’s memories of time spent with headhunters and while I understand what the author was trying to do with this part of the narrative, using it as a device to show the hypocrisy of the time but also comparing what happens to a society no longer geared towards death to the society very much focused towards it, I just didn’t find that part of the story very engaging. For the most part it seemed as though it didn’t fit.

Nonetheless, this was a very powerful ending to an excellent trilogy. It shows with devastating poignancy, the impact of a patriarchal society on the men raised to be soldiers and sent off to war. When I was a young mom, I had been part of a very conservative church. Very family values oriented. Very patriarchal. I was a young mom to a baby boy I adored. One of the things I noted that was prevalent amongst the families was that it was not ok to comfort the boys when they cried. They were just little guys. 2 years old and younger, not allowed to have comfort if they fell or were distressed and that a mother comforting them was seen as a hindrance to the boy developing into a manly man. It broke my heart to see boys treated that way and I can tell you, it’s not something I adhered to. In fact my son had a doll he loved and slept with every night. I remember catching flack for that, the implication being that he wouldn’t turn into much of a man. This was the patriarchal society in full swing and I bucked that system (and left that church) and my son grew into an amazing man and father. But it’s why these stories resonated with me, and I’m sure they’ll stay with me for a good long while.

The Ghost Road is a puzzling book to rate and review. I have not yet read the first two books of Barker's World War I trilogy -- this being the last of them -- so cannot compare; for now, this review will have to stand alone.
On the one hand, it is a brutal, frank portrayal of World War I. Barker does a truly excellent job at poking it, prying it apart, dissecting the war -- which seems so huge and horrific and chaotic and brutal, a war where no one was good, particularly the good guys (this being the war where England shot boys for getting shell shock). Like the snake Rivers wanted to dissect, she's taken on a nasty job and handled it, the telling of the war, deftly. She succeeds largely because she focuses on a few people in particular; by telling the war through their eyes she can narrow the lens, go deep rather than wide, with mere hints at the breadth of the war: when the light washed over the bridge further down the field of an ongoing battle; when Dr. Rivers moved on to different patients, old names being replaced by new patients. She also did a very good job with her historical fictionalizing of characters like Rivers himself and Wilfred Owen; they became fleshed out but without it seeming gimmicky, as some historical fiction can. I actually liked that she focused a great deal on Prior, an entirely fictionalized character. His (bi)sexuality was at the forefront of too much of the story, I thought; but I suppose he was who he was, and it was a useful, if obvious, character trait to contrast with the war itself and the death that surrounded Prior always, while he was in war and then via memory when he was sent home.
On the other hand, the voice of the novel was difficult to go with. Barker is a fantastic writer, and had she simply maintained a third person narrative the entire book, it would have been fine. Instead, a good chunk of the book that belongs to Prior's life is told via Prior's journal. Unfortunately, Prior's journal voice is exactly the same as Barker's narrator's voice. It was too incredulous to believe that Prior -- whom did not, as far as I can tell, make his living as a writer, like Owen -- wrote in the same lyrical prose that drips with description as Barker, nor that anyone with such writing capabilities would choose to exercise such writing when they're keeping a journal in trenches, on the eve or immediately after battle on the French frontlines. Barker needed to separate her voices, and she didn't, making it seem like the journal was made merely by her adding in dates and changing the "He" to "I." It took me out of a story that I should have been right in the thick of.
I also was never quite sure what to make of Rivers' recollections of Melanesia and his friend/research subject, Nijiru. In another book I might have just accepted that Rivers, surrounded by his war survivor patients, might revert to recollections of an earlier period in his life, but Barker clearly was driven by purpose in writing this novel, and so I felt like I should spend a lot of timing working the two stories into one, never quite succeeding. I interpreted this part of the story as an indictment of British colonialism, the blithe way in which it negligently dismantled entire societies, in part on the basis of curtailing the colonized society's more distasteful habits (headhunting), when England itself was entirely willing to send an entire generation of men to kill another country's generation of men and civilians. It illuminated the bizarre lines that civilization draws about when killing and violence is acceptable or correct. But there was more to the story, so much linked to death, and the spirits, and our living link to the dead and the spirits. And this, too, made sense; Rivers felt somewhat haunted by the men who, by curing, he sent back to the frontlines, desensitized and on the doorstep of death. But the pieces never quite fit. I think, in part, because Barker never really fleshed these characters out; even Nijiru never became a character, was never demystified into a person. I understand that we were viewing this society from the psychoanalyst Rivers' perspective, but it is dull to read always about colonialism, even indictments of it, from the point of the uncomfortable white man, where the actual people subjugated by colonialism are mere puzzle pieces to catalyze thoughts or reactions from the protagonist.
It left me wondering why it was there; to flesh out Rivers, I suppose, a real person who actually did visit and study Melanesia. But did we really need these comparisons to highlight the vagaries and relentless violence of the war? Barker already accomplished that, with her skilled unfolding of the life and death of Hallet, for example. Indeed, perhaps this is what was frustrating. The bread and butter of this book is Barker's ability to unfold the truth of the war and England's class system during wartime, through her introduction and careful development of relatively minor characters, like Hallet and Ada; few Melanesians were given the same treatment.
These are real quibble that I had with the book, but overall Barker really did do a masterful job at cutting through the layers of heroism and whitewashed history to delve into the war -- not merely to indict or demonize it, but simply to lay bare the layers of mental, physical, and emotional tolls that the war as a whole had on society, and the war as made up of individual battles, deaths, sacrifices, had on the individuals who fought in it or were affected by it. And given that we know the ending of the book -- or at least, anyone who knows about Wilfred Owen's life -- it remained a compelling, if terrible, read. Barker leads us on an inexorable march toward the books end, and traps us in futility of hoping we come to the end of the war first, before we come to more deaths. The book is brutal, unforgiving, and relentless; and it is this, perhaps more than anything else in the book, that makes real the bloody slog of those final months.
Despite the book's imperfections, it accomplished what it sought to do. The rest of the trilogy is absolutely on my list of future reads.

Still some of the same characters across the trilogy, quite invested in them. We took a bit of a detour from the First World War to Melanesia, interesting, but I felt it was a bit too much of a detour. Detailed gay sex scenes may not be to everyone's liking.

The Ghost Road, volume three in Pat Barker's WWI trilogy, is somewhat more discursive than the first two volumes and yet, paradoxically, is somewhat more focused: Most of the story involves Lieutenant Billy Prior (prior to whom? one wonders) and W.H.R.Rivers, the psychiatrist/neurologist/anthropologist, but Prior and Rivers wander about in this loosely structured novel. We see Prior living a very low life, Prior saying farewell to his fiancee, Prior frustrating Rivers (his doctor), and Prior back at the front, where he is determined to live and die. And we see Rivers on hospital duty caring for the grievously wounded, Rivers at home looking after his ailing sister, and Rivers, through multiple episodes, living in his past when he did anthropological research in Melanesia. The point of these flashbacks is obvious. The practice of headhunting (or substituting symbols for heads) Rivers studied as a younger man is not that different from the barbarity of WWI, both as the action in the trenches unfolds and as it plays out in his hospital.

The strength of this fine novel lies in its writing: the prose is quick, concrete, and efficient. Barker is absolutely stunning as she explores Prior's voracious bisexuality, most of which, but not all, plays out in his head. Here you have the thing people these days say isn't possible: a person of one gender writing convincingly about a character of another gender. Barker is no trespasser, however. She owns Prior whether he is involved with a male or female partner.

If Prior exemplifies abnormality in the maelstrom of war, crude and cunning, Rivers exemplifies normality, which doesn't do him much good, since a normal man doesn't really know how to adapt to the crises of combat and its consequences.

Perhaps the oddest thing about this book is how relentlessly hopeless it is while remaining interesting and compelling. These characters--including many brilliant adjuncts to Prior and Rivers-- are not destined to emerge intact. There is no good way to either think or fight your way out of a war, and not just WWI. And yet one trusts that Barker will continue to find aspects of life that are riveting even in the face of death. Again, her skill as a pure writer is the secret here; reading her work is having her take over your mind and all your senses without, I might add, overdoing it.

Released from Craiglockhart hospital, Billy Prior is eager to return to the killing fields of France and wonders if he is sane. All is soaked in death - even sex, le petit morte, is vicious and cold; a parody of the slaughter it seeks to nullify. Simple, devastating, beautiful prose. For once the word 'triumph' is fully justified.

The sheer brutal rawness of war is what drips through this incredibly powerful and moving narrative. Combining fictional characters with real ones - most notably the soldier-poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sasoon (who had a greater role in the earlier parts of this trilogy) - Pat Barker's Booker Prize winning novel meticulously reconstructs the dismal mood and bleak atmosphere of the final months of what was one of the most merciless wars of the twentieth century. Seen primarily through the eyes of the fictional working class officer Billy Prior and the real-life psychoanalyst William Rivers the novel offers a non-linear plot structure and multiple narrative voices to capture the down in the trenches experience of the soldiers as well as the deep trauma experienced by the combatants, as observed by those providing psychological support.

"Late August sunlight, the colour of cider, streamed into the room, and he was suddenly seized by sadness, a banal, calendar-dictated sadness, for the past summer and all the summers that were past."

A deep sense of loss permeates the novel - the loss of an entire generation - for the many lives lost and the ones that were inevitably going to be lost as well as the horrors that still awaited the young men headed to the front line.

"...Owen's chances of ending the year deaf, blind, dumb, paralyzed, doubly incontinent, insane, brain-damaged or - if were lucky, just plain dead had enormously increased."

While the brutality and senselessness of combat has been captured very well by Barker - and the glorification of which so memorably warned against by Wilfred Owen in his outstanding poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori - what I found truly haunting about the novel are the every day and the mundane that precedes the violence. The anxious waiting, the memories of calmer days, the truncated romances, the drabness of existence in war enforced deprivation, the shame and pressure to join the war and face almost certain, violent death, the brief peaceful spells where life gave a glimpse or two of what it could be in all its beauty, the rushed and urgent love affairs as time ticked by and death stared in the face, the desperation, the persisting horrors of the English class system, and the feeling of being like helpless rats in a vast, merciless laboratory. Even the living are like walking dead. All through it appears as if "Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making."

That war can torment and torture in myriad ways comes through witnessing the mutilated and shell-shocked patients whom William Rivers treats. Juxtaposed with the war narrative are River's reminiscences of his work during an anthropological expedition in the Solomon islands - where to0 a war, a struggle for existence continues on part of the natives against colonial ravages as well as disease brought by missionaries. There too mysterious spirits preside over life and death and extend their hegemony. Of desperate measures to survive economically and maintain an often snobbish social respectability we learn from brilliantly drawn minor characters like the widow Ada Lumb. Then there are the distraught mothers who to to fraudulent seances to make contact with sons they haven't heard from for a long time or believe to be dead. Billy Prior's everyday notes provide natural and poignant sketches of ordinary men caught up in extraordinary times, being dragged along the sordid sequence of systematic decimation of men, up untill the final moments when they turn into lumps of bloody flesh - their disarming ordinariness making the eventual outcome all the more devastating. No less excruciating are the "...conditions of immobility, passivity and helplessness. Cramped in holes in the ground waiting for the next shell waiting for the next random shell to out you out"- that Barker describes, a particular feature of the claustrophobic trench warfare of WWI with its inhuman use of chemical weapons.

Ghosts of dead people abound in The Ghost Road. The war dead; Ghosts of the dead natives as well as those imagined by the living in Solomon islands; and, the men who are like walking ghosts as they are destined to die soon in the conflict. Overwhelmingly, there seems no sense to it at all. As one of the characters says about the unending continuation of the war: "I think things are actually much worse than you think because there isn't any kind of rational justification left. It's becoming a self-perpetuating system. Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop." The war - "fought and refought over strips of muddy earth," seemed to have forgotten the men who regularly flocked to the frontlines to be decimated.

Barker's prose is brutally impactful and memorable as it approaches the final showdown. Her descriptions of the hellish landscapes of the Western Front are worth quoting:

"The sun on the lip of the horizon, filling the sky. I don't know whether it was the angle or the drifting smoke that half obscured it, but it was enormous. The whole scene looked like something that couldn't be happening on earth, partly the sun, partly the utter lifelessness of the land around us, pitted, scarred, pockmarked with stinking craters and scrawls of barbed wire. Not eve birds, not even carrion feeders. Even the crows have given up. And I stumbled along at the head of the company and I waited for the sun to go down. And the sodding thing didn't. IT ROSE. It wasn't just me. I looked round at the others and I saw the same stupefaction on every face. We hadn't slept for four days. Tiredness like that is another world, just like noise, the noise of a bombardment, isn't like other noise. You see, people wade through it, lean into it. I honestly think that 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."

And:

"Marched all day through utter devastation. Dead horses, unburied men, stench of corruption. Sometimes you look at all this, craters, stinking mud, stagnant water, trees like gigantic burnt matches, and you think the land can't possibly recover. It's poisoned. Poisons dripped into it from rotting men, dead horses, gas. It will, of course. Fifty years from now a farmer'll be ploughing these fields and turn up skulls."

Exploring the utter and savage senselessness of war in which lives of ordinary people are inextricably and devastatingly caught up, Pat Barker's World War I novel is writing of tremendous insight and impact. As haunting as the brutality of conflict are the moments when it briefly ceases or escaped from in thought and dreams. A tour de force.

Bloody brilliant.

The final installment of Pat Barker’s trilogy regains some of the cohesion lost in the second one, partly because it focuses more on Dr. Rivers’ past, and partly because Billy Prior — as repugnant as ever — finally returns to battle. What does it say when the horrors of trench warfare perk up a story?

A chunk of the narration takes place as Dr. Rivers battles influenza and his mind wanders back to the time he spent in Melanesia researching a tribe of head-hunters. Their barbaric thirst for heads yet their willingness to curtail the practice, the white man’s abhorrence of head-hunting yet their willingness to send millions of young men to their deaths, a people destroyed by their refusal to fight wars and a nation destroyed by fighting a war...these contradictions all give a not-too-subtle commentary on the moral ambiguity of 20th century British culture. Frankly, I’d sort of checked out. A little social criticism goes a long way if you’re not distracted by engaging characters. Plus I’d endured too many tasteless sexual encounters between Billy and whoever was handy to really care much about the book. (What on earth would make an author think that coarseness is going to be anything other than repellent? Are there readers so depraved that they don’t mind?? I shudder to think.)

One of the big disappointments with the trilogy is that the characters who were so fascinating in Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, are absent from the second book and make only cameo appearances in the last. Much of the charm (which isn't really the right word) of Regeneration's premise is the fleshing out of historical people and encounters. Instead, Barker took the least appealing character from the first book and focused the rest of the series on him.

The ending, at least, packs a punch. And as a bonus, Wilfred Owen returns for a brief appearance, even if it is only in time to get killed at the Sambre-Oise Canal (he died on November 4, exactly one week before Armistice; his mother received word of his death as church bells rang out victory — that part’s not in the novel). I would definitely read Regeneration and definitely skip the next two. Bizarrely, The Ghost Road is the one that actually won the Booker Award.

Another piece of beautiful writing and historical fiction from Pat Barker. WH Rivers is not a household name anymore (not sure he ever was, although he was well known in his field and a pioneer of Social Anthropology), but I am so glad to have gotten to know him through Regeneration and The Ghost Road.
These books truly "take you there". I am not a writer or a student of history but if I were I would be even more grateful if that is possible. This is just a gorgeous book.

In the third book of the trilogy, we leave the rear to move to the heart of the battle, in the last days before the end of the war, when seemed that everything was over. The author describes life in the trenches, using raw language for the last lethal battles and cynicism - through her heroes - for the quietest moments that give the opportunity to challenge what they are doing.

At the same time, something very interesting, psychiatrist Rivers remembers his journey to the South Pacific where he was hosted by a tribe of headhunters, and so he was able to study their culture that seems to revolve around death. This is what gives a lot of food for thought. Despite our evolution, are we modern humans still in the same class as the most primitive tribes? Is war a result of a culture of death worship similar to the most aggressive tribes?

This parallelization is very interesting as in the philosophy of the most fanatical supporters of the war there was this very idea, that war is something invigorating for a society, that the continuous presence of death, either in the form of losses or by the form of extermination of the enemy keeps people alert and makes them energetic. An idea that continued to exist and led to the creation of fascism and then to the Second World War.

Back to the hospital, doctors and nurses have realized that the war is not going to end, as the Spanish flu is making its appearance and is already beginning to cause great losses and they are called to treat these patients along with the injured of the battles. So the book ends and perhaps the author answers to what I mentioned above about death. Together comes the end of this wonderful trilogy which in the simplest way talks about the consequences of the war and makes very important questions about it, making these three books a very important reading for the First World War.

Στο τρίτο βιβλίο της τριλογίας αφήνουμε τα μετόπισθεν για να μεταφερθούμε στην καρδιά της μάχης, στις τελευταίες μέρες πριν από το τέλος του πολέμου, όταν όλα δείχνουν ότι τα πάντα έχουν τελειώσει. Η συγγραφέας περιγράφει τη ζωή στα χαρακώματα, χρησιμοποιώντας ωμή γλώσσα για τις τελευταίες φονικές μάχες και πολύ κυνισμό - μέσω των ηρώων της - για τις πιο ήσυχες στιγμές που δίνουν την ευκαιρία για να αμφισβητηθεί αυτό που κάνουν.

Παράλληλα γίνεται κάτι πολύ ενδιαφέρον, ο ψυχίατρος Rivers θυμάται το ταξίδι του στο νότιο Ειρηνικό όπου φιλοξενήθηκε από μία φυλή κυνηγών κεφαλών και έτσι μπόρεσε να μελετήσει τον πολιτισμό τους που φαίνεται να περιστρέφεται γύρω από το θάνατο. Αυτό είναι που δίνει πολύ τροφή για σκέψη. Παρά την εξέλιξή μας εμείς οι σύγχρονοι άνθρωποι είμαστε ακόμα στην ίδια κατηγορία με τις πιο πρωτόγονες φυλές; Ο πόλεμος είναι αποτέλεσμα μιας κουλτούρας λατρείας του θανάτου ανάλογης με αυτές τον πιο επιθετικών φύλων;

Αυτός ο παραλληλισμός έχει πολύ ενδιαφέρον καθώς μέσα στη φιλοσοφία των πιο φανατικών υποστηρικτών του πολέμου υπήρχε αυτή ακριβώς η ιδέα, ότι ο πόλεμος είναι κάτι το αναζωογονητικό για μία κοινωνία, ότι η συνεχής παρουσία του θανάτου, είτε με τη μορφή των απωλειών, είτε με τη μορφή της εξόντωσης του εχθρού κρατάει τους ανθρώπους σε εγρήγορση και τους κάνει ενεργητικούς. Μία ιδέα που φυσικά συνέχισε να υπάρχει και οδήγησε στη δημιουργία του φασισμού και στο τέλος στον Δεύτερο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο.

Πίσω στο νοσοκομείο, οι γιατροί και οι νοσοκόμες έχουν καταλάβει ότι ο πόλεμος δεν πρόκειται να τελειώσει, καθώς η ισπανική γρίπη κάνει την εμφάνισή της και ήδη αρχίζει να προκαλεί μεγάλες απώλειες και καλούνται να περιθάλψουν αυτούς τους ασθενείς μαζί με τους τραυματίες των μαχών. Έτσι τελειώνει το βιβλίο και ίσως η συγγραφέας απαντάει σε αυτά που ανέφερα παραπάνω για το θάνατο. Μαζί έρχεται το τέλος αυτής της υπέροχης τριλογίας που με τον πιο απλό τρόπο μιλά για τις συνέπειες του πολέμου και κάνει πολύ σημαντικές ερωτήσεις για αυτόν, κάνοντας αυτά τα τρία βιβλία να είναι πολύ σημαντικά αναγνώσματα για τον πρώτο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο.