I have conflicting feelings about Remembrance Day, and the public reverence of World War I in both Britain and Australia. I suspect that for most of the 20th century, when the war was a real event in the living memory of many people, that it was probably purely a day of remembrance and reflection. Now, in the age of 9/11 and Iraq and Afghanistan, when it seems so distant as to be entirely mythical, I think our society’s perception of World War I – and, by extension, all wars – has slipped back towards the jingoism and nationalism of the 19th century ruling class who propagated it in the first place. I stood at the moat of the Tower of London last week, amongst crushing crowds, and admired Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Redt for the striking public artwork that it is – but I couldn’t help but feel unsettled by this sanitised, aestheticised depiction of war, which has become the accepted norm.

Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy – which begins with Regeneration, continues in The Eye In The Door and concludes with the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road – is an incredibly important piece of contemporary literature which highlights the real, ugly truth of the war; one of the most important truths being the fact that it had terrible effects on everybody it touched, not just the young men who lost their lives. (And I use the word “lost” rather than “gave” very intentionally.) It’s notable that The Ghost Road is the first novel in the series which actually has scenes set in the war zone that aren’t memories, dreams or flashbacks. The previous two books, especially The Eye in the Door, focused as much on the wives, mothers, pacifists, protesters and wounded as they did on the soldiers and the dead. That’s another side effect of our reverence for veterans and war dead; it marginalises the effects war has on civilians.

From a purely technical standpoint The Ghost Road is certainly the finest book in the trilogy, and a deserving winner of the Booker Prize. It cleanly narrows the scope down to two of the trilogy’s main characters: Dr Rivers, a fictionalised version of the real-life psychologist who treated traumatised soldiers, and Billy Prior, Barker’s fictional working class officer who returns to the front despite an opportunity for a desk role, out of an ineffable sense of duty towards his fellow soldiers. Prior’s experience at the front is contrasted with Rivers’ treatment of the wounded in London, and a surprisingly extensive flashback sequence detailing Rivers’ time as an anthropologist in the South Pacific, which serves as a comparative metaphor about death and its effect on those who remain living. I criticised Barker’s writing style in Regeneration and to a lesser extent The Eye In The Door because much of it involved conversations between two men sitting on opposite sides of a desk. The Ghost Road, however, has a wonderful sense of physical beauty, from a tropical beach in Melanesia to the ruins of an overgrown French village:

A labyrinth of green pathways led from garden to garden, and they slipped from one to another, over broken walls or through splintered fences, skirting bramble-filled craters, brushing down paths overgrown with weeds, with flowers that had seeded themselves and become rank, with overgrown roses that snagged their sleeves and pulled them back. Snails crunched under their boots, nettles stung their hands, cuckoo spit flecked a bare neck, but the secret path wound on.

I’ve always appreciated this trilogy for its brutal and honest depiction of the war, but The Ghost Road is the first of Barker’s books which I actually enjoyed as a novel as well.

It’s not easy (and nor should it be) to criticise the manner in which nations memorialise their war dead; it can easily come off as churlish and cynical. I don’t mean to suggest this day of remembrance should be done away with. But I feel uneasy about a ritual which has begun to take on symbolic, semi-religious overtones, with its symbols (poppies) and incantations (Gallipoli, Anzac, lest we forget). From the earliest days of primary school I’ve had those words drilled into my head, long before I could properly appreciate and understand even the concept of war. During the minute’s silence in November I’d imagine myself in the trenches with rifle and bayonet in hand – not an empathic act of remembrance, but rather a boyish adventure fantasy. I doubt I was the only one. When the symbols and artworks of our remembrance are sanitised, when our politicians repeatedly say things as trite and false as "they died for our freedom", and when the right wing can reposition World War I into a more pleasing arrangement of good vs evil, it’s clear that our society is deeply conflicted about how it wishes to portray this war. Barker’s Regeneration trilogy does us a great service by presenting the era in all its ugly detail; not just the grisly slaughter of the front, but the twisted politics of British imperialism, class warfare and capitalism which led to it. The Regeneration trilogy is a warning that while we must remember, we must not remember selectively.

Because I enjoy just about every book I've ever read about war time, I'd be wrong to not say I liked this one. However, as much I was looking forward to reading another Man Booker Prize winner, I have to say this one didn't do a lot for me.

Only two of the characters were of interest and one of them was a head hunter tribesman. The inclusion of detail about these natives gave the book a perspective one wouldn't get from the typical war story. Rivers, the doctor, and his relationships with them proved to be the thing that most held my interest.

I'm not saying "The Ghost Road" isn't a good story; it is. It's only a three-star book for me, but I recommend it for WWI fans anyway.

I can't say enough good about this trilogy. In an interview with Pat Barker, she described growing up in a home where she saw the lifetime of effects of WWI. Struggling with the effects of a war she didn't live through, her obsession lead to a brilliantly re-imagined world, much of it based on historical records.

She addresses the war from several angles: a brilliant psychologist, women who are freed to work in munitions factories, soldiers faced with moral and class conflicts.

The first book is set in an institution where soldiers are sent for shell-shock. A pacifist is sent there too, to prevent him from speaking out about the war.

The second book addresses the government's fear of traitors in war time: gays and socialists are targeted.

The third continues the story of a few of the characters, who are now returning to the front.

The writing is remarkable, flipping from harsh memories, to forgotten childhood incidents, to the psychologist's anthropology studies in Africa. The therapy sessions were the most engrossing--almost voyeuristic--but they did so much to develop all the characters.

All three books are engaging--interesting plots and characters-- but work on a deeper level too, questioning why nations go to war and how individuals survive it.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker is the culmination of the Regeneration trilogy, which sets out ostensibly to press home to the reader not only the brutal horrors experienced by those who fought on the Western Front during the First World War but also how such appalling conditions affected them psychologically.

Where the first (Regeneration) and second (The Eye In The Door) instalments in the trilogy set out respectively to detail the treatment of those suffering mentally from being on the Western Front and then how one character in particular (Billy Prior) deals with these experiences whilst being back on home soil, The Ghost Road largely alternates between Billy's preparations before returning to France and ultimately going there, as well as those of Dr. Rivers whilst in Melanesia, before he qualified as a doctor.

Dr. Rivers, as is the case throughout the trilogy, acts as the anchor, the 'relatable' character that brings us back to reality and speaks in the same voice we may imagine ourselves using, were we confronted with the same circumstances. This gives balance to the novel and serves as a means of encouraging us to consider such circumstances in a rather more circumspect manner than may otherwise be the case. Hearing the tale of his experiences in Melanesia and in particular, his interaction with the islanders there, informs us of their attitudes to death and how these differ markedly from those of western civilisation. Headhunting for example, forms a key part of their culture and the ban imposed by those attempting to govern the island deprives life of 'almost all it's zest'. The population of the Melanesian island which Rivers and his colleagues inhabit is also influenced by the mythology they attach to the ghosts arising as a result of the deaths of the islanders. Rivers is also influenced by this culture of ghost mythology, to such an extent that he is able to draw strong parallels with the experiences of those he treats. He recalls the ghost sightings experienced by Siegfried Sassoon whilst under his treatment and realises that such hallucinations were a driving force in compelling Sassoon to return to the front. The mythology and culture of the islanders was at times seemingly impenetrable and was the least compelling part of the book. Nonetheless, it was still possible to keep both eyes on the thread of the story whilst reading these sections.

The real hammer that struck my heart on reading this though was inflicted by the prose included in the last third of the book, detailing Billy's experiences following his return to France.

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. Poison’s 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.

Where Regeneration alluded to the experiences of those who had been there, and was all the darker as a result of such allusion, The Ghost Road takes us directly there, in all it's gory, futile, trauma-inducing horror. The thoughts that the book provokes surrounding such events was mainly as a result of this segment of the novel. In between sections detailing the brutal nature of the conflict are contrasting sections which either merely serve to jog us on to contemplation of such brutality, or set the scene beautifully and evocatively.

The sun hung 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 even 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 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.

Such sections force us to cogitate on exactly what these poor bastards experienced. It was simply inhuman and barbaric and on a far greater scale than previously experienced in warfare. It almost brings home how lucky our generation are to simply be allowed to live without constant fear of death hanging over us. And it's in no small part due to Barker's writing.

The Ghost Road can be read as a standalone novel. In fact, the reading experience may benefit all the more from doing so, as this is the most powerful of the trio of works that comprise the Regeneration trilogy. Nonetheless, reading the trilogy back-to-back was a moving and poignant experience. The characters of Dr.Rivers and Billy Prior were those most heavily featured and I really feel I got to know them. Prior was undoubtedly flawed and scarred. He was left bruised and battered, largely as a result of the war but also in part due to his hard working-class existence; a father that could barely communicate with him and a mother that was over-protective. Forced to conceal his sexual peccadilloes from society due to the oppression of the Edwardian age, he battled the demons raging inside his mind both on and off the front. Barker made him an easy character to, if not necessarily like, then certainly empathise with. Dr.Rivers, whilst undoubtedly empathetic towards his patients, was only ever half-aware of the hell that they had been through. By 'aware' I don't mean of course that he knew what they had been through, he obviously did. No, I mean rather that he simply hadn't experienced it and therefore was only ever able to view it through the lens of his own experiences, including those whilst visiting a Melanesian island in his younger years.

In the final section, the story alternates between the experiences of Rivers (treating patients in London) and Prior (struggling to stay alive on the front) and this is done deliberately and to great effect, in a jarring, juxtapositional manner. The tension is ratcheted up throughout these sections, building to a climactic and devastating coda, which leaves the senses and emotions reeling for some time thereafter.

I'll end it there by simply saying that this should be read. Read it as either a standalone or as part of the full trilogy. But it's a book that carries a rare level of importance. Whilst there are those in modern society who gripe that nobody cares enough about their needs, however petty and ultimately meaningless they may be, this book serves as a reminder of the things that we really should be grateful for.

omg so damn good.

This book brings the trilogy - a trio of books highly engaging and deeply important - to a crashing end. Barker returns to her characters Rivers and Prior, now well-loved by her readers, and uses them to explore the messy, stunted end of the war and the human debris it left in its wake as it stumbled to an end.

By splitting the narrative between protagonists, and through time, Barker emphasises the sense of fragmentation that governed the soldiers' war experience. Her individuals are caught between home - the familiar - and the front, a strange place of in-betweenness where normal social codes broke down and new ones sprung up. They negotiate this unstable territory whilst simultaneously coming to terms with experiences of cruelty, violence and needless destruction.

Barker's parallel narrative of River's fieldwork in Melanesia stands beside Prior's stunted diary entries to create a broader picture of how war works within societies; and what purpose, if any, it serves. As Rivers looks back on his time with an unfamiliar society, where he lived as a vulnerable stranger, his patient Prior is thrust back into the line of fire. Their narratives converge, diverge, then finally come back together for Barker's dramatic finish. Gripping.

This novel is set in the last few months of World War I and you can imagine that some of the imagery is harrowing.

William Rivers is the main character in the novel. He was a real person - an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist known for treatment of First World War officers suffering shell shock, so they could be returned to combat. This returning to combat gives him severe pangs of conscience during the novel where he is constantly remembering his time amongst a tribe in the South Pacific, a tribe whose spirit goes into decline once they give up head hunting.

The other main character is Billy Prior who after treatment with William Rivers, decides to return to France and the fighting for a fourth time. He knows he will regret his decision. Billy's decision is based on the fact that he's an officer from the working class and sets an example for others to follow. He has a fiancee in England and writes to her and thinks of her constantly.

Other real people in this fictional novel include the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen. Owen almost made it to the end of the war, but died trying to cross the Sambre-Oise canal, one week before The Armistice.

The third book of the Regeneration trilogy proved unsatisfying on first reading. I'm not sure how that happened, since I felt such a strong connection to the first two novels, and even felt a certain amount of sympathy to one of the main characters, officer Billy Prior and especially to psychiatrist Dr. Rivers, but here, there were parallels to be drawn between Rivers's remembrances of time spent among an island tribe of headhunters and their cult of the dead with the horrors of trench warfare during World War I that would need to be explained to me. As it is, I found this to be a disappointing ending. I'll be rereading the trilogy in future and expect to gain a better understanding of the author's intention by then. Considering this book won the Booker Prize of the three in the Trilogy, I've obviously missed a big piece. Shame, but these things are bound to happen now and again. —December 2011

Central to this novel are two men divided by class and experience, but sharing a mutual respect and empathy. One is Lieutenant Billy Prior, cured of shell shock by famed psychologist Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase in the late summer of 1918. The other is Dr. Rivers himself, consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back to the battlefields and almost certain death. Billy Prior is a working-class man on the rise, a "temporary gentleman," who inhabits a sexual, social, and moral no-man's-land. His sexual encounters with both women and men are tinged with a cynical fatalism that the war has engendered. Still, he is eager to join a fellow Craiglockhart "graduate," the poet Wilfred Owen, in France in time to participate in the great English offensive, the "one last push" intended to redeem all the shining heroism and senseless slaughter that has gone before.

When this was chosen as our next book group books, I admit to a slight sinking feeling in my stomach; this was because the woman whose choice it was always chooses very worthy books, tales with meaning, which, although not a bad thing, can sometimes mean the books are heavy going. Speaking to a couple of other members, my heart sank more as they described a depressing, sordid tale with horrific characters! So, the book arrived today and having just finished one book, I started it, fully expecting to take a full week to plough through it. Imagine my relief when after reading the first page my own thought was that it was entirely readable, so I settle down to read a couple of chapters....here I am 8 hours later..finished.

It is a tale full of the cruelties, barbarity, horrors and sordity of life but told with such humanity and humour to make the telling bearable and the story almost enjoyable, altough there is a sickening inevitability to it too. Based on historic characters, which was in itself a surprise to me, it brings the full horrors of WW1 to the fore with clarity and compassion.

An amazing piece of writing. As Peter Parker for The Times Literary Supplement said, "....Intricately plotted, beautifully written, skilfully assembled, tender, horrifying and funny, it lives on in the imagination..."

More excellent writing from Pat Barker but, for me, didn't have the same resonance or emotional impact as the other books in the trilogy

What becomes of us when all we know is death and killing, and that is taken away?

If that is the question being asked, the answer is not forthcoming. The book ends just before the war does, so we never get to see how any surviving characters would reintegrate into civilian life. From their worries, their neuroses, and what the experiences of warfare have done to them, the answer appears to be "not well." If the experiences of Rivers among the headhunters are instructive, particularly not well.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

Painfully, tragically well written. This book hurt me to my core but I loved every single word. Devastatingly moving. I equal parts wanted to throw the book out the window and hug it close at the end.