The Ghost Road (original 1995; edition 1995)

Don't make the mistake I did, read the last one first read them in order. Sucked in by the Booker prize! ( )

Brilliant. Enthralling. The story swapping between Captain River's hospital life and Melanesian reminiscences, and Billy Prior's return to the front kept me absolutely captivated. I read much longer than I intended to each night, wanting to know what would happen to these characters who are so beautifully and sympathetically drawn by Pat Barker. My affection for and understanding of them has built and built over the course of the three novels.

I'm sad to have finished the Regeneration trilogy. Time to seek out the rest of Pat Barker's books. ( )

re-read (audiobook) ( )

This is the perfect ending to the Regeneration trilogy. Barker manages perfectly to tie together Rivers' anthropological studies of Malaysian headhunters, for whom the ban on warring with neighboring tribes was a debilitating blow to their culture, with soldiers fighting WWI. The premise in the first book, advanced by Siegfried Sassoon,was that the government was unnecessarily prolonging a war that could be ended with diplomacy. By the end of Ghost Road the war is almost over, but soldiers are forbidden to talk of peace. They are told that the only just end to the war would be the complete destruction of Germany. So, the government is enjoying the war that the headhunters would like to engage in, but the soldiers just do their duty. This is an excellent study of war and psychology with Billy Prior, the lusty, shameless officer representing what? The life wish in opposition to the government's promotion of the death wish? I'm not entirely sure, but this is a trilogy that must be read in its entirety. Then think about the wars that continue, the made up reasons for continuing them, and the effects on the people who fight them and the people who love those fighters. ( )

The third book of the [Regeneration] trilogy unfortunately proved unsatisfying. I'm not sure how that happened, since I felt such a strong connection to the first two books 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' 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. ( )