Beautiful book with lyrical prose. Anyone with any interest in war, psychology, sexuality, literature should read it.

The first in a trilogy of books set in WW1.

Set in Craiglockhart, Corps doctor Rivers is treating WW1 soldiers and officers. They have come to him to be assessed, cured and probably sent back to the front. His most illustrious ward is Sassoon, sent to him after missing a Board. Sassoon is trying to get a court-martial for refusing to fight - not for cowardice or religious grounds, just that the war should be stopped. His friend, Graves, is trying to save him by sending him to Rivers. Sassoon and Rivers forge a friendship that transcends the normal doctor-patient relationship. We also see a young, insecure young Wilfred Owen meeting Sassoon.

Among the other the patients is a young soldier who is literally wasting away because of the trauma of waking up on top of a corpse, now every time he eats, he feels he is taking in rotting flesh. Another character, Pryor (who is present in the other 2 books in the series), arrives unable to speak through a breakdown. Pryor is an interesting man, promoted from the ranks, he is in his own nomansland socially.

This is a very human book set in a very inhuman time, a senseless war. Rivers is a flawed man (he stutters), but this seems to lead him to connect better with his patients. Amongst other topics, Barker opens up the reality of WW1, the trenches, the yellow skin of the amunition girls, pacifists, physical and mental victims as well as a look at treatment methods. This is a strong opening to a great trilogy. ( )

Simply the best book I've read for a long time. I very much want to read the next two in the trilogy, although Regeneration stands perfectly well on it's own.

A fictional depiction of a real event, Barker visits the harrowing effect of the first world war trenches on inmates of a mental facility where eminent war poet Siegfried Sassoon spends time under the care of Dr. Rivers, an overworked psychiatrist with his own demons to battle. Sassoon had publicly decried the continuation of the war, placing him in danger of censure and prison; despite growing sympathy with his position, Rivers must guide Sassoon to the conclusion that he must return to the front, or he will never be able to live with his 'abandonment' of his men.

The characterisation (both major and peripheral) in this book is phenomenal. The handling of the subject of Sassoon's sexuality is both sensitive and era-appropriate; the inclusion of his meeting with the young and impressionable Wilfred Owen just blew me away (Owen is by far my favourite war poet, but I had never really bothered to explore who his influences might have been). Mostly, what grips the reader with this book is the exquisitely drawn realisation that war is an incredibly unnatural thing for a man to face, and the consequences can range from mild depression, to devastating and irreversible neuroses. ( )

A beautifully written novel, the first in Barker's "Regeneration Trilogy" (the third volume won the Booker Prize). Set in a war hospital in Engliand during World War I, the story revolves around several patients and physicians, including the poet Siegfried Sassoon. After serving honorably, Sassoon wrote an anti-war statement, which he asked an MP to read in session. His friend and fellow officer Robert Graves, knowing that Sassoon would be facing a court martial, claims the statement was due to battle fatigue and has him sent to Craiglockhaven for treatment. Dr. Rivers's task is to get Sassoon to agree to return to the front. A fascinating look at the social pressure put on young men during the war, as well as the effects of the war and of the treatment of the psychological scars it caused.

I listened to this one on audio, read wonderfully by Peter Firth, and I will be moving on to the next two volumes, [The Eye in the Door] and [The Ghost Road]. ( )

an amazing book. i've read it, that is to say, listened to it as i can no longer read, perhaps 10 times and just finished it again. the narration by peter firth is outstanding and nuanced.

barker is a master at dialogue and for me that elevates this book to greatness. the characters are finely drawn through description but, for me, even more so by their interchanges. ( )

For whatever reason this wasn't exactly what I was expecting - billed as a 'World War I' novel; it is really the story of a military psychiatric hospital during World War I and attempts to rehabilitate "shell-shock" victims to get them back to the front. It focuses on the internal life of the physician, Dr. Rivers, and his interaction with many patients in particular Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated officer, who is sent to the hospital in lieu of a court-martial for publicly objecting to the War. Apparently, I learned at the end, most of the characters were real people.

The writing was quite good but ultimately I find novels that feature alot of pschoanalysis rather dull. I did enjoy reflections on trench warfare and the interesting and tragic forms in which mental breakdowns occur for example pschosomatic paralysis and mutism. But much of the novel hemmed and hawed vaguely about repressed sexuality, fear, guilt, dream analysis. Frankly, I wanted more action.

I feel as if I will definately go on to read the rest of the trilogy as the writing is fine and there is much critical acclaim. Perhaps with different expectations -- I will enjoy them more. Overall, a worthy read, but a bit bland. ( )

Regeneration is the first book in Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy. Siegfried Sasson was an historical figure, a noted poet and decorated war hero who penned the Soldier’s Declaration - a refusal to continue serving as a British officer based on the moral grounds that the war was a misguided effort contributing to the senseless slaughter of men. Spared a court martial, Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland where the famous psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers was assigned the task of “curing” him from insanity in order to send him back to France and the front line.

The novel, however, is less about Sassoon and more about the psychological effects of war. Barker shows us the shell-shocked and mentally damaged patients through the eyes (mostly) of Dr. Rivers. Billy Prior arrives at the hospital unable to speak. A young soldier by the name of Burns is so traumatized by his experiences he is unable to eat without vomiting. The reader meets yet another soldier who is “paralyzed” even though his spinal cord is physically undamaged. In sensitively revealing the psychic injuries of the characters, Barker asks the essential question: Is war worth the toll it takes on those who sacrifice for it? Even Rivers, who is tasked with restoring men to duty, begins to question the morality of war.

Pat Barker’s strength is in revealing the emotions of her characters without being maudlin. Often she employs dialogue between doctor and patient to reveal the the horror of war and its impact.

Regeneration is a war novel which is set not on the battlefield, but inside the minds of its characters - many of whom are historical figures. I found it to be a slow start - it is a drama that slowly reels the reader into the story. Regeneration is written with compassion and a subtle tension which reveals a sometimes barbaric and disturbing period in the history of psychiatry. Barker writes with honesty and has created a novel which pricks at the conscience.

Regeneration was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 1991.

Recommended for those readers interested in historical fiction, particularly during World War I. Those interested in psychology will also find this novel a fascinating character study. ( )

Asces. Believable characters, sharp dialogoue. Great balance between characterizations and plot. ( )

Regeneration by Pat Barker combines the stories of real and fictional people to create a compelling account of life in a psychiatric hospital for British soldiers during the first world war. Barker uses the true stories of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Owen Wilson, who met and worked together during their stay at Craiglockhart Hospital, Dr. William Rivers their psychiatrist and the fictional Billy Prior. The three soldiers, along with the other patients in the hospital, are all officers who have all suffered nervous breakdowns to varying degrees. It is Dr. Rivers's job to cure them and return the to service, either back to the front in France or to some other work.

The novel is a true ensemble of characters; each takes a significant turn at center stage and each is fascinating in his own way. While there is no single narrative thread to the novel, the psychological profiles of the four main characters that emerge and their struggles to regain a sense of normalcy, to recover from their experience enough to return to it, make for compelling reading. Whether Sassoon has suffered a breakdown is not clear. He is placed in the hospital to save the army from embarrassment. A true war hero, decorated for bravery after saving the lives of many wounded men, he joins with several prominent pacifists and publishes a declaration against the war. Friends of his convince the army that he has had a breakdown and should be treated instead of court martialled. (This will save the army a good deal of embarrassement as well. ) Dr. Rivers treats him, as he does Owen and Prior, through basic Freudian techniques, the talking cure. Nightmares are problems for all of the soldiers in the hospital, so there is plenty of dream analysis in the book, all of it interesting reading.

Many of the officers in Craiglockhart want to be cured so they can go back to the battle, because they want to return to their men whom they feel guilty about leaving and because they have difficulty dealing with civilians who do not understand their experience. Billy Prior meets a local girl during the times he is allowed to leave the hospital and a romance develops. She knows that he is a patient, that he has had some sort of breakdown, but he does not tell her the details. He keeps her innocent of his experience so that her innocence can be his place of refuge. He loves her because she is not a part of the war; but this fact also separates them, prevents him from opening up to her in a way that would make a deeper bond possible.

Dr. Rivers becomes friends with many of his patients and often visits them after they leave the hospital. He is older than his many of his patients, actually old enough to be their fathers which makes it even easier for the doctor-patient relationship to become father-patient. His techniques and his manner with his patients work so well and are so admirable that I began to reconsider my own general skepticism about psychiatry. The men in Craiglockhart are so well looked after that it becomes tempting to read Regeneration as a commentary on how mental illness is viewed in the military today. Sassoon can have a 'breakdown' and return to battle as an officer in charge with no apparent loss of face while in the U.S. today we regularly hear stories about soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who won't seek counseling for fear of repercussions from their superior officers that might end their careers. (How does this attitude contribute to the high suicide rate amoung U.S. soldiers today seems like a questions we're not really allowed to ask if we want to "support the troops.") But towards the end of Regeneration Dr. Rivers goes to a psychiatric hospital in London where he witnesses a different sort of treatment. The Doctor there treats his patients through prolonged sessions of electric shock. A patient who is mute has shock treatments applied to his throat, neck and mouth, until he is forced to speak again. The patient is speaking by the end of the near day-long session, but Dr. Rivers is horrified by the force that has been used as is the reader. The best treatment, that of Dr. Rivers, is reserved for the officer class while the other soldiers are subjected to treatments that would be classified as torture today.

The story continues in The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road which I'll be getting to shortly. I found Regeneration an enjoyable read the same way I found Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy enjoyable. In each series the reader is not rushed down a plot driven road towards a climax. Instead, we get to spend time with a set of characters who make up an enjoyable circle of friends. I'm giving Regeneration by Pat Barker five out of five stars. I'd have consider it a major contender for my top five books of the year. ( )

The horrors of WWI without actually being in the trenches at the front. Barker approaches the war through the interiors of historical figures (Sigfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen, WHR Rivers); the psychological affects of war are more powerfully drawn through the treatment in a Scottish military hospital and through Sasson and Owen's poetry than at the front. ( )

Trin got this as a present for me, telling me no more than that I should read it because I would love it. It's kind of scary how well she knows my tastes. Regeneration is the first of a trilogy of novels set during the Great War. This first novel centers on the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his time at a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, the place where he was sent to 'recover' under the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers after he began raising protests about the war.

There are no words for how much I adored this book. The characters are so perfectly drawn. It amazes me how good a grasp Barker seems to have on Sassoon's personality and motivations, and even those people of whom I hadn't heard before, like Rivers, seem tangible and real. The prose in the book is the real revelation. Simple, stark and bleak, it helps make a two hundred and fifty page long piece feel like an epic in novella form.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the book is Barker's insights into people and class conditions, into how we treat our wounded and our less-than-perfect, into the stupidity and pointlessness and heroism of war. There were a couple of points where I had to actually put the book down and go away and make a cup of tea in order to think over parts of the book.

"You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you say."

Definitely one of the most impressive novels I've read in a long, long time, and highly recommended. ( )

2953 Regeneration, by Pat Barker (read 6 Feb 1997) This is a fictional account of Siegfried Sassoon's time in a psychiatric hospital in 1917, after he issued his declaration against the war, and ends with his leaving the hospital to return to France. If I were a psychiatrist or greatly interested therein this book would have been more interesting. The writing is clean and able and a joy to read, with no annoying quirks like those I put up with recently in Richard Llewellyn or Cormac McCarthy. But the story does not grab one up, and while the reading was smooth nothing seemed very compelling about the story--which has a considerable theme of fact therein. The psychiatrist, Rivers, was the actual one who attended Sassoon, and both Robert Graves and Wilfrid Owen 'appear' in the story. I read the book because it is laid in World War One, but I found no special attraction in the book despite this. ( )

The first book in the trilogy. In 1917, Siegfriend Sassoon, having issued a public declaration against the continuance of the war, is persuaded to attend a Medical Board, and finds himself in a military hospital, Craiglockhart, where his doctor, Rivers, learns much from Sassoon's case, about the nature of treatment, and war, and the ethics of sending back Sassoon to France, where he might be killed. [Dec 2004] ( )

The first one in the trilogy is my favourite. It deals more with the after effects of the trench warfare than the actual event and is set in a hospital in Scotland, where officers are treated for shell shock. The hospital actually existed, as did the psychiatrist in the novel and a few real life war poets like Siegfried Sassoon. An excellent read (if you like the slightly quirky) and it introduced me to the war poems of WWI written by the Brits. ( )

It took me a lot longer to read this book than it should, and it took a lot longer than usual for me to get into it. At first I almost gave up, but I'm glad that I persevered.

The protaganist is a psychiatrist called Rivers, who helps soldiers with war neuroses. Amongst those he tries to help are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

I think I'm more into poetry now than I used to be - much more so. I know how to read it, and what to look for; thanks to Barker's work I'm reminded of the first world war's poets and their work, and I should look them up in the near future.

That said, I found some of Barker's writing - or at least her style - a little abrasive, with so many words in italics. I like to choose for myself how to read a sentence, and coming across words slanted across the page forced my internal voice to speak differently, slowing my pace of reading. Perhaps though that's a good thing. ( )

Outstanding. One of the best WWI things I've ever read. Hard to believe a woman could get in the mind of men like this. This blend of fact and fiction is what I'd like to do. ( )

This is certainly an interesting novel, and disturbing in quite a few places (e.g. the electric shock treatment), but it somehow didn't draw me in emotionally as I might have expected. Maybe because I didn't really find myself warming to any of the characters. So not sure if I will bother with the sequels. Also the front cover of my edition is misleading as it claims this book won the 1995 Booker Prize when it was actually the third in the trilogy that did so. ( )

This is a very thoughtful novel set during the first world war, which philosophises on the effects of mental trauma caused by war - the existence of which beyond "shell-shock" was barely recognised by many psychiatrists at the time. The novel is based on a real-life encounter between Dr Rivers - an army psychologist and the poet Siegfried Sassoon occurring in 1917. It explores the relationship between doctor and reluctant patient, and also the utter madness of many of the front-line decisions in the trenches which resulted in the wholesale massacre of young men, as immortalised by Wilfred Owen, another patient, in his 'Anthem for doomed youth'. ( )

Review for the trilogy
I enjoyed Regengeration, but I could have done without reading the other two, even though TGR won the Booker. Regeneration stands alone on its own well enough. It examines the relationships between various patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh in 1917 and one of the doctors. The patients at that time included Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and for that reason alone it was interesting enough. The other two books continue the story, concentrating on one of the minor characters from the first book, and I was left at the end of the last one going WTF? I don't understand what Barker was trying to achieve with the other two. War is hell? It has horrible effects on people? Well yeah, we get that, but a plot would have been a useful addition.

I was also amused to note that although each book was roughly the same size, the typeface got larger with each one, so that the final book was really about half the length of the first. ( )

This trilogy and Pat Barker more generally were my favorite discoveries from the summer I prepared for my qualifying exams (one of my topics was Contemporary Women Novelists). She manages to weave such an abundance of complex issues together, from the question of why we write poetry and what its effect is on both outer and inner realities to the ethics of treating dissent as an illness. She also has fascinating observations to make about the similarity of the anthropologist's gaze to the analyst's and the prison warden's, and even (in the later books in the series "The Eye in the Door" and "The Ghost Road") about how sexuality becomes the site of tension and scapegoating when a nation is put under the strain of an extended and difficult war. Really a must read for anyone interested in poetry, the World Wars, British history, anthropology or psychotherapy. It should be said, however, that before I read these astonishing novels, I didn't know I was even interested in half these things. ( )

http://rivkat.livejournal.com/123406.... ( )

The first of a trilogy that ends with Ghost Road that won the Booker this year. I liked it. It can be a tricky thing to create a novel and dialogue that involves real people (in this case principally Siegfried Sassoon and his psychiatrist, Dr.Rivers), but I think Barker did it well. The book brings home the horrible, shattering effect of war on individuals. It rings true to me and I have read all of Sassoon's memoirs, much of his poetry and related biographies such as those dealing with Wilfred Owen who met Sassoon for the first time in the hospital. In fact, although I don't know if this is true, I was delighted that Barker has Owen say to Sassoon, when they first meet in the novel, how much he enjoyed Sassoon's poem The Death Bed. This has long been a favourite of mine with, I think, some very fine images:

He dropped and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

...
Rain---he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on dropping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.

an unlikely read for me (i don't tend towards books about world war 1), regeneration turned out to be a heartbreaking and struggling story about the lives of soldiers during this most horrible of wars. focussed on the lives of war poets siegfried sassoon and wilfred owen, pat barker fictionalizes the lives of these very real men during their time in one of the military psychiatric hospitals. the war stories and their resulting psychoses are rending portrayals of what life was like during the heyday of trench warfare - and how a generation of men were destroyed by the aspirations of their nations' leaders. a great and moving read. ( )

In Craiglockhart war hospital, Doctor William Rivers attempts to restore the sanity of officers from World War I. When Siegfried Sassoon publishes his declaration of protest against the war, the authorities decide to have him declared mentally defective and send him to Craiglockhart.