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The Regeneration trilogy is Pat Barker's sweeping masterpiece of British historical fiction. 1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper...Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last show more months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation. show lessTags
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The novelists who wrote immediately after the war (or even during it) – Barbusse, Remarque, Manning, even Hemingway – were concerned mostly with getting down the facts: recording the realities of modern warfare before they allowed themselves to forget, before the details became incredible. Writers of subsequent generations cannot write what they know, and they need to do something else – bring some higher assessment of how people, and society, reacted to this cataclysm overall.
Doing this badly, or not even bothering, is what has frustrated me about other modern novels set around 1914–18. It was interesting coming to this one after recently reading Thomas Keneally's The Daughters of Mars, a book in which the two central show more characters are female and yet where there was frustratingly little examination of how the First World War affected men and women and their social and sexual interactions. The main characters in the Regeneration trilogy are all men, but one of the things I loved most about it was its constant attention to sexual politics and the radical shifts that this period saw in wider society.
I had been expecting a constrained, clever-clever novel spun around the literary footnote that was the meeting between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in hospital in 1917. You get that, but there's a lot more here than just lit-historical geekiness. What I wasn't expecting was the delicate infusion of what you might call feminist psycho-sociology: a fascinating exploration of the ways in which men's struggle to deal with trauma is so deeply linked to issues of gender.
Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.
Which is one of the things that 1914–18 indeed did. Barker draws out the irony that women were suddenly forced into much more active roles during the war, while men, shipped off to ‘active’ service, in fact found themselves squatting motionless in ditches for ninety percent of the time, before being routinely slaughtered, as Owen famously put it, like cattle.
The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity […]. No wonder they broke down.
And again:
Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.
This sexual mercuriality is exemplified in the character of Billy Prior, who emerges as a conflicted, damaged antihero in the second book of the trilogy (where Barker just about manages to keep her inclination to melodrama under control). His violent swings between, on the one hand, domestic happiness, and on the other a sort of self-hating sadistic bisexuality (he describes himself memorably after one encounter as a ‘seminal spittoon’), are set against the backdrop of London's brief ‘cult of the clitoris’ scandal.
Prior's girlfriend is awesome. The last thing I expected when I picked this book up was to listen in on a group of Geordie munitionettes telling a joke about a prostitute.
‘He says, “How much is that?” I says, “7/6.” He says, “Hadaway and shite,” and when I come back he'd gone.’
God knows what non-Brit readers make of all this. I am not sure where Pat Barker's from, and I'm too lazy to do even the most rudimentary research, but she nails the dialect, the intonations, the chattiness of these conversations – and from this base she builds a whole social critique into the novel. Some reviewers (I notice) have found this stratum unconvincing, but for me the attempt to examine social change is what lifts this book above its peers. Prior reflects, for instance, that the reaction working-class men have to the trenches is very different from that of the upper class officers – for him and those he knows,
the Front, with its mechanization, its reduction of the individual to a cog in a machine, its blasted landscape, was not a contrast with the life they'd known at home, in Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or the Welsh pit villages, but a nightmarish culmination.
In the third book this bird's eye view of British society zooms out even further, by means of a sustained juxtaposition with the tribal society of a group of Melanesian islanders once studied by WHR Rivers, the (historically real) doctor that has been treating Prior. This narrative technique is so audacious, so weird, that at first I didn't really know what to make of it; mostly, I'm just impressed. And I think it's the right decision. I mean if you're a writer, and you know that one of your characters was an anthropologist who studied tribes in Oceania, then I think you have to pursue this and look for parallels – but to see this in action is quite amazing, it's just so very far, at least at first glance, from the world of trench warfare that you can hardly believe Barker attempted it.
Rivers is indeed the calm, still centre of this trilogy (despite some troubled waters of his own), and the way this figure has been recreated in these pages is for me the most impressive achievement of the books. Barker got the Booker Prize in '95 for The Ghost Road, the third novel; but this is a bit of a catch-up job, like giving Peter Jackson the Oscar for Return of the King when he should have won it for Fellowship. The whole trilogy is great though – psychologically astute, hugely wide-ranging, very readable, a perfect example of how writing about conflict from a century ago can still be a way of telling us things about how we think about each other, and about ourselves, today. show less
Doing this badly, or not even bothering, is what has frustrated me about other modern novels set around 1914–18. It was interesting coming to this one after recently reading Thomas Keneally's The Daughters of Mars, a book in which the two central show more characters are female and yet where there was frustratingly little examination of how the First World War affected men and women and their social and sexual interactions. The main characters in the Regeneration trilogy are all men, but one of the things I loved most about it was its constant attention to sexual politics and the radical shifts that this period saw in wider society.
I had been expecting a constrained, clever-clever novel spun around the literary footnote that was the meeting between Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in hospital in 1917. You get that, but there's a lot more here than just lit-historical geekiness. What I wasn't expecting was the delicate infusion of what you might call feminist psycho-sociology: a fascinating exploration of the ways in which men's struggle to deal with trauma is so deeply linked to issues of gender.
Fear, tenderness – these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.
Which is one of the things that 1914–18 indeed did. Barker draws out the irony that women were suddenly forced into much more active roles during the war, while men, shipped off to ‘active’ service, in fact found themselves squatting motionless in ditches for ninety percent of the time, before being routinely slaughtered, as Owen famously put it, like cattle.
The war that had promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity […]. No wonder they broke down.
And again:
Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.
This sexual mercuriality is exemplified in the character of Billy Prior, who emerges as a conflicted, damaged antihero in the second book of the trilogy (where Barker just about manages to keep her inclination to melodrama under control). His violent swings between, on the one hand, domestic happiness, and on the other a sort of self-hating sadistic bisexuality (he describes himself memorably after one encounter as a ‘seminal spittoon’), are set against the backdrop of London's brief ‘cult of the clitoris’ scandal.
Prior's girlfriend is awesome. The last thing I expected when I picked this book up was to listen in on a group of Geordie munitionettes telling a joke about a prostitute.
‘He says, “How much is that?” I says, “7/6.” He says, “Hadaway and shite,” and when I come back he'd gone.’
God knows what non-Brit readers make of all this. I am not sure where Pat Barker's from, and I'm too lazy to do even the most rudimentary research, but she nails the dialect, the intonations, the chattiness of these conversations – and from this base she builds a whole social critique into the novel. Some reviewers (I notice) have found this stratum unconvincing, but for me the attempt to examine social change is what lifts this book above its peers. Prior reflects, for instance, that the reaction working-class men have to the trenches is very different from that of the upper class officers – for him and those he knows,
the Front, with its mechanization, its reduction of the individual to a cog in a machine, its blasted landscape, was not a contrast with the life they'd known at home, in Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or the Welsh pit villages, but a nightmarish culmination.
In the third book this bird's eye view of British society zooms out even further, by means of a sustained juxtaposition with the tribal society of a group of Melanesian islanders once studied by WHR Rivers, the (historically real) doctor that has been treating Prior. This narrative technique is so audacious, so weird, that at first I didn't really know what to make of it; mostly, I'm just impressed. And I think it's the right decision. I mean if you're a writer, and you know that one of your characters was an anthropologist who studied tribes in Oceania, then I think you have to pursue this and look for parallels – but to see this in action is quite amazing, it's just so very far, at least at first glance, from the world of trench warfare that you can hardly believe Barker attempted it.
Rivers is indeed the calm, still centre of this trilogy (despite some troubled waters of his own), and the way this figure has been recreated in these pages is for me the most impressive achievement of the books. Barker got the Booker Prize in '95 for The Ghost Road, the third novel; but this is a bit of a catch-up job, like giving Peter Jackson the Oscar for Return of the King when he should have won it for Fellowship. The whole trilogy is great though – psychologically astute, hugely wide-ranging, very readable, a perfect example of how writing about conflict from a century ago can still be a way of telling us things about how we think about each other, and about ourselves, today. show less
A powerful trilogy of books about the Great War which argues with itself for and against the patriotism and sacrifice of fighting for King and country. War poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen are fictionalised in the first novel, 'Regeneration', as is Doctor William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. In the second book, 'The Eye in the Door', one of Pat Barker's few original characters, Billy Prior, is working a desk job in London after his return from Craiglockhart, and starts a relationship with a fellow patient. He also gets drawn into the real life incident of a woman accused of trying to assassinate Lloyd George with a poisoned dart, reminding him of his own northern working class background. show more Finally, in 'Ghost Road', Prior is back in France for the end of the war, and Rivers remembers his anthropological field work in Melanesia, following the tribes on Eddystone Island.
'A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. He was this boy's great grandfather.'
Set during 1917-1918, and featuring many real life personalities, from Sassoon to Lewis Carroll, the Regeneration trilogy is a dark, brutally honest account of the First World War and how survivors of the conflict often returned home mentally and physically scarred. Pat Barker has obviously done her research, from Mills bombs (the common name for hand grenades in the First World War) to yellow skin and bleached hair of munitions workers, and she conveys with powerful poignancy the camaraderie of the trenches with dark humour against the despair and upheaval of family life on the home front. However, I found the psychological dialogue and introspection between Rivers and Sassoon, and then Rivers and Prior, to be rather stiff and smug on occasions, and although I don't object to homosexual or bisexual characters, I felt that Prior's bisexuality was seedy and rather too 'trendy' for the era in which the book is set. Prior isn't a pleasant character, but then, I'm not usually the type of reader who requires 'sympathetic' or 'likeable' characters in fiction, or a Happy Ever After at the end of the book. Good job, really, considering the subject! But Prior was little more than a textbook study of shell shock and sexuality, only showing any humanity with Sarah Lumb, his fiancee, and the men in the trenches. Perhaps that was the point.
There is no neat and dramatic story arc to 'Regeneration' - no star-cross'd romance, or future generations delving into the military records at Kew to bookend the action in the trenches, and for that I'm thankful. The First World War is an epic narrative in itself. Granted, Billy Prior could have been less obsessed with sex, and Rivers' reminiscing about his Polynesian island hopping was on a bit of a tangent, but never has an author's writing had such an impact with me - the brutal and bloodthirsty anecdotes of life and death in the trenches saying more about war, and why we should remember the fallen, than all the rest of the psychobabble and subtext put together. One soldier at Craiglockhart was blown into the air by a shell, and landed face first in the decomposing and gas-filled stomach of a German corpse. An officer makes the decision to shoot one of his own men who is slowly drowning in the mud, but the gun jams on the first try. Truly the stuff of nightmares, illustrating how the mind could be destroyed even if the body survived.
Definitely recommended reading, but perhaps only the first and second novels in the trilogy, and then not all in one go! Heavy stuff. show less
'A generation lasted six months, less than that on the Somme, barely twelve weeks. He was this boy's great grandfather.'
Set during 1917-1918, and featuring many real life personalities, from Sassoon to Lewis Carroll, the Regeneration trilogy is a dark, brutally honest account of the First World War and how survivors of the conflict often returned home mentally and physically scarred. Pat Barker has obviously done her research, from Mills bombs (the common name for hand grenades in the First World War) to yellow skin and bleached hair of munitions workers, and she conveys with powerful poignancy the camaraderie of the trenches with dark humour against the despair and upheaval of family life on the home front. However, I found the psychological dialogue and introspection between Rivers and Sassoon, and then Rivers and Prior, to be rather stiff and smug on occasions, and although I don't object to homosexual or bisexual characters, I felt that Prior's bisexuality was seedy and rather too 'trendy' for the era in which the book is set. Prior isn't a pleasant character, but then, I'm not usually the type of reader who requires 'sympathetic' or 'likeable' characters in fiction, or a Happy Ever After at the end of the book. Good job, really, considering the subject! But Prior was little more than a textbook study of shell shock and sexuality, only showing any humanity with Sarah Lumb, his fiancee, and the men in the trenches. Perhaps that was the point.
There is no neat and dramatic story arc to 'Regeneration' - no star-cross'd romance, or future generations delving into the military records at Kew to bookend the action in the trenches, and for that I'm thankful. The First World War is an epic narrative in itself. Granted, Billy Prior could have been less obsessed with sex, and Rivers' reminiscing about his Polynesian island hopping was on a bit of a tangent, but never has an author's writing had such an impact with me - the brutal and bloodthirsty anecdotes of life and death in the trenches saying more about war, and why we should remember the fallen, than all the rest of the psychobabble and subtext put together. One soldier at Craiglockhart was blown into the air by a shell, and landed face first in the decomposing and gas-filled stomach of a German corpse. An officer makes the decision to shoot one of his own men who is slowly drowning in the mud, but the gun jams on the first try. Truly the stuff of nightmares, illustrating how the mind could be destroyed even if the body survived.
Definitely recommended reading, but perhaps only the first and second novels in the trilogy, and then not all in one go! Heavy stuff. show less
REGENERATION
I’ve had this on my shelf for a very long time and imminent emigration to Papua New Guinea brought it rapidly to the front of my to be read list as my books headed into storage, to friends or to the guy who buys books off me on Cambridge market. Very glad to finally get into this trilogy which I first saw on the shelf of a friend of mine In Seoul back in 2006… the same friend that inspired me to get back into novels.
This novel focusses not on the First World War battlefields that we’re so often reminded of but on the effects of those battlefields on the minds of their victims. Dr Rivers, the main character of the book, pioneered our understanding of what is now apparently called combat stress reaction but was then show more known as nothing at all. We more commonly call it shell-shock. The novel is moving, intricate and written with a great deal of insight into the human condition than many I’ve read for a while.
As Rivers engages with each of his patients you begin to learn more about not only the condition but Rivers himself, a remarkable man in many ways. You learn also about the way that British culture at the time responded to these victims of the war who, to all intents and purposes, were perfectly unharmed and yet completely disabled. You encounter men who cannot speak, who cannot see, who cannot walk – all psychosomatic victims of trauma. Rivers’ way of unlocking the cages these men are in is intriguing and reveals a man of great empathy and tireless compassion.
I thought the novel was remarkable on many levels. The characters are, for the most part, real people – Rivers, Sassoon, Owen prominent among them. But the way she brings them to life, investing dry and dusty research on these figures with a real colour and power is worthy of praise. In addition, there are very well-constructed fictional characters in there as well, notably Billy Prior who figures prominently in the next two books of the trilogy. The fact that you are at no point aware of any division between fact and fiction speaks volumes for Barker’s skill in this regard. In addition, I thought the subject matter and her portrayal of the home front of WW1 was rare.
I found the novel to be really well-crafted. I loved the way that paragraphs lent themselves to be re-read for more reflection on exactly what was being described. Unfortunately, I read this on the road so didn’t have time to mark any passages for you here. I suggest instead that you get yourself a copy of the whole trilogy if possible and dive on in.
THE EYE IN THE DOOR
Picking up where Regeneration leaves off, Barker’s second book of the Regeneration trilogy was, I thought, in many ways an improvement on the first. The story of shell-shock deepens and while Regeneration showed the response of the medical profession to this condition, Eye tells the story of society’s response, in particular that of the Army itself.
Billy Prior, one of many patients at the Craiglockhart Hospital of Regeneration now becomes the protagonist. The story follows his resumption of Home service, his developing relationship with Sarah Lumb and his continued treatment by William Rivers who has moved to work at a hospital in London.
Billy’s bisexuality comes to the fore in this novel and, just ten pages in, you’ll have struggled to read his first sexual encounter. While I didn’t care for the descriptive nature of them, I do appreciate Barker creating Billy with such a disposition.
I think a bisexual nature works as a literary device for a character who shell-shock has divided into two extremely different and yet equally destructive personalities. The Eye in the Door develops the depths of Billy’s shell-shock much further than even experienced in his time in Craiglockhart Hospital in Regeneration. He finds that he’s blanking out for hours at a time and coming to only to find that he’s been operating as a completely different character he has no control over… with disturbing consequences.
And bisexuality, like shell-shock, was something that society at the time could not deal with head on. There are more reflections from Billy that hint at what might have given rise to such a predilection. Again though, like shell-shock itself, Billy illustrates that the understanding between the causes and their effects on the psyche are little understood. Billy himself, as with his shell-shock, seems to be helpless to manage the urges that bisexuality brings and, as with shell-shock, doesn’t question them as anything but natural. This kind of writing may spark debates which could potentially divide many a book club of close friends I fear.
I think Eye is more complex than either Regeneration or the final book, The Ghost Road. It’s a very vivid description of the society of Britain at the time and is very valuable for that. It’s a rare glimpse of WW1 from the perspective of the Home Front which I don’t recall ever having been considered in any other WW1 book.
There’s a lot going on here both in terms of the characters and the depths of their experiences and society as a whole and the way that Barker portrays it. I think it would be a good one to re-read. Trouble was, I had to finish it fast to pass on to a friend. I think it deserved more time than I could really give it.
THE GHOST ROAD
The final part of the Regeneration trilogy picks up with Billy Prior getting cleared to return to the front in France and his return. Alongside this narrative unfolds more of W.H.R. Rivers’ story, only this time there’s much more from his anthropology days in Melanesia than in the previous books and Barker cleverly works the Melanesian into Rivers’ day to day work in Britain.
Billy also begins a diary which means that you get more of his inside views on things. There are more disturbingly graphic sex scenes too as he pursues his bisexual tendencies and the shell-shock, at least from Prior’s point of view, seems to take a back seat although there are smaller vignettes of other patients that Rivers treats.
There’s more detail in this book than any other about how Rivers became the doctor he was. As Barker draws on the original notebooks that Rivers wrote his anthropological data in, we see how she has constructed his character and thus depicted his approach to treating the victims of shell-shock. I found that doing this in the third novel of a trilogy was much more satisfying because it meant that by now I was much more interested in where Rivers had come from and what had influenced him than I would have been two books ago when I was just getting to know him. He was, it seems, quite a remarkable man if Barker’s descriptions are even remotely correct.
Again, as with The Eye in the Door, there’s a lot going on here. Barker has a great way of using metaphor to convey themes to the reader which, if you’re not careful, you’ll miss because of their subtlety. The futility of conflict, for example, is depicted ingeniously by the juxtaposition not only of the WW1 debacle that we in the west know so well but by the descriptions of Rivers’ experience with headhunters in the Torres Straits in Melanesia. While on the one hand, western society at the time was condemning the tiny scale of Melanesian conflict as needless and barbaric, it was lauding the valorous demise of an entire generation of men.
It’s only by reflecting carefully on the entire construction of the novel from its grand themes to its details that reveals the richness of her writing. I’m sure it was such ability that earned Barker her Booker Prize. I think such an award is entirely just for a novel which closes out a trilogy which will forever influence how I see not only WW1 but also my nation and its part in it. show less
I’ve had this on my shelf for a very long time and imminent emigration to Papua New Guinea brought it rapidly to the front of my to be read list as my books headed into storage, to friends or to the guy who buys books off me on Cambridge market. Very glad to finally get into this trilogy which I first saw on the shelf of a friend of mine In Seoul back in 2006… the same friend that inspired me to get back into novels.
This novel focusses not on the First World War battlefields that we’re so often reminded of but on the effects of those battlefields on the minds of their victims. Dr Rivers, the main character of the book, pioneered our understanding of what is now apparently called combat stress reaction but was then show more known as nothing at all. We more commonly call it shell-shock. The novel is moving, intricate and written with a great deal of insight into the human condition than many I’ve read for a while.
As Rivers engages with each of his patients you begin to learn more about not only the condition but Rivers himself, a remarkable man in many ways. You learn also about the way that British culture at the time responded to these victims of the war who, to all intents and purposes, were perfectly unharmed and yet completely disabled. You encounter men who cannot speak, who cannot see, who cannot walk – all psychosomatic victims of trauma. Rivers’ way of unlocking the cages these men are in is intriguing and reveals a man of great empathy and tireless compassion.
I thought the novel was remarkable on many levels. The characters are, for the most part, real people – Rivers, Sassoon, Owen prominent among them. But the way she brings them to life, investing dry and dusty research on these figures with a real colour and power is worthy of praise. In addition, there are very well-constructed fictional characters in there as well, notably Billy Prior who figures prominently in the next two books of the trilogy. The fact that you are at no point aware of any division between fact and fiction speaks volumes for Barker’s skill in this regard. In addition, I thought the subject matter and her portrayal of the home front of WW1 was rare.
I found the novel to be really well-crafted. I loved the way that paragraphs lent themselves to be re-read for more reflection on exactly what was being described. Unfortunately, I read this on the road so didn’t have time to mark any passages for you here. I suggest instead that you get yourself a copy of the whole trilogy if possible and dive on in.
THE EYE IN THE DOOR
Picking up where Regeneration leaves off, Barker’s second book of the Regeneration trilogy was, I thought, in many ways an improvement on the first. The story of shell-shock deepens and while Regeneration showed the response of the medical profession to this condition, Eye tells the story of society’s response, in particular that of the Army itself.
Billy Prior, one of many patients at the Craiglockhart Hospital of Regeneration now becomes the protagonist. The story follows his resumption of Home service, his developing relationship with Sarah Lumb and his continued treatment by William Rivers who has moved to work at a hospital in London.
Billy’s bisexuality comes to the fore in this novel and, just ten pages in, you’ll have struggled to read his first sexual encounter. While I didn’t care for the descriptive nature of them, I do appreciate Barker creating Billy with such a disposition.
I think a bisexual nature works as a literary device for a character who shell-shock has divided into two extremely different and yet equally destructive personalities. The Eye in the Door develops the depths of Billy’s shell-shock much further than even experienced in his time in Craiglockhart Hospital in Regeneration. He finds that he’s blanking out for hours at a time and coming to only to find that he’s been operating as a completely different character he has no control over… with disturbing consequences.
And bisexuality, like shell-shock, was something that society at the time could not deal with head on. There are more reflections from Billy that hint at what might have given rise to such a predilection. Again though, like shell-shock itself, Billy illustrates that the understanding between the causes and their effects on the psyche are little understood. Billy himself, as with his shell-shock, seems to be helpless to manage the urges that bisexuality brings and, as with shell-shock, doesn’t question them as anything but natural. This kind of writing may spark debates which could potentially divide many a book club of close friends I fear.
I think Eye is more complex than either Regeneration or the final book, The Ghost Road. It’s a very vivid description of the society of Britain at the time and is very valuable for that. It’s a rare glimpse of WW1 from the perspective of the Home Front which I don’t recall ever having been considered in any other WW1 book.
There’s a lot going on here both in terms of the characters and the depths of their experiences and society as a whole and the way that Barker portrays it. I think it would be a good one to re-read. Trouble was, I had to finish it fast to pass on to a friend. I think it deserved more time than I could really give it.
THE GHOST ROAD
The final part of the Regeneration trilogy picks up with Billy Prior getting cleared to return to the front in France and his return. Alongside this narrative unfolds more of W.H.R. Rivers’ story, only this time there’s much more from his anthropology days in Melanesia than in the previous books and Barker cleverly works the Melanesian into Rivers’ day to day work in Britain.
Billy also begins a diary which means that you get more of his inside views on things. There are more disturbingly graphic sex scenes too as he pursues his bisexual tendencies and the shell-shock, at least from Prior’s point of view, seems to take a back seat although there are smaller vignettes of other patients that Rivers treats.
There’s more detail in this book than any other about how Rivers became the doctor he was. As Barker draws on the original notebooks that Rivers wrote his anthropological data in, we see how she has constructed his character and thus depicted his approach to treating the victims of shell-shock. I found that doing this in the third novel of a trilogy was much more satisfying because it meant that by now I was much more interested in where Rivers had come from and what had influenced him than I would have been two books ago when I was just getting to know him. He was, it seems, quite a remarkable man if Barker’s descriptions are even remotely correct.
Again, as with The Eye in the Door, there’s a lot going on here. Barker has a great way of using metaphor to convey themes to the reader which, if you’re not careful, you’ll miss because of their subtlety. The futility of conflict, for example, is depicted ingeniously by the juxtaposition not only of the WW1 debacle that we in the west know so well but by the descriptions of Rivers’ experience with headhunters in the Torres Straits in Melanesia. While on the one hand, western society at the time was condemning the tiny scale of Melanesian conflict as needless and barbaric, it was lauding the valorous demise of an entire generation of men.
It’s only by reflecting carefully on the entire construction of the novel from its grand themes to its details that reveals the richness of her writing. I’m sure it was such ability that earned Barker her Booker Prize. I think such an award is entirely just for a novel which closes out a trilogy which will forever influence how I see not only WW1 but also my nation and its part in it. show less
An omnibus containing all three books in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, I originally picked this up thinking that I would only read the first in the series. However, her characters and their situations were so brilliantly realised that I had trouble putting the book down until there were no more pages left to read.
Broadly speaking this is about the horrors of war, in particular the trench warfare of the first world war, and how the human mind tries to deal with such horrors. It's more than just a novel about the war though: in order to involve us fully in it, Barker takes us into the heads of her main characters, primarily W.H.R. Rivers, army psychologist and noted anthropologist, and Billy Prior, an officer from a working class show more background. Their struggles with themselves and each other made me care about them and brought home the ultimate message: it's not worth it.
I struggled a little with the middle entry, The Eye in the Door, which was more an examination of society during the war rather than the war itself. It was interesting but less engaging than the first and last books, which dealt more directly with the soliders and Rivers' interaction with them. Overall though, I would highly recommend this as an excellent read, quite apart from its effectiveness as a reminder of how stupid and wasteful war can be. show less
Broadly speaking this is about the horrors of war, in particular the trench warfare of the first world war, and how the human mind tries to deal with such horrors. It's more than just a novel about the war though: in order to involve us fully in it, Barker takes us into the heads of her main characters, primarily W.H.R. Rivers, army psychologist and noted anthropologist, and Billy Prior, an officer from a working class show more background. Their struggles with themselves and each other made me care about them and brought home the ultimate message: it's not worth it.
I struggled a little with the middle entry, The Eye in the Door, which was more an examination of society during the war rather than the war itself. It was interesting but less engaging than the first and last books, which dealt more directly with the soliders and Rivers' interaction with them. Overall though, I would highly recommend this as an excellent read, quite apart from its effectiveness as a reminder of how stupid and wasteful war can be. show less
An interesting premise, & certainly the core of the trilogy sticks to the concepts & issues surrounding the effects of World War One trench warfare had on that particular generation. There's more to this than just an expose or revelation about poor psychiatric care in that era, there's commentary on poetry, young masculinity, paternalism & ideologies. Good, but at times, almost lost in its pathos. Would I recommend this? To those with an interest, most definitely, but to the general reader? Well, if you have an interest in human relationships, their fragility & the effects of war, you'd probably get something worthwhile out of this. It isn't for all readers however, & if you're not sure, I'd advocate leaving alone, as it can be a trudge show more to the uninitiated. show less
Regeneration
The forthcoming anniversary of the Great War should provide some motivation for readers to revisit, or discover this trilogy from the nineties. Acclaimed at the time (topped off by a Booker Prize for the last in the series The Ghost Road) it has been on my 'to read' list for many years. The story centres around an institution for mentally ill soldiers near Edinburgh, and psychologist W H Rivers. A particular focus is his relationship with patient Siegfried Sassoon and the moral conflict between his support for the war and the damage he sees in his patients.
The book sometimes feels a bit lacking in incident and plot mobility, but beautifully draws its characters. Pat Barker's research must have been detailed as her insight show more into the psychological treatment of the time as well as the maladies feels quite authentic. The setting is a really interesting way of exploring the consequences of the war rather than through a traditional battlefield context.
Not always an easy read the book is rewarding and insightful, and cleverly intertwines the main theme of wartime trauma and suffering with explorations of masculinity and the role of women in wartime. show less
The forthcoming anniversary of the Great War should provide some motivation for readers to revisit, or discover this trilogy from the nineties. Acclaimed at the time (topped off by a Booker Prize for the last in the series The Ghost Road) it has been on my 'to read' list for many years. The story centres around an institution for mentally ill soldiers near Edinburgh, and psychologist W H Rivers. A particular focus is his relationship with patient Siegfried Sassoon and the moral conflict between his support for the war and the damage he sees in his patients.
The book sometimes feels a bit lacking in incident and plot mobility, but beautifully draws its characters. Pat Barker's research must have been detailed as her insight show more into the psychological treatment of the time as well as the maladies feels quite authentic. The setting is a really interesting way of exploring the consequences of the war rather than through a traditional battlefield context.
Not always an easy read the book is rewarding and insightful, and cleverly intertwines the main theme of wartime trauma and suffering with explorations of masculinity and the role of women in wartime. show less
Interesting but I'm left somewhat let down by this one, I didn't really engage with anyone and I'm not sure I was supposed to, every time I started to get to know them I was whisked off to someone else's moment in the sun. Lots of homosexual and the odd hetrosexual encounter and sometimes I felt it was a bit more than I wanted or needed for the story, the sex felt somewhat tacked in sometimes, not a smooth flow from events.
A different view of what went on, the first book focuses on the asylum and later things move to London and to a horrible waste of humanity that was the end of the war.
Worth reading but not a story that made me feel for the characters.
A different view of what went on, the first book focuses on the asylum and later things move to London and to a horrible waste of humanity that was the end of the war.
Worth reading but not a story that made me feel for the characters.
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Author Information
31+ Works 21,416 Members
Pat Barker's most recent novel is Another World (FSG, 1999). She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the 1996 Booker Prize. She lives in England. (Bowker Author Biography)
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Contains
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Regeneration Trilogy
- Alternate titles*
- Chong sheng san bu qu
- Original publication date
- 1996 (The Regeneration Trilogy) (The Regeneration Trilogy); 1991 (Regeneration) (Regeneration); 1993 (The Eye in the Door) (The Eye in the Door); 1995 (The Ghost Road) (The Ghost Road)
- People/Characters
- W. H. R. Rivers; Siegfried Sassoon; Wilfred Owen; Billy Prior
- Important places
- Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; London, England, UK
- Important events
- World War I
- Related movies
- Regeneration (1997 | IMDb)
- Dedication
- For David, and in loving memory of Dr. John Hawkins (1922-1987).
- First words
- I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)A long moment, and then the brown face, with its streaks of lime, faded into the light of the daytime ward.
- Blurbers
- Coe, Jonathan; Chisholm, Kate; Barker, Peter; Bailey, Paul; Patterson, Harriet
- Original language
- English
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
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- Reviews
- 15
- Rating
- (4.33)
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- 5 — Chinese, simplified, Dutch, English, Italian, Romanian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 13
- ASINs
- 8
