quippe | Entries tagged with pat barker

The Blurb On The Back:

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care – particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured man, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation …

The Ghost Road is the Booker Prize-winning account of the devastating final months of the First World War.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Pat Barker’s Booker Prize winning conclusion to the REGENERATION TRILOGY is a thoughtful, moving novel that reflects on the duality demanded from the men involved in it. I particularly enjoyed Prior’s diary sections recounting his journey to the Front but Rivers’s experiences in Melanesia were equally moving as he seeks to understand the tribe he’s visiting. I did wish that there had been more scenes with Sarah, although the encounters with her family are effective and give some much needed humour. As with the earlier books, there is a sameness to some of the characters but Prior and Rivers have enough to depth to carry you through to the sad end. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this and will check out Barker’s other World War I novels.

The Blurb On The Back:

London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men – pacifists, objectors, homosexuals – conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before – army psychiatrist William Rivers – Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his soldiers wish him to be …

The Eye In The Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Pat Barker’s sequel to REGENERATION is another deftly written historical novel that again draws on the psychological horrors of World War I but this time combining it with what was happening on the home front, notably drawing on the real life case of Alice Wheeldon (a Suffragette and atheist who was convicted of plotting to murder Lloyd George) and the real Pemberton Billing libel case that alleged there to be 47,000 homosexuals working for Germany to bring down Britain. It’s a beautifully written novel that goes deeper into Prior and Rivers’s psychology and personal history and I thoroughly enjoyed the home front setting, which continues the themes in REGENERATION but gives more of a sense of the conflict within. Like REGENERATION though, I did find some of the characters samey and in building on REGENERATION it also repeats some of the themes although this didn’t affect my enjoyment and I will definitely read the conclusion.

The Blurb On The Back:

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker’s Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.

( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )

The Verdict:

Pat Barker’s historical novel looks at the psychological trauma wrecked by World War I on a generation of young men and the development of techniques to try and treat it. The book does a great job of showing the schisms created by the war in terms of attitudes towards psychological disorders, the class system, the treatment of women and, ultimately, attitudes towards the war itself. There are some horrifying scenes in the book – most notably the scenes where Yealland demonstrates his own, more brutal approach to treatment but there are also moments of tenderness, particularly in a scene where Billy Prior is forced to confront what happened to him on the Front. It’s not a perfect book – at times the male patients do merge into one another, there’s a sameness to all of the point of view characters and there’s (understandably) not much in the way of female characters (with the exception of a love interest for Prior). However, I did find it an immensely moving book that utterly held my attention from beginning to end and I can well see why it is held in such high regard.