Sharp Words

I hadn’t intended to review anything during November, being too busy with NaNoWriMo of course. But my reading of Pat Barker’s award-winning Regeneration trilogy has coincided, quite by chance, with the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I – the Great War, the war to end all wars (if only) – and it seemed apropos to discuss it on my blog.

9 out of 10

First, an anecdote of sorts. I bought The Ghost Road a couple of weeks ago from a charity book shop, because I wanted to read more Booker winners and this had been recommended. The other parts of the trilogy were next to it on the shelf, but I ignored them. I read The Ghost Road and only then realised that it was the last part of the trilogy. As soon as I got a chance, I went back to the book shop and bought the other two parts. And in the first one, Regeneration were newspaper clippings about The Ghost Road’s Booker win, which were really interesting to read in the context of 13 years later.

The trilogy is of course set during World War I – specifically, in its last year and a bit. The first part, Regeneration is a fictional account of the poet Siegfried Sassoon’s stay at Craiglockhart, a psychiatric hospital in Scotland where soldiers were treated for shell-shock and other psychological effects of the war, and his relationship with William Rivers, anthropologist and psychiatrist. As well as these two central characters, there are an awful lot of other historical characters and events in the story – Wilfred Owen, who was to become another well-known poet despite his death in 1918, features heavily, and the novel describes the influence Sassoon had on Owen’s poetry, direct and indirect.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out these hasty orisons.

From Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Sassoon had been sent to Craiglockhart following his Soldier’s Declaration, a statement of ‘an act of wilful defiance of military authority’, which stated that he believed that the war was ‘being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’. After this was read out in Parliament, he was lucky (or, the novel implies, he was helped to be lucky) that he was diagnosed as suffering mental illness instead of charged as a traitor. It was Rivers’ job both to ascertain Sassoon’s mental health and to convince him to return to fight in France, and it’s the contrasting and conflicting opinions and attitudes of these two men that provides the focus to the novel and to a very intriguing discourse on the rightness of war and of how attitudes to, for example conscientious objectors, have changed in the past years.

The second novel of the trilogy, The Eye in the Door focuses on Billy Prior, a minor (and fictional) character from Regeneration. He has been given a job in the Ministry of Munitions; even though Rivers has judged him mentally fit, his asthma has prevented him from returning to France. However, as he becomes involved in a one-man conspiracy to prove the innocence of a woman convicted of attempting to murder Lloyd George – a woman he knew in childhood – his psychoses resurface and he finds himself losing hours with no knowledge of what happened. Again, Rivers is a central character. Now working in London, he tries to help Billy with his problems; and they both have to deal with their demons against a backdrop of suspicion (particularly towards any who might be homosexual or a pacifist – it’s hard to tell which might have been worse).

The third novel, The Ghost Road, is the one which won the Booker prize in 1995. It’s a two-hander: we see Billy’s return to the fighting in France both in third-person and through diary entries, and we see Rivers back in London, remembering a childhood which included Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) as a family friend, and also his anthropological studies amongst the headhunters of Melanesia.

Whereas in the previous two novels, we were at one remove from the war (even if we saw its direct results and heard accounts of terrible, frightening things), in The Ghost Road we are eventually plunged directly into it, and see the horrors at first-hand. There’s perhaps less of the philosophy of war than in the other two books, and more of the nitty-gritty, but this doesn’t make it any less a fantastic book. (In fact, since this one did win a Booker, we should probably assume that it’s more of one.)

For me, these are some of the most interesting and powerful books I’ve read in a very long time. They touch on so many subjects – war, death, class, sexuality, madness, psychology, philosophy, poetry, friendship, love, cultural differences, gender differences – giving each its due. They are well-researched and evoked for me a strong sense of time and place, something that I always strongly appreciate in historical novels.

They also made me dig out my poetry books in search of World War I poets such as Rupert Brooke and Isaac Rosenburg as well as Sassoon and Owen, and I found half-remembered poems and learnt them – and suffered with them – all over again.

I cannot recommend this trilogy enough, with just a caveat about the pretty graphic sex scenes and descriptions of war horrors, if you’re of a squeamish nature. But if you have any interest in twentieth-century and/or military history, or in early psychiatry, or in poetry… then read these novels.

Men jostle and climb to meet the bristling fire.
Lines of grey, muttering face, maked with fear,
They leave their trenches, going over the top,
While time ticks blank and busy on their wrists,
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fists,
Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop!

From Attack by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

And to finish, another anecdote. I had of course heard of the poets mentioned plenty of times before, and was pretty familiar with Owen’s work at least. But until reading Regeneration, I didn’t know that Sassoon had been involved in the writing of Anthem for Doomed Youth (to the extent of even changing its title). But the day after I read Regeneration, this article about Wilfred Owen appeared on the BBC News site – it discusses Siegfried Sassoon’s direct influence on the poetry of Wilfred Owen. There’s synchronicity for you!