Regeneration Trilogy: I read these books in the late 's, after Ghost Road was first published, I was in love with the British war poets of WWI at the time and this fit right in.
I don't remember many details, but these books were great reads, Very athmospheric, accessible and captivating main characters, I suffered with them every step of the way,
P. S. : The movie is also very good, I have returned to this book four years later and listened to it in the Audible version, Four years ago I had sought out the other two
books in the trilogy expecting to read them but in the interim have Become almost exclusively an audible reader.
And now I have those same other two books in the audible versions and believe I have more determination to follow up with them immediately.
My experience in rereading this book did not cause me to change my star rating,
In the intervening four years I have had some significant events in my pseudopacifist life, The primary event has been the inheritance and disbursement ofmillion in inherited income, In two years I will have conscientiously and openly resisted paying approximately/million dollars in federal income tax while redirecting nearly,to meet human needs.
I have participated in the creation of a documentary titled The Pacifist which will hopefully be completed In early.
There is a Facebook group titled The Pacifist with some information about that experience,
I was attracted to this book because the information about it says it has something to do with pacifism, a state of being that fascinates me and that seems like a good goal in life.
I have been a pacifist in my mind for a long time although there is not much of a list of any actual actions I have taken that would brand me as a pacifist.
I have joined and supported some pacifist organizations, been a conscientious objector to military taxes and done some pacifist reading.
I guess I am a fellow traveler but have not been brave enough to get in water over my head.
is the ninetieth anniversary of the War Resisters League sitelinkwww, warresisters. org, one of the oldest pacifist organizations in the U, S.
This book is pathos and humor along with the horror and earlyth century psychology, It is sitelinkCatch and sitelink One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest mixed in with sitelinkJohnny Got His Gun and sitelinkAll Quiet On the Western Front.
And Ill bet you will see a few moments of sitelink Mash as well, It is certainly not as well known as any of these classics, But it is a book about war written by a woman,
It is not a long, dense bookpages although I did bog down on occasion, It is fairly accessible to a wide audience while still having some intellectual challenge, Although Regeneration is fiction, several of the characters are based on real men, two poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and a doctor William Rivers.
The setting is a hospital in Scotland that is being used to treat British officers who have mental disabilities as a result of The Great War in France.
We see men who limbs are paralyzed, whose tongues are muted, whose bodies are contorted, whose dreams terrorize, whose lives have been distorted by the horror of war but who have no physiological damage that can be determined by the best doctors.
Many are the classic “shellshock” that most of us have heard about, That and the poison gas is what has hung on from the First World War for many of us.
And the staggering death toll of men who lived in trenches but occasionally were ordered to stand up and walk into machine gun fire.
The author suggests that the mental disabilities represent the rebellion of the body against the carnage of battle, the destruction of war.
It is the body screaming, “I cant take it anymore!” The men are hospitalized and their evil spirits are exorcised so that they are fit to return to the front line to kill again and to be killed.
The disabilities are the rebellion of the mind to the insanity of life in the No Mans Land of Somme and Ypres Flanders.
The cure is the likely sentence of death, So the irony in this and any other war is that medicine was a tool that sent men back to war and death.
In Regeneration we watch doctors and soldiers struggle with that reality,
“A few shells, a few corpses, and youve lost heart, ”
“How many corpses”
“The point is, . . “
“The point is,last month alone, Youre right, I am obsessed, I never forget it for a second, and neither should you, Robert, if you had any real courage you wouldnt acquiesce the way you do.
”
Graves flushed with anger, “Im sorry you think that, I should hate to think Im a coward, I believe in keeping my word, You agreed to serve, Siegfried, Nobodys asking you to change your opinions, or even to keep quiet about them, but you agreed to serve, and if you want the respect of the kind of people youre trying to influence the Bobbies and the Tommies youve got to be seen to keep your word.
They wont understand if you turn around in the middle of the war and say, “Im sorry, Ive changed my mind.
” To them, thats just bad form, Theyll say youre not behaving like a gentleman and thats the worst thing they can say about anybody, ”
And more to the point:
There are many important themes in the book including class distinctions and the importance of poetry, but the most important one is a moral issue: for what are these men being regenerated The answer is clear: to go back to France and fight again.
Source: sitelink wordpress. com/
Ultimately, the book is about the struggle between war and peace, And arguments are made by the author, interestingly a woman, with certainty:
Obvious choices for the east window: the two bloody bargains on which a civilization claims to be based.
The bargain, Rivers thought, looking at Abraham and Isaac, The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded, If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons.
Only were breaking the bargain, Rivers thought, All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shellholes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.
A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic and unquestioning allegiance, Perhaps the rebellion of the old might count for rather more than the rebellion of the young, Certainly poor Siegfrieds rebellion hadnt counted for much, though he reminded himself that he couldnt know that.
It had been a completely honest action and such actions are seeds carried on the wind, Nobody can tell where, or in what circumstances, they will bear fruit,
How on earth was Siegfried going to manage in France His opposition to the war had not changed.
If anything it had hardened, And to go back to fight, believing as he did, would be to encounter internal divisions far deeper than anything hed experienced before.
Siegfrieds solution was to tell himself that he was going back only to look after some men, but that formula would not survive the realities of France.
However devoted to his mens welfare a platoon commander might be, in the end her is there to kill, and to train other people to kill.
Poetry and pacifism are a strange preparation for that role, Though Siegfried has performed it before, and with conspicuous success, But then his hatred of the war had not been as fully fledged, as articulate, as it was now.
It was a dilemma with one very obvious way out, Rivers knew, though he had never voiced his knowledge, that Sassoon was going back with the intention of being killed.
Partly, no doubt, this was a youthful selfdramatization, Ill show them. Theyll be sorry. But underneath that, Rivers felt there was a genuine and very deep desire for death,
And if death were to be denied Then he might well break down, A real breakdown this time,
Regeneration is the first book in a trilogy and some reviewers have opined that this first book benefits from the further developments in the following books.
I thought this was a fine stand alone book but I do have the two followon books and expect to read them in due course.
I thought that the content of this book was variable, I lost my way a couple of times but to some extent that was my lack of attention, So I had experiences where I could easily put the book down in spite of being in the middle of an episode but there were other instances where I found the book was a page turner.
As I have already mentioned, several of the major characters in this novel were based somewhat on real people.
One main character, Prior, was evidently wholly fiction and I did not find his role to be obvious, There is an Authors Note at the end of the book that starts “Fact and fiction are so interwoven in this book that it may help the reader to know what is historical and what is not.
” It goes on to indicate some of the distinctions, I wondered why this was at the end rather than at the beginning,
There were some five star as well as some three star portions of Regeneration so I take the easy route and award four.
I felt enough commitment to the book to want to read the second and third books in the trilogy, but I am not engrossed enough to move immediately into book two.
Upon finishing the book, my mind was absolutely quiet, almost numb, as if there were too many thoughts to assimilate and I needed to let it all soak in.
Like the patients with their experiences, this book can't be rushed, you can't quickly brush past one passage to go the next.
Each person's thoughts and memories need to marinate, allowing their individual flavors to meld together, in order to enjoy its overall effect.
It is profound and thought provoking, and deserves to be mentioned alongside the best of antiwar literature, sitelinkAll Quiet on the Western Front and sitelinkThe Red Badge of Courage.
Pat Barker's Regeneration, first of her WWI trilogy, goes even deeper into the heart, mind, and souls, of not only the men who fought but of the people affected by the Great War.
"They'd been trained to identify emotional repression, as the essence of manliness, Men who broke down, or cried, or admitted to feeling fear, were sissies, weaklings, failures, Not men. "
The book centers on poet Siegfried Sassoon's stay at Craiglockhart War Hospital, which in part was orchestrated by his friend and fellow poet Robert Graves, to prevent Sassoon from being court marshaled after his declaration against the continued fighting of The Great War.
"I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
" While there for treatment Sassoon befriends and influences another poet, Wilfred Owen, Their friendship may have started out with Wilfred's admiration of Sassoon, Barker lets us see it blossom into mutual respect.
Wilfred Owen
All this while under the care of respected anthropologist and groundbreaking psychiatrist William H.
Rivers. He is a man fighting against the established methods, bringing humane treatment into a world where most did not even believe in shell shock.
You can feel how seeing these courageous men break affected him and how he was tormented with the job of having to 'cure' them in order to return to the front.
Dr, Rivers outside Craiglockhart War Hospital
Barker lets the fact that life brought these men together at this point in history shine through in a simple straight forward manner, using her fictional characters to support and explore other aspects of the war and homefront.
Through Sarah, a munitions factory worker, we see the female point of view and the changes the war afforded them.
Barker's informative author's note, which I recommend not reading until after you've finished the book, brought a deeper level of understanding and an unwanted revelation.
I was disappointed to find out that one doctor actually existed and I really rather wish he's remained fictional.
His harsh treatments of the servicemen under his care and later detailing this in a book gave me a new version of Dr.
Frankenstein, only this one was sadly all too real, The power of the narrative lies with the patients, the doctors, and the War, Who really changed or helped who The lines blurred, some were helped, some not, some temporarily, some die and some helped in surprisingly unexpected ways.
"They women seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space.
"
The narrative jumps around between the many characters, in unconnected scenes, and no character list is provided.
I made a character list, detailing patients and their mental issues and any connections, Some passages dealing with dissecting symbols in dreams or the psychology behind certain elements can be a bit dry.
Religion, homosexuality, and sex are woven through, as well as the importance of father and son relationships, the familial ones and those formed through other circumstances.
There are no battle scenes, everything takes place at or around Craiglockhart War Hospital, the war is seen through the patient's memories trying to unlock the brutality and carnage to the body and mind.
For readers who don't like to keep track of different characters, or like everything cleaned up at the end, this may not be the read for you right now.
This is not a light and breezy read and not to be taken lightly, Barker expects a lot from her reader and doesn't disappoint, a solid/.
painting of Sassoon
Sassoon's Military Cross awarded for gallantry in.