Regeneration

As a former soldier, the insights on PTSD (not called that then) and how docs approached it. Especially liked seeing two World War I “anti-war” poets featured!

How does it go? So many books, so little time. I can’t believe I am only this year discovering the work of the brilliant Pat Barker. Her writing took me right back to some of the greatest novelists I’ve enjoyed over the years, for the quality of their work, not necessarily for the same themes or style of writing. Among these, I would include Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and John le Carré.

I have made a commitment - from July 2024 to June 2025 - to read at least one novel a month by a woman author… show more.

I loved this book because it is subtle and deeply psychological in its execution and content.

Based on historical characters and events, you may recognize Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, who all became famous writers.

The story is set in a mental hospital during WWI. An array of characters are represented as psychotherapist Rivers works with these “shell shock” victims of the Great War. This framework allows the author to portray many of the brutal and horrific experiences of British soldiers in trench warfare. Along the way, the author exposes many elements of class prejudice and discrimination.

An… show more.

I’ve pressed copies of Pat Barker’s trilogy into the hands of more friends than I can count!

Set during the First World War, the books didn’t transport me to the battlefields of France as I’d expected, but onto a hospital ward for shell shock victims and into the fictionalized life of an amazing therapist who dedicated himself to their humane treatment.

I’d done a lot of research on the subject for a documentary film and knew about the extreme, sometimes horrific treatment these men received. So I was blown away to learn that there was at least one doctor who… show more.

I loved this book for its humanity and compassion, as well as its consideration of the impact of war on the individual combatants and those who choose to try and heal them.

Another wartime novel, this time World War One, it is set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, a real place, with many real, historical characters. Its central relationship is between the poet Siegried Sassoon and his psychiatrist, W. H. R Rivers, a British neurologist who experimented with treating post-traumatic stress disorder. Sassoon’s publicly stated reservations about war echo those of Rivers, who struggles with healing patients only to send… show more.

Pat Barker’s prize-winning 1991 novel is a devastating portrait of the horrors of the trenches of World War One but also a meditation on why men fight, how they suffer and recover, how they live for the men they fight with.

I came to Regeneration young, and to the poems of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon, all of whom appear in Barker’s novel. Sassoon’s declaration against the war is well known, as is his decision to return to it, to be with his men. Owen was killed in action.

There is also a character Barker creates: Billy Prior,… show more.

When I was seventeen, I endlessly reread Robert Graves’s classic memoir Goodbye to All That.

It was the combination of his very low-key description of an ordinary middle-class English childhood with his equally matter-of-fact account of the horrors of the First World War that drew me. Pat Barker’s novel covers the aftermath of that experience, as poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen recover from “shell-shock” (or what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder) at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, under the pioneering care of psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers.

How do you find meaning in ordinary life after suffering through… show more.

Set at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland in 1917 this book is about an army psychiatrist, William Rivers trying his best to find ways to help his traumatised patients.

Included as patients are real people such as WW1 poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and fictional characters like Billy Prior. Deeply distressed by what he’s witnessed, Billy’s only way of communicating is to write things down. As William Rivers works with his patients he becomes increasingly tormented that the success of his treatments will result in the men being sent back to the Front.

I can only imagine how painful… show more.

Regeneration, the first novel of Pat Barker’s widely acclaimed The Regeneration Trilogy, is also a knock-out. In this novel about the psychosomatic effects of trench warfare, the angel of mercy is a psychiatric doctor based on the real-life W.H.R. Rivers, a neurologist and anthropologist holding the military rank of captain. His job at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland is to heal war-traumatized patients so that they could return to the Front. Rivers, conflicted himself about the war, is as duty-bound as his patients, one of whom is Siegfried Sassoon, who later became the heralded war poet. I love… show more.

The first of Pat Barker’s masterful Regeneration Trilogy won the Booker Prize in 1995 for its absorbing and sensitive study of the impact of war on the minds of the men who fought. Based on a real-life relationship between army psychologist W.H.R Rivers and the poet Siegfried Sassoon, Barker really conveys the horrors of war and explores human relationships in this intense book which I found immersive and emotionally draining. I like books that make me feel deeply, sometimes uncomfortably and this dark and graphic study makes a powerful anti-war statement.