Tag Archives: Pat Barker

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

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The Ghost Road was first published in 1995 and it won the Booker prize that year. It is the last book of the Regeneration trilogy.

In it Billy Prior is hoping to be pronounced fit enough to go back to the fighting in France. Although he has been offered a safe job by Charles Manning at the Ministry of Munitions in London he turns it down. Despite having such bad asthma that he is nicknamed the canary by his men, because his chest was affected by the least whiff of poison gas, he is passed fit for the front. He is attached to the 2nd Manchester Regiment along with Wilfred Owen.

Although Billy’s enthusiasm for sex is so rampant that he seems to look for opportunities anywhere and with anyone, he has got engaged to Sarah.

In this book we find out more about Dr. Rivers’s experiences studying tribespeople in Melanesia, before he got the job of piecing shell-shocked soldiers’ minds together again.

I loved the first book Regeneration, the second one The Eye in the Door somehow didn’t quite hit the same mark for me. However with The Ghost Road and the return to the madness of the war, Barker is on terrific form and if you are interested in World War 1 her books are essential reading.

Library Book Sale

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There was another mad withdrawn library book sale at the Adam Smith Theatre today. Surely they will have to re-think the book buying policy soon. There are so many cuts going on in other council departments, especially education. Anyway, I shouldn’t really complain as I bought another 5 fiction books plus a pasta cookery book.

I’ve only read 2 of the books that I bought in last month’s sale though, so the TBR pile is growing at an alarming rate.

This month, I couldn’t say no to:

Not the End of the World – Kate Atkinson
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
Life Class – Pat Barker
April Lady – Georgette Heyer
The Popular Girl – F. Scott Fitzgerald.

No doubt I’ll get around to reading them at some point. At the moment I’m reading Vanity Fair, it’s a very old copy from the second-hand book shop. Unfortunately I didn’t realise how long it is when I started it. It dawned on me as I was turning the pages that they are nearly bible thin and there are 883 pages of them.

I could be some time.

The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

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The Eye in the Door is the second book of The Regeneration Trilogy, and it was the winner of the 1993 Guardian Prize for Fiction. The action has moved from Scotland to England and the storyline centres around Billy Prior, who had been one of Dr. Rivers’s patients at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. Billy is still suffering from black-outs which are happening more and more frequently and are lasting for longer. He has no idea what he is doing during his ‘lost’ hours.

It is now 1918 and Billy (or Prior as Dr. Rivers had addressed him) is now out of the hospital and is working for Intelligence. The work involves tracking down deserters so they can be convicted and jailed.

As it is set in 1918 I suppose that class has to come into it and Billy Prior is that very unusual thing – a working class officer. Dr. Rivers had called the rest of his officer patients by their first names.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Regeneration, I don’t know if it is just because the first book in the trilogy had a lot about Sassoon, Owen and war poetry in it, which I have always been interested in. Sassoon does crop up again towards the end of the book, having been shot in the head by his own NCO who had mistaken him for a German.

Certainly, Pat Barker has again incorporated real events such as Alice Wheeldon’s trial into the story, but a large amount of the book is about Billy Prior’s bisexuality and I don’t find that very interesting. So, it was illegal, but it wasn’t anything new.

Anyway, I’ll be reading the last part of the trilogy The Ghost Road soon.

Regeneration by Pat Barker

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This book was first published in 1991 and I’ve been meaning to read it since then. I’m glad that I got around to it at last as I really enjoyed it although it is quite harrowing in parts.

It is set mainly in Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland in 1917. It seems that just about every book I have picked up recently has a local flavour to it, sometimes to my surprise.

Army psychiatrist William Rivers has the job of treating shell-shocked soldiers and making them fit enough to be sent back to the front. We hear the stories of several of the patients as they are treated but the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen are the most prominent characters.

By 1917 Sassoon had had enough of the war and the stupidity of the politicians and generals. He wrote A Soldier’s Declaration which was going to be read out in the House of Commons which would have meant that it would have ended up in the newspapers which was just what the authorities didn’t want.

Sassoon is packed off to the hospital so that the authorities can say that he has suffered a severe mental breakdown. As the train is about to leave the station the guard blows the whistle which reminds Sassoon of the whistle which was blown in the trenches signalling the beginning of an advance towards the enemy. It had never struck me how horrific such a common-place sound must have been for soldiers at that time.

The pacifists are pressurising him to join forces with them but Sassoon still feels a great loyalty to his men still at the front.

If you are at all interested in World War 1 then you will enjoy reading this book even if you have already read Sassoon’s own book Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

Regeneration has been made into a film which was nominated for a BAFTA award. For some reason they didn’t use the real Craiglockhart in the film, but chose to use Overtoun House which is set in the hills near Dumbarton.
Overtoun
As you can see it is in the Scottish baronial style, which I don’t find at all scary to look at but that might be because I’ve known this house since I was a wee girl, when any family walks up the hills usually took us in that direction.

The real Craiglockhart is now part of Napier University in Edinburgh and I think it must have looked a lot more forbidding and daunting to any poor nerve-racked soldiers.