The story opens in 1917, as the poet Siegfried Sassoon protests the war in a London newspaper. He is saved from court martial by a military friend who argues successfully for his transfer to the Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, where he comes under the care of psychiatrist, William Rivers. Sassoon is not sick, but he and his doctor both know that the line between sanity and insanity is blurred, especially for a homosexual in wartime. The other patients, however, are gravely wounded in spirit if not body; sometimes they are tormented by uncomprehending parents and wives. Rivers’ efforts to unravel their nightmares, revulsions, mutism, stammering, paralysis, and anorexia begin to shake his own psychic strength and lead him to doubt the rationality–if not the possibility–of restoring them to service—a form of regeneration. Conflict is its own form of insanity. Rivers yearns for his pre-war research in nerve regeneration, the quixotic enterprise that serves as a metaphor for his clinical work.
This eloquent statement against the madness of war is the first novel in a trilogy that includes The Eye in the Door (1993) and finally The Ghost Road (1995), which was awarded the Booker prize. The story is closely based on the publications and annotated literary papers of three real men who met at Craiglockhart in 1917: psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers (1864-1922) and two poets: Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen wrote some of the most moving war poetry and the knowledge that he would be killed in action at age 25 simply adds to the poignant sense of futility.
Pat Barker (b. 1943) probed the tenacious role of class within the military hierarchy, while the society, which the military purports to defend, is rapidly being transformed by the converging lives of domestic servants and aristocrats. Her descriptions are powerful: the yellow skin of women who work in the munitions factory; the surgeon who can no longer bear the sight of blood; the young soldier who cannot eat because his nose and mouth had once been filled with rotting flesh when he was hoist by a grenade into the decomposing belly of a dead German. Rivers helps the men to recall and to understand the origins of their ailments by gentle, patient conversation–a treatment that he described in Lancet, 2 Feb 1918.
Regeneration
Pat Barker
London: Viking Press
New York: Plume
1991, 256 pages)
From the Vault: In these times, certain works of literature seem to be as relevant to us now as when they were published — possibly more relevant than the times that they depict. From the vault of the now closed Literature, Arts and Medicine Database, we will pluck a few items for their power and timeliness.
Web image by National Library of Medicine
