Pat Barker’s three volume Regeneration series of novels are set at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, a real place, in Scotland, in 1917, where William HR Rivers, a real psychiatrist and anthropologist, is treating British soldiers sent home from the front for the newly-described entity of “shell shock,” what we would come to know as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
The Eye in the Door, the second in the trilogy, turns its attention to the Home Front, and more specifically describes the rampant paranoia during the war, as the government targets two groups: homosexuals and “conchies,” or conscientious objectors. While it too is tethered to historical fact, it is more of a fictional narrative concentrating on the state-sponsored witch-hunt, refracted through the story of Billy Prior, a patient of Dr. Rivers. Billy is bisexual; he also grew up with childhood friends who became pacifists and objectors, and who may or may not have been involved in a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, and so he moves in both of these marginalized and persecuted worlds. He also has fallen in love with a woman whom he wants to marry. During his ongoing treatment of Billy, Rivers confronts his own repressed childhood memories.
The Regeneration Trilogy has much to recommend it in considering works of literature in the area of medical humanities. First—and obviously—it is about the psychological damage suffered by young men pressed into military service during wartime, and the way in which medicine approaches their resultant illness with the tools it has at hand. Each one of these soldiers has a story, each one has a trauma, and there are no pharmacological options. Much like Freud (a contemporary whose work was well-known to him), Rivers felt that the way to treat the shell-shocked soldiers was a “talking cure,” making the traumatic events unrepressed and having the patients recognize and address them. The stories of the soldiers’ treatments are engaging, Rivers’ warmth and compassion for his charges is unmistakable, and the nature of physician-patient interaction during treatment is explored.
Barker also poses questions about gender; more specifically, about the nature of manhood and the role of women in a male-dominated society turned upside down by a cataclysm. Being a man in England during the war means being in uniform and preferably fighting in France; the conchies and the gay men are seen by many, including many women, as being “less than” men, and in their otherness, as subversive. Women, for their part, have had to step up and assume the roles in the workforce that men have vacated to go off to fight. It is supposedly the love of their fellow men that allows the soldiers to fight as a unit, to want to enlist and to want to re-up after they are wounded, and this comradeship is trumpeted by those in command. But it is crucial that everyone understand that this must be the right kind of love; the wrong kind of love is ferreted out and made example of.
There are many paradoxes, and many instances of doubling or of opposites, in the novels. Rivers wants to cure his patients, although curing them will render them fit to be sent back to combat and likely be killed. Several bisexual men lead bifurcated lives. And underlying all of it is a society rigidly divided along class lines, with the WC’s—the working classes—distinguished not only by their living and working conditions but also by the idiomatic speech put into their mouths by the author. The war may be in some ways a great “we’re all in this together” moment, but it can’t erase class distinctions.
It is worth noting that Barker’s style can range over to the gritty and realistic, as well as the graphic, whether describing the events occurring on a battlefield in Picardy or in a bedroom (or back alley) in London. The writing style is crisp, and the narrative moves along nicely. The author’s characterizations are on point, especially William Rivers and Billy Prior. Barker has a great feel for language, although some of the words and expressions several of the characters use are distinctly British and may be unfamiliar to American ears. She conveys an England—or at least, a segment of England—tired of war, tired of being bombed, often living hand to mouth in cold water flats with faded wallpaper and trying gamely to carry on despite being ground down.
And underlying it all, The Great War—its idealization, its senselessness. The three volumes of this trilogy are beautifully written, hold the attention, and move quickly, and its relatively spare language has a lot to say.
The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker
Dutton: 1994, 288 pages
Photo of Chester from The Cleveland Museum of Art
