Review: Regeneration

Regeneration, Pat Barker[“Regeneration” by Pat Barker (published by Penguin 1992). Part of a trilogy of historical novels about the First World War. This fascinating novel is concerned with shell shock, psychiatry, poetry and class.]

I thought writing about this book would be easy, but it is not.

I thought that I would just write about the experience of reading the book, nothing about the characters and plot. But I could not do that.

The book asks many questions about life, love and war. But it also asks questions about oneself, and one's attitudes and beliefs. About how we were brought up, about what we felt about those who went to war, and why, why, so many whys.

Did you ever wake up suddenly sweating and screaming? The same thing again. I expect you did, why did you do that? You had nothing to really worry about compared to these people, nothing that your mind could not make sense of, replaying again and again to see if there is a solution this time, Nooooo. Now we sleep during the day, we cannot bear the nightmare that will come.

But these people had all that and so much more, and more, horrors that they saw, were part of, were involved in, had no control over, all feelings suppressed, but that is in the day, the mind sleeps but the soul is wide awake and will not be controlled. Withdraw, if I don't think about it it, it will not be there. Don't speak, and I cannot tell you and so acknowledge the horror. Don't tell and there will still be a haven to come to, Don't move and I am not part of this. Shell shock. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Cowardice. The conflict between the desire for manly activity which had been replaced by feminine passivity in the need to look after their men, and the impossibility of doing so.

Here is a physician. He empathised with these tormented souls, after all his own speaking was difficult at times. He wondered about the morality of war and yet he made his patients able to return to that horror, conflict of duty and moral dilemma, to probably be killed. Did this not conflict with his Hippocratic Oath?

His techniques were new, experimental. But did show good results. But then other techniques, more barbaric, also showed good results. Finally he comes to terms with his internal conflicts by leaving the front line of treatment and retreating to research, into the workings of the mind under stress. I do not use the term mental disorder for who is to judge order from disorder in the mind.

A novel about a real person, some other real people and some that are made up. The conversations are made up, as there is no record of them. But the thoughts and feelings of the characters are there in their writings and in case notes. I normally do not like this putting words into mouths that can no longer protest, but here it does not matter, it is believable, it has foundation in what they themselves have written, and in what was written about them by contemporaries. That deals with the real characters, now the fully made up ones. They are the researched distillations of people alive at that time and in those circumstances, totally believable.

The insights into class, are revealing. The officers were all from the upper class, better educated, better fed, better educated, five inches taller than the men. This book is exclusively about officers and their road into their private hell, and their ways out. We assumed that “the men” would have just been shot as cowards.

The group read many other themes in this book, homosexuality, the war poets, social class, going to war, the reporting of war and its consequences, and many more. Although the book used the war poets as the foundation of the “plot”, we thought that the book was actually about Rivers, the Psychiatrist, although I am not sure if that was a term used at that time. And I think we all agreed that the book was “Intense”.

I must give you some quotes from the book. I do not know if the real characters actually said them or are the imagination of the author, but they are too good to ignore.

Sasoon says. “You can rely on me to be inconsistent”

“The congregation having renounced reason, looked the happier for it”

“Men love women as the fox loves the hare, and women love men as the tapeworm loves the gut” (I bet that one alone will get you talking!)

There are so many more, I had two pages of them, far more than anything else I have read, and I believe that was the experience of others as well. I will end with one last one which I think applied to this book

“You want perception, you go to a novelist, not a psychiatrist”

(see.. that was not so difficult after all, but will it make anyone want to read the book? I hope it does, but there is so much more to say about it, was it really only 250 pages? I must read more of this....... fade to black and silence)

Love from