regeneration (pat barker)

Pat Barker’s book, the first part of a trilogy, was nominated for the Booker Prize a long time ago. (The third part of the trilogy won in 95.) It feels, in so many ways, like a paradigmatic work of British fiction. Firstly for its subject matter, and secondly because of the novelist’s stylistic choices.

The content involves the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from PTSD in WW1. Rivers, a fictionalised version of a real person, is one of the medics at the remote Scottish hospital where patients are treated, humanely, as they recover. The kicker is that, if they recover, they can then be sent back to fight in France. Something one of the patients, Siegfried Sassoon, who has written a letter in protest at the ongoing carnage, decides he wants to do, if he is deemed to have recovered. Rivers is is chief medical officer, aware of the Sassoon paradox of both objecting to the war and seeking to continue to wage it, and he himself wrestles with his conscience as he realises he is only curing young men in order to send them to their deaths. Along the way other figures who my generation grew up with, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, make cameo appearances. The First World War poets were our British poetes maudits, weaving from the mud, blood and death of the trenches beautiful flowers of verse which would echo through the generations. These were romantic icons long before rock and roll made its claim on the youthful psyche, and I remember myself declaiming Owen’s poem, An Anthem to Doomed Youth, on a stage at prep school back in the seventies. Choosing to fictionalise the reality of this moment in history, using factual testimonies and the poems themselves, Barker must have known she was digging up literary gold, and so it proved to be.

The form of the novel is, by and large, utilitarian. Much of it is constructed from pages of dialogue, as soldiers and medics discuss their predicament. The author refrains from anything that might be considered flowery, although the occasional passage where her imagination appears to have been given freer reign. such as when a soldier goes awol in a wood and encounters a menagerie of dead animals, are the ones that stand out. Maybe this means less is more, but at the same time the novel’s insistence on a rational engagement with the irrationality of PTSD feels, at times, almost surgical. It made me think of the course I did at Faber, where flights of fancy were seen as vaguely bad taste. There’s something almost brutally British about all this, and whilst the authorial efficiency is undeniable, the resistance to any sense of flair feels like it would have been given full approval by the generals of the war office as they sent the young men out to do their duty.