Genre Fiction
![Sarah Gamble - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001HCX97G.jpg)
![Pat Barker - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B004N8URNA.jpg)
Regeneration (Regeneration Trilogy)
"Calls to mind such early moderns as Hemingway and Fitzgerald...Some of the most powerful antiwar literature in modern English fiction."-The Boston Globe
The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy-a Booker Prize nominee and one of Entertainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Novels.
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim.
One of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time, Regeneration has been hailed by critics across the globe. More than one hundred years since World War I, this book is as timely and relevant as ever.
The first book of the Regeneration Trilogy-a Booker Prize nominee and one of Entertainment Weekly's 100 All-Time Greatest Novels.
In 1917 Siegfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: the war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim.
One of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time, Regeneration has been hailed by critics across the globe. More than one hundred years since World War I, this book is as timely and relevant as ever.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Regeneration
"Dramatic, moving, brilliantly harrowing...a novel thatmakes the madness of war more than a metaphor."-The New York Times
"Earns...a place on the shelf of WWI literature."-Kirkus Reviews
"Extremely accomplished and intelligent... Barker is adept at dramatizing moral dilemmas that have no easy answers."-Entertainment Weekly
"One of the most deserving winners of the prestigious Booker fiction prize in recent years."-The New York Review of Books
"Pat Barker makes both her fictional and her real characters complex and credible....Best of all, she attends to the moral nuances of a time when it was hard to distinguish the lesser insanities from the greater ones."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel....Regeneration is an inspiring book that balances conscience and thevitality of change against a collapsing world."-The New Yorker
"Dramatic, moving, brilliantly harrowing...a novel thatmakes the madness of war more than a metaphor."-The New York Times
"Earns...a place on the shelf of WWI literature."-Kirkus Reviews
"Extremely accomplished and intelligent... Barker is adept at dramatizing moral dilemmas that have no easy answers."-Entertainment Weekly
"One of the most deserving winners of the prestigious Booker fiction prize in recent years."-The New York Review of Books
"Pat Barker makes both her fictional and her real characters complex and credible....Best of all, she attends to the moral nuances of a time when it was hard to distinguish the lesser insanities from the greater ones."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel....Regeneration is an inspiring book that balances conscience and thevitality of change against a collapsing world."-The New Yorker
Readers Top Reviews
H. LacroixMorven
A book that cannot be missed! This account of the horrors of the first world war and the traumas suffered by the soldiers is absolutely first class. Especially because Pat Barker is clever enough not to dwell but simply to tell only what is necessary and when it is necessary. No fuss, no histrionics, plain, matter of fact telling without any over emphasis, which is made more poignant anyway by the restraint used. Doctor Rivers 's dealings with his patients and the care he takes of them is masterfully portrayed. I did deduce a point because the book lost momentum towards the middle. There was a section that failed to catch my interest as the rest had done. To wards the end I was appalled by one of the last chapters when Rivers witnesses Yealland's ministrations to one of his patients. That men who had already given so much should be tortured into a 'cure' is unimaginable. I had no ideas such things had occurred. A book that is full of information and asks the relevant questions.
LynneF
I've read several novels recently about the First World War and decided to revisit this trilogy, which I enjoyed the first time round. Regeneration is just as good at a second reading, perhaps even better - after all the coverage given to the Great War this year. Some of the narrative makes for harrowing reading but given the nature of this horrific conflict, it's not surprising . It's very interesting to hear about the way in which the men were medically treated and learn how real life characters were involved in the war. Pat Barker skilfully interweaves their stories with those of her fictional characters. I've been completely gripped by the book and couldn't put it down! I'm now two thirds of the way through The Eye in the Door, the second book in the trilogy, which is just as good... as we follow the lives of many of the characters from the first book. Recommended.
William Gwynne
“Fear, tenderness - these emotions were so despised that they could be admitted into consciousness only at the cost of redefining what it meant to be a man.” Regeneration is a story inspired by true events of World War One. Centres around the now famous war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and his inspiring of Wilfred Owen, the story takes place in a hospital called Craiglockhart, for those suffering shell shock, PTSD. It is a story of intricate characterisation, the horrific consequences of war, and the internal conflict each character faces. Everyone faces different tribulations and struggles that appear impossible to overcome, yet they can unite over their experiences, and it is what forges them into brothers. “You know you're walking around with a mask on, and you desperately want to take it off and you can't because everybody else thinks it's your face.” Sassoon is the central character. He wrote The Declaration, which criticised and discredited those causing the war, proclaiming that it could have been ended, and was not fuelled by incessant greed. Yet, he faces the trial of facing heavy opposition who can send him far away, and the guilt of leaving his men on the front line. It Is a story of moral dilemmas that plagues all, especially that of William Rivers, the doctor, who wishes to ‘regenerate’ those in his care, but only to send them back to the front line, to almost certain death. This was emphasised by the subtle and smooth prose that allowed ideas, themes and undertones to evolve and naturally present themselves to the reader, depicting realistic and believable mentalities to the characters. “A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance." Regeneration was a haunting yet revealing story that was brilliant in presenting both the horrors of the war, but the reasons of why people fought, and how it formed bonds and inspiration. Focusing on Sassoon, it was amazing to find out how and why he used poetry in the way he did to portray such powerful visions of the reality of war. A powerful war story that focuses on the traumatic impact as a result of the horrendous things most people in WW1 saw. 4.5/5
Book Bonkers
Poignant and powerful, this is not a novel about war, or the pity of human conflict, but about how governments and medical professionals respond to it. It focuses on a neurologist and social anthropologist, Dr W.H.R.Rivers, working at Craiglockhart hospital near Edinburgh during the Great War. This extraordinary man, whose back story is picked up later in the trilogy, opens up brand new approaches to the treatment of 'shell shock' on his patients. As he meets the challenges of mutism, nightmares and paralysis, his regenerative therapies propose allowing his patients to reveal repressed memories through talk. What he fails to understand, though, is that the very things he is trying to 'cure' are themselves forms of protest against the horrors of war. To speak would be to acknowledge your victimhood. To do that would be to admit to your loss of masculinity, the most shaming of all confessions in time of war. What they do recall is the male bonding in the trenches, the sweeping, cleaning, the washing, what Margaretta Jolly calls 'the maternal masculine'. Pat Barker writes with great simplicity and sensitivity, raising key questions about gender roles in wartime and what illness really is. How did physicians like Rivers 'heal' their charges in the knowledge that they would be sent back to the Front as soon as they were released? Siegfried Sassoon's comment at the end that war is 'not worth it' finally brings Rivers to the same point of view and is spoken in the perfectly lucid and aware voice of a patient who misses the male fraternisation that trench warfare allowed. Barker's most inspired and entirely fictional creation is Billy Prior, the 'temporary gentleman', raised to officer rank in spite of his social class, who turns Rivers' treatment back on himself, so that the doctor's own repressed memories of a tyrannical father and the stammer he developed as a deliberate protest against it turn him into a victim too, not of war, but of the pincer grip of patriarchy still lingering throughout this era that sent millions of men to their needless deaths.
Sallie Reynolds
I met Pat Barker in 1978 or 79 at a party given by Virago Press in London. Virago had just published her first novel, and the early reviews were coming in, all raves. Barker herself seemed shy and not very ego-driven, which appealed to me. Yet, somehow, when I got back to the US, I didn't read her book. I'm sorry now. I would have been enriched years ago by this writer's wisdom and art. Recently someone suggested Regeneration, since I had gotten interested in the impact of World War I in Europe (it had a less emphatic effect over here, I think. Not as devastating to us as the influenza epidemic that followed it). And I remembered meeting Barker and wondered that I had let her work slip past me. I began reading, and quickly saw what those early reviewers had meant. I found myself marveling not only at the story, but at this writer's very high art and skills. Many writers tell a good story, and you either read around glitches in the execution or just skip when you come to the dead parts. It had been so long since I had read a truly great book, that I had forgotten the force of masterly skills - I had forgotten how important doing something brilliantly could be to the effect of the whole. Barker does many things brilliantly. Description of scene and emotion - fantastic. Ditto to internal monologue, which sets a character in our minds. And sliding easily and naturally from one character to another. Moving back and forth in time as simply as we ourselves do when something today calls to mind something from years ago. She deepens our understanding of each character and the background as she goes. This is high art in service of story, not in service to itself. Barker's knowledge of just which details are important is another skill to marvel at. These scenes are evocative to the reader as well as to the character experiencing them, as tales within tales let us see farther and more clearly. At the same time, the forward movement of the overall story never falters. I couldn't put this book down. The trilogy, of which this is the first part, treats of the multitude of ways an external trauma, in this case war, acts upon individuals and on a society as a whole. Barker uses historical characters as well as invented ones. And such is the level of her skill, known people like Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, for example, to say nothing of the other war poets and the medical people, are never ever the usual wooden historical characters. They are as finely thought- and felt-out as those other characters whom the writer has been free to invent. The reader is drawn well and truly into their lives, unaware of history's heavy hand. That means that this is hardly a "historical novel," along the lines of those we have access to every day. It is as natural as Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian, and to my mind, an even better book tha...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Part 1
1Finished with the War A Soldier's Declaration
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
S. Sassoon
July 1917
Bryce waited for Rivers to finish reading before he spoke again. ‘The "S" stands for "Siegfried". Apparently, he thought that was better left out.'
‘And I'm sure he was right.' Rivers folded the paper and ran his fingertips along the edge. ‘So they're sending him here?'
Bryce smiled. ‘Oh, I think it's rather more specific than that. They're sending him to you.'
Rivers got up and walked across to the window. It was a fine day, and many of the patients were in the hospital grounds, watching a game of tennis. He heard the pok-pok of rackets, and a cry of frustration as a ball smashed into the net. ‘I suppose he is - "shell-shocked"?'
‘According to the Board, yes.'
‘It just occurs to me that a diagnosis of neurasthenia might not be inconvenient confronted with this.' He held up the Declaration.
‘Colonel Langdon chaired the Board. He certainly seems to think he is.'
‘Langdon doesn't believe in shell-shock.'
Bryce shrugged. ‘Perhaps Sassoon was gibbering all over the floor.'
"‘Funk, old boy." I know Langdon.' Rivers came back to his chair and sat down. ‘He doesn't sound as if he's gibbering, does he?'
Bryce said carefully, ‘Does it matter what his mental state is? Surely it's better for him to be here than in prison?'
‘Better for him, perhaps. What about the hospital? Can you imagine what our dear Director of Medical Services is going to say, when he finds out we're sheltering "conchies" as well as cowards, shirkers, scrimshankers and degenerates? We'll just have to hope there's no publicity.'
‘There's going to be, I'm afraid. The Declaration's going to be read out in the House of Commons next week.'
‘By?'
‘Lees-Smith.'
Rivers made a dismissive gesture.
‘Yes, well, I know. But it still means the press.'
‘And the minister will say that no disciplinary action has been taken, because Mr Sassoon is suffering from a severe mental breakdown, and therefore not responsible for his actions. I'm not sure I'd prefer that to prison.'
‘I don't suppose he was offered the choice. Will you take him?'
‘You mean I am being offered a choice?'
‘In view of your case load, yes.'
Rivers took off his glasses and swept his hand down across his eyes. ‘I suppose they have remembered to send the file?'
Sassoon leant out of the carriage window, still half-expecting to see Graves come pounding along the platform, looking even more dishevelled than usual. But further down the train, doors had already begun to slam, and the platform remained empty.
The whistle blew. Immediately, he saw lines of men with grey muttering faces clambering up the ladders to face the guns. He blinked them away.
The train began to move. Too late for Robert now. Prisoner arrives without escort, Sassoon thought, sliding open the carriage door.
By arriving an hour early he'd managed to get a window seat. He began picking his way across to it through the tangle of feet. An elderly vicar, two middle-aged men, both looking as if they'd done rather well out of the war, a young girl and an older woman, obviously travelling together. The train bumped over a point. Everybody rocked and swayed, and Sassoon, stumbling, almost fell into the vicar's lap. He mumbled an apology and sat down. Admiring glances, and not only from the women. Sassoon turned to look out o...
1Finished with the War A Soldier's Declaration
I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.
S. Sassoon
July 1917
Bryce waited for Rivers to finish reading before he spoke again. ‘The "S" stands for "Siegfried". Apparently, he thought that was better left out.'
‘And I'm sure he was right.' Rivers folded the paper and ran his fingertips along the edge. ‘So they're sending him here?'
Bryce smiled. ‘Oh, I think it's rather more specific than that. They're sending him to you.'
Rivers got up and walked across to the window. It was a fine day, and many of the patients were in the hospital grounds, watching a game of tennis. He heard the pok-pok of rackets, and a cry of frustration as a ball smashed into the net. ‘I suppose he is - "shell-shocked"?'
‘According to the Board, yes.'
‘It just occurs to me that a diagnosis of neurasthenia might not be inconvenient confronted with this.' He held up the Declaration.
‘Colonel Langdon chaired the Board. He certainly seems to think he is.'
‘Langdon doesn't believe in shell-shock.'
Bryce shrugged. ‘Perhaps Sassoon was gibbering all over the floor.'
"‘Funk, old boy." I know Langdon.' Rivers came back to his chair and sat down. ‘He doesn't sound as if he's gibbering, does he?'
Bryce said carefully, ‘Does it matter what his mental state is? Surely it's better for him to be here than in prison?'
‘Better for him, perhaps. What about the hospital? Can you imagine what our dear Director of Medical Services is going to say, when he finds out we're sheltering "conchies" as well as cowards, shirkers, scrimshankers and degenerates? We'll just have to hope there's no publicity.'
‘There's going to be, I'm afraid. The Declaration's going to be read out in the House of Commons next week.'
‘By?'
‘Lees-Smith.'
Rivers made a dismissive gesture.
‘Yes, well, I know. But it still means the press.'
‘And the minister will say that no disciplinary action has been taken, because Mr Sassoon is suffering from a severe mental breakdown, and therefore not responsible for his actions. I'm not sure I'd prefer that to prison.'
‘I don't suppose he was offered the choice. Will you take him?'
‘You mean I am being offered a choice?'
‘In view of your case load, yes.'
Rivers took off his glasses and swept his hand down across his eyes. ‘I suppose they have remembered to send the file?'
Sassoon leant out of the carriage window, still half-expecting to see Graves come pounding along the platform, looking even more dishevelled than usual. But further down the train, doors had already begun to slam, and the platform remained empty.
The whistle blew. Immediately, he saw lines of men with grey muttering faces clambering up the ladders to face the guns. He blinked them away.
The train began to move. Too late for Robert now. Prisoner arrives without escort, Sassoon thought, sliding open the carriage door.
By arriving an hour early he'd managed to get a window seat. He began picking his way across to it through the tangle of feet. An elderly vicar, two middle-aged men, both looking as if they'd done rather well out of the war, a young girl and an older woman, obviously travelling together. The train bumped over a point. Everybody rocked and swayed, and Sassoon, stumbling, almost fell into the vicar's lap. He mumbled an apology and sat down. Admiring glances, and not only from the women. Sassoon turned to look out o...
