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marc129 's review for:
The Ghost Road
by Pat Barker
Third and last part of the Regeneration trilogy. Earlier, I read the first book and that made quite a big impression. In this part two characters are followed further, but now at the end of the war (summer and autumn 1918): Dr. Rivers in London, still trying to tinker injured soldiers, and Billy Prior, the asthmatic officer who absolutely wants to get back to the war. Rivers looks back on his time as anthropologist in Polynesia, where he had lived in a community of headhunters become lethargic and lustless by the British ban on head-hunting; precisely the same Great Britain now sent waves of young men to a certain death in Flanders and Northern France; the theme of war as a vitalist force. Prior is one of those men who aware his fate and resolutely going for it, but at the same time struggling with his social background (proletarian) and his sexual orientation (bisexual, described in some fairly explicit scenes). Barker has made of this last part a very rich book, with numerous vistas to a greater whole; but to me it is less successful than the first part, that went much broader and gave more depth to the theme of psychological traumas.