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librarianonparade 's review for:
Regeneration
by Pat Barker
This book is hard to describe, because the knee-jerk reaction is to say it's about Siegfried Sasson receiving treatment at Craiglockhart Hospital during WW1, which is ostensibly true, but it gives the wrong impression about who the book is really about. More than Sasson or Robert Graves or Wildfred Owen, all of whom make appearances, this book is really about Rivers and the methods he uses to treat them.
It's hard even to describe it as a war novel, because unlike 'Birdsong', for example, none of the characters are at the Front. At one point in the novel do any of the characters even hear the guns of France, and even then it's Rivers and at a distance across the Channel. But the Western Front is ever-present in the minds of the soldiers Rivers is treating, and that's what this novel is really about: the effect of war on the mind and the sometimes futile, sometimes valiant ways the men try and confront and overcome their experiences.
It's a tremendously moving novel, all the more so as Rivers comes to care for and about the men receiving treatment, and feels an immense conflict between his duty as army psychiatrist to get the men fit and back to duty and his own knowledge of the horrors that await them there.
It's hard even to describe it as a war novel, because unlike 'Birdsong', for example, none of the characters are at the Front. At one point in the novel do any of the characters even hear the guns of France, and even then it's Rivers and at a distance across the Channel. But the Western Front is ever-present in the minds of the soldiers Rivers is treating, and that's what this novel is really about: the effect of war on the mind and the sometimes futile, sometimes valiant ways the men try and confront and overcome their experiences.
It's a tremendously moving novel, all the more so as Rivers comes to care for and about the men receiving treatment, and feels an immense conflict between his duty as army psychiatrist to get the men fit and back to duty and his own knowledge of the horrors that await them there.