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arirang 's review for:
Regeneration
by Pat Barker
"As soon as you accepted that the man's breakdown was a consequence of his war experience rather than of his own innate weakness, then invariably the war became the issue. And the therapy was a test, not only of the genuineness of the individual's symptoms, but also of the validity of the demands the war was making on him. Rivers had survived partly by suppressing his awareness of this. But then along came Sassoon and made the justifiability of the war a matter of constant, open debate, and that suppression was no longer possible."
Regeneration is based on the real-life story from 1917 of the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers treating British first world-war army officers for shell shock at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, among them the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero, but who has written a letter renouncing the war, believing it to be unnecessarily prolonged and is being treated as suffering from psychosis rather than a conscientious objector.
While Rivers succeeds in getting Sassoon to return to the war (no spoiler alert needed - this is a matter of historical record) he doesn't change his views of the futility of the War and indeed, as the opening quote suggests, if anything it is Rivers' own views that come under pressure. He was in any case not unaware of the irony of his work - his goal essentially being to render the victims of shell-shock fit for battle again:
"Normally a cure implies that patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but suicidal."
The horrors of the trench warfare of World War I are a powerful but not usual subject for fiction. Barker's novel distinguishes itself first for focusing on the effect on officers rather than troops. The working class characters that do appear are the least convincing in the book (too much of a "cor blimey guvnor" vibe for my taste) and Rivers himself has an attitude rooted in the class system. He tells a patient that officers unlike private soldiers rarely suffer from mutism:
"What you get in officers is stammering. And it's not just mutism. All the physical symptoms: paralysis, blindness, deafness. They're all common in private soldiers and rate in officers. It's almost as if ... the labouring classes illness has to be physical. They can't take their condition seriously unless there's a physical symptom. And there are other differences as well. Officers' dreams tend to be more elaborate."'
But the key distinguishing feature of the novel is that it is largely focused on the psychological rather than physical effects of the conflict. Much of the novel consists of Rivers own reflections and consultations with his patients, and have at times an air of being summarised versions of his real-life Lancet paper and subsequent book, rather than really coming to life. For example, on discovering that men who manned observation balloons had the highest breakdown rate of any service:
"This reinforced Rivers view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stess in active and constructive ways."
People may record their thoughts in scientific papers in that fashion, but they don't think in their heads like that.
Barker also seems to feel it necessary to obey the genre rules of historical fiction - not depart from the facts and get in all the source material - which can give the book a curiously forced feeling at times.
There is a whole scene where Sassoon works with the poet Wilfred Owen on one of his poems, entirely based on actual handwritten amendments found in Owen's papers.
And as Barker has largely learned of Rivers' methods and views from a paper published in the Lancet, then we have to see him write that paper.
To me the novel really took off when Barker indulged her fictional impulses with a character entirely of her own invention, Billy Prior, the main subject of her follow up Eye in the Door where more subtleties of his character, such as his confused sexuality, merely hinted at here, emerge.
Overall - certainly a powerful work, but to me there were two books here battling for control of the text - a non-fictional summary of Rivers work versus a fictional novel.
Regeneration is based on the real-life story from 1917 of the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers treating British first world-war army officers for shell shock at the Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, among them the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated war hero, but who has written a letter renouncing the war, believing it to be unnecessarily prolonged and is being treated as suffering from psychosis rather than a conscientious objector.
While Rivers succeeds in getting Sassoon to return to the war (no spoiler alert needed - this is a matter of historical record) he doesn't change his views of the futility of the War and indeed, as the opening quote suggests, if anything it is Rivers' own views that come under pressure. He was in any case not unaware of the irony of his work - his goal essentially being to render the victims of shell-shock fit for battle again:
"Normally a cure implies that patient will no longer engage in behaviour that is clearly self-destructive. But in present circumstances, recovery meant the resumption of activities that were not merely self-destructive but suicidal."
The horrors of the trench warfare of World War I are a powerful but not usual subject for fiction. Barker's novel distinguishes itself first for focusing on the effect on officers rather than troops. The working class characters that do appear are the least convincing in the book (too much of a "cor blimey guvnor" vibe for my taste) and Rivers himself has an attitude rooted in the class system. He tells a patient that officers unlike private soldiers rarely suffer from mutism:
"What you get in officers is stammering. And it's not just mutism. All the physical symptoms: paralysis, blindness, deafness. They're all common in private soldiers and rate in officers. It's almost as if ... the labouring classes illness has to be physical. They can't take their condition seriously unless there's a physical symptom. And there are other differences as well. Officers' dreams tend to be more elaborate."'
But the key distinguishing feature of the novel is that it is largely focused on the psychological rather than physical effects of the conflict. Much of the novel consists of Rivers own reflections and consultations with his patients, and have at times an air of being summarised versions of his real-life Lancet paper and subsequent book, rather than really coming to life. For example, on discovering that men who manned observation balloons had the highest breakdown rate of any service:
"This reinforced Rivers view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stess in active and constructive ways."
People may record their thoughts in scientific papers in that fashion, but they don't think in their heads like that.
Barker also seems to feel it necessary to obey the genre rules of historical fiction - not depart from the facts and get in all the source material - which can give the book a curiously forced feeling at times.
There is a whole scene where Sassoon works with the poet Wilfred Owen on one of his poems, entirely based on actual handwritten amendments found in Owen's papers.
And as Barker has largely learned of Rivers' methods and views from a paper published in the Lancet, then we have to see him write that paper.
To me the novel really took off when Barker indulged her fictional impulses with a character entirely of her own invention, Billy Prior, the main subject of her follow up Eye in the Door where more subtleties of his character, such as his confused sexuality, merely hinted at here, emerge.
Overall - certainly a powerful work, but to me there were two books here battling for control of the text - a non-fictional summary of Rivers work versus a fictional novel.