Regeneration by Pat Barker Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Regeneration
Book Review: Decent portrayal of reality, but not the best
Summary: 3 Stars
The anti-war novel, "Regeneration", attempts to portray the severity of the Great War by guiding the reader through the minds and lives shell-shocked soldiers in a hospital undergoing different forms of recovery. Pat Barker uses real poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and others as examples throughout the book, which acts as evidence for her case- yet the novel has a slight sense of fiction and it detracts from the feeling I believe she was trying to convey to the readers. Barker also analyzes the dreams and thoughts of the mental patients in order to examine exactly how WWI affected the minds of the surviving soldiers.
Although I understand how greatly the war affected the soldiers mentally, I do not believe that Barker was particularly strong at showing this fully. Although she used existing people, their stories didn't seem such. I found that there was also plot left unsettled or underdeveloped, particularly with the love story between Sarah and Prior and the hanging ambiguity in patients' sexual orientations (although that may have been intended).
Though I found some of Barker's dialogue hard to follow and some of her metaphors over the top, the novel was generally comprehensible and a quick read. I think that if one were to want a general feel of the effect of WWI and the anti-war sentiments that were felt afterwards, particularly by Sassoon, this would be a great book to start with. However, I believe that there are better choices for those that wish to delve into a more realistic, first-hand account of the occurrences and affects of WWI.
Book Review: Disturbing
Summary: 3 Stars
This is the first in a crisply written trilogy of novels woven around WWI trench soldiers and the doctor that treats them when they come home shell-shocked. One of Dr. Rivers' patients is Sassoon who takes a stand on the moral status of the war and it's continuance. Given that it is better to be thought lunatic than a pacifist Sassoon's friends pull strings to see that he is treated instead of court-martialed. His arrival at Craiglockhart introduces us to a startling variety of damaged soldiers, their ailments, the treatments, and their futures, which we follow in the next two books: The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. Grisley. Disturbing. Graphic sex. I am still undecided as to whether or not I recommend these books.Book Review: Excellent writing, best if you read all three.
Summary: 5 Stars
As a stand-alone novel it's good. As book one in a trilogy, it's excellent. You meet the main characters in Regeneration. You learn their secrets in The Eye in the Door. You share their pain in The Ghost Road. It's a very different--and often haunting--look at World War I through its soldiers and their horrors. But it's Barker's writing that makes this trio a "10." There is history, fiction, philosophy, psychiatry, even sex and gore; but all part of the story, none of it gratuitous. She does not clutter her prose with tedious descriptions, yet every picture is crystal clear. She tells you things you don't want to know, through three books you won't want to put down.Book Review: Extremely overrated
Summary: 2 Stars
I was so looking forward to this read, and equally disappointed. The male characters (with one notable exception) don't seem to live and breathe, and are a sketchy set of characteristics and tics. The one exception (and not a surprise, considering the author's former work) is a working class Northern woman involved with one of the main characters. Since the characters are not particularly involving and the milieu and era is not brought vividly to life, the book reads as a schematic, rather than a flesh-and-blood, fully realized work of art.Book Review: Fine sublime writing about the pointlessness of war
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is a tremendous and subtle work of art. The story revolves around the hositalization of poet, Siegfried Sassoon, for shell shock during World War I. He is being treated by Dr. Rivers, psychiatrist and anthropologist. The conversations, memories, and internal dialogues of these two men make up much of the book. How does an intelligent and refletive man come to try to give meaning to a meaningless and pointless catastrophy such as World War I. This is Sassoon's dilemna. He is against the war, not as a religious objector or a pacifist, but because he has come to see it as meaningless, pointless, horror imposed on the youth of Europe by an arrogant, stubborn, ruling class. Sassoon struggles during his hospitalization with the grief of losing young friends to the war, the frustration and irony of knowing that the excessive killing was pointless, and that he must find meaning in his sacrifice if he is to return to the front lines. Dr. Rivers is in a similar situation. He must assist men who have had a nervous breakdown compensate just enought to be returned to the front lines where they will no doubt be cannon fodder. He heals so that the sacrifice may continue.
The ethical and historic issues abound in this beautifully written novel. Whereas Joseph Heller in Catch 22 plays on the dark humor of the absurdities of war; Barker does not go for the sarcastic humor of the hanged. Rather, she takes a much more existentialist approach, of exploring how we try to create meaning to survive pointless and disasterous situations. I was reminded of Edith Stein, Ph.D., the phenomenologist philospher who became a Dutch nun but was then gased by the Nazis. While being transported by train across Germany to the gas chambers she tried to make sense of her senseless situation. She decided that she would offer herself up to God as the sacrificial lamb so that he might end the insanity and destruction of World War II. You will see that Sassoon stuggles with a similar situation, how to return to an absurdly deadly war with a sense of meaning, even if that meaning has to be forged out of our own soul and exists only for ourself.