2021/077: Regeneration -- Pat Barker

Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace. [p. 222]

After The Pull of the Stars, I felt an urge for more WW1 fiction, so finally embarked upon Regeneration. It's the kind of 'literary' novel that I tended to avoid in the decade after finishing my literature degree ... but that was in another millennium.

Regeneration is based on the time that Siegfried Sassoon spent in Craiglockhart War Hospital as a patient of Dr W H R Rivers, after Sassoon was diagnosed with shell-shock to avoid a court-martial for his anti-war declaration. It's effectively a novel about therapy: Rivers is presented as a deeply humane character, keen to unravel the various psychological and neurological symptoms of his patients. In addition to Sassoon, these include Wilfred Owen (whose workshopping of 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' with Sassoon is fascinating); Burns, who is unable to eat after a close encounter with a rotting corpse; and Billy Prior, a working-class lad made good who is initially mute. Prior's war experiences, and his time at Craiglockhart, are in sharp contrast to Sassoon's.

There is plenty of conflict here: between duty and conscience, between upper and working class, between the 'proper' camaraderie of soldiers and the homosexual impulses that Sassoon tries to repress and that Robert Graves is at pains to deny, between Rivers' approach to treatment and the horrific electroshock 'therapy' practiced by Dr Lewis Yealland.

It's a very masculine book, though Prior's girlfriend Sarah -- a munitions worker -- carries a lot of weight as a representative of working-class women. And it deals sensitively with 'war neurosis' in its various forms, without subscribing to the contemporary view of it as weakness. There's a lot of anger here too, not only in Sassoon but in Rivers, and in the narration, which doesn't wax lyrical but also doesn't gloss over the horrors.

I shall, quite probably, read the rest of the trilogy (The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road) eventually: but although I found Regeneration interesting, well-written, informative and powerful, it was (unsurprisingly) not an especially enjoyable read.