Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear -- the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing -- it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road.


From Library Journal
In 1917, decorated British officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote a declaration condemning the war. Instead of a court-martial, he was sent to a hospital for other "shell-shocked" officers where he was treated by Dr. William Rivers, noted an thropologist and psychiatrist. Author Barker turns these true occurrences into a compelling and brilliant antiwar novel. Sassoon's complete sanity disturbs Dr. Rivers to such a point that he questions his own role in "curing" his patients only to send them back to the slaughter of the war in France. World War I decimated an entire generation of European men, and the horrifying loss of life and the callousness of the government led to the obliteration of the Victorian ideal. This is an important and impressive novel about war, soldiers, and humanity. It belongs in most fiction collections.- C. Christopher Pavek, National Economic Research As socs. Lib., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Forbes, Malcom S. Forbes Jr.
Centers on military psychiatrist Dr. William Rivers, whose mission is to restore shell-shocked soldiers to "sanity" so that they may return to the insanity of World War I trench warfare.


From Kirkus Reviews
In this fact/fiction hybrid, Barker (Union Street, 1983, etc.) turns from the struggle for survival of northern England working- class folk to the struggle back to sanity by British officers unhinged by WW I trench warfare. Craiglockhart War Hospital, a grim psychiatric facility outside Edinburgh, is the setting. The framework is the arrival of Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart in the summer of 1917, and his discharge back to France in November. Sassoon is treated by the eminent neurologist (and Army captain) William Rivers, whose job is to restore his damaged warriors to fighting condition. Sassoon is a relatively easy assignment. Despite his public statement protesting the war, Sassoon is no pacifist; this complex poet feels at home in the Army and is an exceptionally courageous officer, beloved by his men, to whom he feels a blood-debt that can be paid only by his return. For all the sparring between Sassoon and Rivers, only a hair separates them, for the latter is also a man of enormous integrity, profoundly troubled by the horrors his patients must endure. And it is these horrors (not the clipped exchanges of Sassoon and Rivers) that linger in the mind: Burns's vomiting nightmares caused by a mouthful of decomposing German flesh; Prior's being rendered mute after handling a human eye. At the center is Rivers, a model therapist, whose unstinting support may give even the wretched Burns a chance at a normal life. Barker has also provided some workmanlike off-base romance for Prior, her one developed fictional character; but the heart of the work, where the big fish swim, is Rivers's consciousness, his insights into front- line behavior enriched by his anthropological straining. Don't look here for the dramatic sweep of a war novel; instead, you get a scrupulously fair reconstruction of Craiglockhart, plus a moving empathy for both doctors and patients. The extent of that empathy earns Barker's work a place on the shelf of WW I literature. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen
In the summer of 1917, more than 100,000 English soldiers die in World War I. That same summer, Captain William Rivers continues to build his reputation for curing mentally "broken-down" officers in a London war hospital; and Captain Sassoon, well-bred English gentlemen, poet, and decorated war hero, is committed to the hospital as an alternative to court-martial for his public letter denouncing the government and the war. Pat Barker seamlessly interweaves fiction with facts gleaned from the journals and writings of these real-life military men to probe the depths of the conflicts and contradictions they face. Captain Rivers is moved by Captain Sassoon's anti-war position and torn by his own duty to cure broken men so they can return to the front, to a "resumption of activities ... that were positively suicidal." Captain Sassoon can't believe they are powerless to stop the carnage. Both struggle with the war's many paradoxes, especially the fact that "this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was ... domestic. Caring.... maternal," a feeling that tortures Sassoon with questions about what it means to be a man. Both men struggle, with each other and internally, as a terrible, unaskable question haunts them: what kind of "automatic or unquestioning allegiance" does one owe to "a society that devours its own young?" -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

ANNOTATION

Set in a British military hospital during WWI, this novel blends fact and fiction, drawing its two protagonists from the pages of history. The author of Union Street, portrays overwhelmed men who try to come to terms with their outrage over a futile war.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In 1917 Seigfried Sasson, noted poet and decorated war hero, publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer in World War I. His reason: The war was a senseless slaughter. He was officially classified "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. There a brilliant psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, set about restoring Sassoon's "sanity" and sending him back to the trenches. This novel tells what happened as only a novel can. It is a war saga in which not a shot is fired. It is a story of a battle for a man's mind in which only the reader can decide who is the victor, who the vanquished, and who the victim. It is one of the most amazing feats of fiction of our time. Regeneration is the first novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed World War I trilogy, which continues with The Eye in the Door and culminates in the 1995 Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Books of the Century

...[A] magnificent antiwar novel and a wonderful justification of her belief that plain writing, energized by the named things of the world, will change readers profoundly by bringing them deep into imagined lives. (1992)

New York Times Books of the Century

...[A] magnificent antiwar novel and a wonderful justification of her belief that plain writing, energized by the named things of the world, will change readers profoundly by bringing them deep into imagined lives. (1992)

Library Journal

In 1917, decorated British officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote a declaration condemning the war. Instead of a court-martial, he was sent to a hospital for other ``shell-shocked'' officers where he was treated by Dr. William Rivers, noted an thropologist and psychiatrist. Author Barker turns these true occurrences into a compelling and brilliant antiwar novel. Sassoon's complete sanity disturbs Dr. Rivers to such a point that he questions his own role in ``curing'' his patients only to send them back to the slaughter of the war in France. World War I decimated an entire generation of European men, and the horrifying loss of life and the callousness of the government led to the obliteration of the Victorian ideal. This is an important and impressive novel about war, soldiers, and humanity. It belongs in most fiction collections.-- C. Christopher Pavek, National Economic Research As socs. Lib., Washington, D.C.

Samuel Hynes

Regeneration is essentially the story of two men and their effects on one another. Both are in the army, and this is a war story though it takes place far from the battlefields....Regeneration is an anti-war war novel, in a tradition that is by now an established one, though it tells a part of the whole story of war that is not often told -- how war may batter and break men's minds -- and so makes the madness of war more than a metaphor, and more awful....This novel, like her others, is testimony to the persistent vitality of that kind of writing.-- The New York Times

New York Times Books of the Century

...[A] magnificent antiwar novel and a wonderful justification of her belief that plain writing, energized by the named things of the world, will change readers profoundly by bringing them deep into imagined lives. (1992)Read all 6 "From The Critics" >

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