The Ghost Road: Booker Prize Winner (A Novel) (Regeneration Trilogy)

The trilogy is superb and should be read in sequence. The depiction of the horrors of war, especially of WWI, are gripping and almost unbelievable in this day and age. The intermingling of details from Rivers experiences on Eddystone island, Solomon Islands, (now Simbo) are almost entirely accurate as regards people and ceremonies, they add a fascinating counter to the horrors of mechanized war.

The Ghost Road is an interesting book that intersperses the sacred (Melanesian death rites) with the profane (graphic depictions of risky sexual behavior) in an attempt to reconcile man's actions with the inevitability of death. The story itself is a split narrative: the psychoanalyst William Rivers treats men returning from the front during World War I and officer Billy Prior details his military and sexual actions leading up to his final battle in France. Rivers' narrative is further split between his real-time attendance to the War's casualties and his Melanesian experiences ten years' prior (related as an involuntary dream, similar to the symptoms he treats in others).Each narrative uses differing perceptions of death as its central theme. Although initially treated as foreign and backwards, the primitive Islanders' perceptions finally appear the more civilized of the two and their culture of acceptance stands in stark relief to the voluntary cheapening of Prior's life while he waits for what he feels is a useless but inevitable death on the Western Front. As such, the final passages in the book are far more uplifting than other WWI narratives such as All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory.

Great insight into soldier life!

A difficult read that doesn't sugar coat war. This is a book that does not spoon feed you the story nice and tidy in perfect order. It is shaky, scattered, difficult... which suits the subject matter. With that said, it is definitely worth your time to read. Many in our book club did not enjoy reading it (this is not a joyful book), but we spent the majority of our meeting actually discussing the book! We all came away glad that we had read it and with a deeper understanding of World War 1 and all wars.

I reviewed REGENERATION, the first volume in Pat Barker's WW1 trilogy, when I first read it and liked it. I did not submit a review of the second volume, THE EYE IN THE DOOR, because it did not seem to sustain the promise (or answer the questions) of the first, and I felt it necessary to see how this third volume would pull the threads together. My verdict: while THE GHOST ROAD is certainly a more focused book than its predecessor, it still does not quite sew the trilogy into a coherent whole.Barker's method is to take a huge subject that has been much written about, the first World War, and to examine it from unusual angles. Almost all the first two books and the first two-thirds of this one take place in Britain rather than in France. They do not show the war itself, but its effects on the damaged minds of soldiers who return from it, and on social attitudes at home. The brilliance of the first volume was to take two real people -- the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the pioneering psychiatrist William Rivers -- and trace their interaction at Craiglockhart mental hospital, where Sassoon has been sent after publishing a denunciaton of the war. I doubt that Barker had a trilogy in mind when she wrote the first book, and it might have been difficult to have extended it further in the same vein. THE EYE IN THE DOOR suffers from having too many characters; there is a bit of Sassoon, a bit of Rivers, and a bewildering array of new people, but the main character is a relatively minor figure from the first book, Billy Prior. The main subject of the story is the strongly prejudiced reactionism in wartime Britain, taking as its targets pacifists, socialists, and homosexuals. It is a hard book to follow, and it rather loses its way.THE GHOST ROAD more or less gets back on track, by giving more of the book to Rivers, by building Prior into a richer and more sympathetic character, and finally moving the action into the trenches for the last chapters. But the focus on war poets which gave such character to the first book has all but vanished in this one. Sassoon barely appears. Wilfred Owen, who figured as a secondary character in the first book, returns here and dies (as he did) in the last days of the war, but he is treated so peripherally that it is hard to see why the author cites no less than six books on him in her concluding bibliography.This change of direction is a pity, because Barker is much more successful finding the humanity in her real characters than she is inventing others out of whole cloth. She seems to want to use Billy Prior, for example, in protean fashion, to represent whatever she needs at any given moment: a homosexual and yet a lover of women; an officer and gentleman who nonetheless comes from a working-class background; a soldier turned civil servant turned soldier again. The lack of focus in Prior's own life risks the narrative focus of the last two books; his decision to return to France comes as a relief, because it simplifies everything.The psychiartist Rivers has always been an attractive and complex character, I think because his complexity is real and not made up. In this volume, Barker fills him out by delving into his past: his relationship with Lewis Carrol as a child, and his anthropological work in the South Seas at the start of the century. Both are interesting, but their relationship to the overall direction of the trilogy is less clear. Others have commented on the parallels between the Melanesian culture and the situation in the trenches, but I do not find it especially cogent. However, it certainly makes an unusual angle on the war, and the ability to find unusual angles has been Pat Barker's greatest success from beginning to end.

WW I from a woman’s perspective and investigation into women’s and gays’ treatment by the government. Third novel of a brilliant trilogy, it explores PTSD from before it was known as “shock” — which so many women experience walking down the street. Wonderful. Jane B.

Pat Barker is a Class A writer, that is not to be disputed. However, I would think everyone who knows anything about WWI, knows it was not something anyone would want repeated. But the graphic sexual depictions were just an exercise in voyerism, and even if performed exactly as Ms. Barker describes them, I don't see how the literary experience is enriched by the telling.

If you enjoyed the Movie "1917" then you would probably appreciate this book & the trilogy that goes with it.