Regeneration - Pat Barker

Pat Barker has developed something of a reputation for novels based around The Great War. Having heard much from Mrs SWSt about the Regeneration Trilogy, I was keen to get started and see how the first in the trilogy (Regeneration) measured up. Rather than focussing on the War itself, Regeneration concentrates on a number of soldiers sent back home suffering from psychological problems as a result of what they have witnessed. One of the constant characters throughout the trilogy - and the main one in this book is army psychologist Dr W H Rivers and the book examines his attempts to cure the soldiers and get them back to the Western Front. In particular, ...  Read the complete review

Regeneration by Pat Barker is a moving and insightful novel about the First World War. Loosely based on real life events, it is set in Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh, a hospital that looked after soldiers that were suffering mental health problems due to the things they had seen and experienced on the front line. The main character in the novel is Siegfried Sassoon, a war poet who spent some time in this hospital. After serving on the front line, Sassoon felt that the war was being deliberately ‘stretched out’ by people that had the power to stop it, but chose not to. As the casualty figures soared, Sassoon saw this as a wilful act of mass murder. Sassoon ...  Read the complete review

‘Regeneration’ by Pat Barker is set over four months in a psychiatric hospital at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, in 1917, which attracted me to the novel as it is close to the village where I live and I find the subject matter of the first world war and its psychology interesting. The novel has many interrelated themes concerning the memory of World War One, memory itself, masculinity, masculinity in war, the morality of military conflict, military and civil hierarchies, and poetry. Barker seamlessly interweaves fact and fiction while focusing on the conflict between Dr William Rivers’ efforts to ‘cure’ those traumatised by the war, and his duty ...  Read the complete review