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Regeneration by: Pat Barker

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Rating: - Review for Regeneration (Pat Barker)

I am very happy with this item. It arrived promptly and in great condition. Thank you very much.

Rating: - Great purchase!

I bought this book after reading other customers reviews. I have loved it from the moment I started to read it and look forward to buying more of Barker's novels.

Rating: - More of the wonderful Billy Prior

I'm not sure if I have read Pat Barker's trilogy about World War One out of sequence, with this one, which someone tells me is the middle of the three, read last(?). Never mind, it is, to my mind, the best of the three with a major helping of the wonderful Billy Prior, the only one of the main characters who is not a real person. Billy is streetwise, bi-sexual, not a soft touch, an officer from the `lower classes' and consequently a man with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. But seeing things from his point of view is our one vision in this trilogy of what war was like for the working classes. He acts as a touchstone with reality, strangely enough, while the `real' people, over-represented as they are, perhaps, have a quality of being, somewhat artificially, re-created.

Not that there is any lack of realism in any of these books or any sign of the real lives being somehow condensed or not given their complex due. W H R Rivers, the psychiatrist, is a very sympathetic portrait of a man charged with treating officers who have somehow broken down or have psychosomatic problems - ranging from shell-shock to psychological paralysis of some kind (mutism, for instance). An immensely compassionate man, he brought a modern sensibility to a practice that had few humane precursors.

This second volume in the trilogy also brings in the treatment of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who met at the Craighlockie institution where Rivers was based. Both men are treated sympathetically, though the enormous confidence and security in his righteousness of Sassoon contrasts with the uncertainty and humility of Owen.

The despair of men who experience the horrors of war is not a comfortable or easy subject, but Pat Barker's gifts for concision and her sensitive creativity make this time and this subject come alive on the page.

Rating: - impressed

I was really impressed with this book.
It is well written, intelligent but accessible, and gave me a greater insight and understanding of some of the characters and dilemmas they faced in the Second World War. I liked the author's style of writing, and wanted to just sit and read it without interruption (which is, of course, impossible!) The explanations of the psychiatrist's methods, understandings and processes were detailed but in a way that always felt like part of the tale, not a lecture or clinical analysis. Very clever, very engaging, and I will be asking for the other 2 books for my birthday. Thank you.

Rating: - Read it - it's great!

This book was recommended to me by a friend, and once I started, it was so good I rationed myself to make it last longer!

Sensitive, wonderfully written and well researched, the encounter between Rivers, a psychologist torn between duty to his country and duty to his patients, and Sassoon, one of our foremost WWI poets, will change your perspective on war and soldiers forever.

I somewhat rashly lent it to my dad, who loved it so much he won't give it back! Enjoy!

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