Pat Barker
Regeneration by Pat Baker is the first book in a trilogy that blends fact with fiction. Set in Craiglockhart Hospital during World War 1, the hospital houses men suffering from psychological trauma as a result of shell shock and exposure to the horrors of war, especially to trench warfare. It features two prominent war poets as residents of the hospital, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
The focal character is a psychiatrist, Dr. William Rivers, the actual doctor who treated the residents of the hospital. Impacted by what he sees and hears from his patients, it is through his interactions with them that we learn of the horrors they experienced. Their traumas are manifested in a variety of forms, including nightmares, speech impediments, tremors, memory lapses, psychosomatically induced inabilities to eat or walk, and hallucinations. Sassoon is in the hospital because his friend, Robert Graves, managed to convince the powers-that-be Sassoon’s letter calling for an end to the war is due to a nervous breakdown.
Although many of the characters’ names are fictitious, in the Author’s Note, Pat Barker claims to have based their histories and methods of treatment on Rivers’ posthumously published book. Barker alternates between characters with Rivers as the focal point. She inhabits their minds as they interact with Rivers and with each other. But because she is limited to historical accuracy in how far she can take historical figures, her characterization is sketchy. As a result, the characters don’t emerge as fully rounded individuals. They are presented in a series of interrupted vignettes which fail to fully engage the reader.
The strength of the novel lies in its depiction of war and its impact on young, vulnerable men. Barker does not sugar-coat their experiences. She allows them to describe the horror with unflinching honesty. The novel captures a medias res point in their lives, a pit stop of sorts. The young men are sent to the hospital to recover from their trauma so they can be sent back to continue the fight. As Rivers recognizes, his job is to help them recover so they can be re-traumatized.
This powerful antiwar novel, focusing as it does on the middle point of the soldiers’ lives, illustrates the obscenity of war by demonstrating its traumatic impact on men’s minds and bodies.