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The Ghost Road (Regeneration #3)

4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 · rating details · 5,660 ratings · 217 reviews

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care – particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war t...more

Paperback, 277 pages

Published May 1st 2008 by Penguin Books, Limited (UK) (first published 1995)

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Apr 28, 2013 Steve aka Sckenda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Steve aka Sckenda by: Booker Prize

Shelves: world-war-i, death, war, 20th-century, british, psychological, medicine, booker-author, booker-prize

“The Ghost Road,” winner of the 1995 Booker Prize, concludes the Regeneration Trilogy, throughout which psychologically wounded soldiers of the Great War are encouraged to unearth their repressed trauma and to remember terrible things. “Stop the repression, please,” whispers the kindly Dr. William Rivers, who believes that the path to healing lies in recognizing, confronting, and excavating the buried truth.

The war is heading for its violent and spastic conclusion after four years of trench war...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What becomes of us when all we know is death and killing, and that is taken away?

If that is the question being asked, the answer is not forthcoming. The book ends just before the war does, so we never get to see how any surviving characters would reintegrate into civilian life. From their worries, their neuroses, and what the experiences of warfare have done to them, the answer appears to be "not well." If the experiences of Rivers among the headhunters are instructive, particularly not well.

In...more What becomes of us when all we know is death and killing, and that is taken away?

If that is the question being asked, the answer is not forthcoming. The book ends just before the war does, so we never get to see how any surviving characters would reintegrate into civilian life. From their worries, their neuroses, and what the experiences of warfare have done to them, the answer appears to be "not well." If the experiences of Rivers among the headhunters are instructive, particularly not well.

In the midst of the First World War, Billy Prior desperately wants to go back to the front. A victim of what is then termed shell shock, he has been hospitalized in England. Rivers, the psychiatrist that has taken care of him and many other men, sees the effects of war every day, but does not understand why anyone would want to return to the front. Billy does make it back, along with the poet Wilfred Owen.

From afar, Rivers tries to heal the men in his care, knowing they'll be sent back to be killed. While suffering from a battle with Spanish influenza, he gets stuck in his memories of doing anthropological research with a headhunting tribe, and his witness of their disintegration when headhunting is forbidden.

The Ghost Road feels distant from its characters sometimes, but from that remove weaves beautifully the attractions and horrors of war, the material world surrounding these soldiers, the hospitals that take care of the dead and dying, and who know their success stories will be sacrificed anew. We see men who are irrevocably changed by war. Their culture is now death, and death is about to be taken away.

Sex is another battlefield in this book - getting it, having it, exerting power through sexuality. Billy has to plan out an extensive campaign in order to be able to be alone with his fiancee, and, as in most combat, the plan doesn't survive first contact with the enemy. Billy also attracts and is attracted to men and women he encounters, and maneuvers sexual interactions skillfully, and mostly from a position of power, power that he has not always held.

This book deals with what parts of their lives the soldiers can control, which are controlled for them, and how they deal with it. And the looming threat of peace, which the soldiers both desire and fear.

The writing in The Ghost Road is evocative, and the details of the seamier sides of a soldiers life mesmerizing. The focus is squarely on the human elements of war, and Barker does a striking job of examining the moment before the end.

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Sep 24, 2008 Laura rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: world-war-i, english-lit, war

The final installment of Pat Barker’s trilogy regains some of the cohesion lost in the second one, partly because it focuses more on Dr. Rivers’ past, and partly because Billy Prior — as repugnant as ever — finally returns to battle. What does it say when the horrors of trench warfare perk up a story?

A chunk of the narration takes place as Dr. Rivers battles influenza and his mind wanders back to the time he spent in Melanesia researching a tribe of head-hunters. Their barbaric thirst for heads...more The final installment of Pat Barker’s trilogy regains some of the cohesion lost in the second one, partly because it focuses more on Dr. Rivers’ past, and partly because Billy Prior — as repugnant as ever — finally returns to battle. What does it say when the horrors of trench warfare perk up a story?

A chunk of the narration takes place as Dr. Rivers battles influenza and his mind wanders back to the time he spent in Melanesia researching a tribe of head-hunters. Their barbaric thirst for heads yet their willingness to curtail the practice, the white man’s abhorrence of head-hunting yet their willingness to send millions of young men to their deaths, a people destroyed by their refusal to fight wars and a nation destroyed by fighting a war...these contradictions all give a not-too-subtle commentary on the moral ambiguity of 20th century British culture. Frankly, I’d sort of checked out. A little social criticism goes a long way if you’re not distracted by engaging characters. Plus I’d endured too many tasteless sexual encounters between Billy and whoever was handy to really care much about the book. (What on earth would make an author think that coarseness is going to be anything other than repellent? Are there readers so depraved that they don’t mind?? I shudder to think.)

One of the big disappointments with the trilogy is that the characters who were so fascinating in Regeneration, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, are absent from the second book and make only cameo appearances in the last. Much of the charm (which isn't really the right word) of Regeneration's premise is the fleshing out of historical people and encounters. Instead, Barker took the least appealing character from the first book and focused the rest of the series on him.

The ending, at least, packs a punch. And as a bonus, Wilfred Owen returns for a brief appearance, even if it is only in time to get killed at the Sambre-Oise Canal (he died on November 4, exactly one week before Armistice; his mother received word of his death as church bells rang out victory — that part’s not in the novel). I would definitely read Regeneration and definitely skip the next two. Bizarrely, The Ghost Road is the one that actually won the Booker Award.
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Jan 05, 2013 David Monroe rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, book-to-re-read, fiction, historical-fiction

This is the 10th anniversary of first reading this amazing trilogy all the way through during a Summer Vacation. I really want to read these again this year. I actually would love to read them every 10 years and see how my thoughts and opinions change. If you get a chance, read this trilogy. Would definitively be on my 1,000 Books to Read before you die list.

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May 03, 2013 trishtrash rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biographical-fiction, historical-fiction, war

The third chapter in the Regeneration trilogy, and another powerful, moving, gripping look into Dr. Rivers' past, and the effects of WWI on his patients. As with The Eye in the Door we follow Billy Prior as much as Rivers (and, again, glimpses of other current cases in Rivers' London practice); this time we follow Prior back to France (where he fights alongside Wilfred Owen), and much of his story is given in diary excerpts. Rivers, meanwhile, having caught a flu with accompanying fever, reminis...more

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Jul 22, 2008 Karen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I can't say enough good about this trilogy. In an interview with Pat Barker, she described growing up in a home where she saw the lifetime of effects of WWI. Struggling with the effects of a war she didn't live through, her obsession lead to a brilliantly re-imagined world, much of it based on historical records.

She addresses the war from several angles: a brilliant psychologist, women who are freed to work in munitions factories, soldiers faced with moral and class conflicts.

The first book is...more

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Jan 17, 2009 Karlan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult

Winner of the 1995 Booker prize, this final novel in a trilogy can be read alone. The horror and futility of WWI are shown through the eyes of two main characters; Dr. Rivers, a real person who treated shell shock victims and Billy Prior, a fictional bisexual soldier who returns to battle after treatment. Chapters about Rivers memories of work with former headhunters in the South Seas provide interesting contrasts to the supposedly more civilized Europeans.

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Jan 13, 2009 Paula rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A powerful and moving exploration of WWI's devastation seen through the eyes of a psychiatrist ( W.H. Rivers, an actual doctor) who must cure shell shocked soldiers only to see them return to the Front. I particulary enjoyed the sections on his memories of a South Pacific tribe of cannibals who needed their death rituals in order to live life.

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Jun 04, 2007 Siria rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, british-fiction, historical-fiction, queer-lit

I saw the ending coming, which perhaps made this a little less gripping than the first two books in the trilogy. There is a certain sense of inevitability to it which lessens the tension—though I suppose it's fitting, given the subject matter and the protagonists' characters. The prose is as lucid and vivid as ever, beautifully constructed, and I was very impressed with how skilfully Barker drew parallels between the collapse of the long nineteenth century and the decay of the Melanesian headhun...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Fabian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Compared with (previous war novel read) “Empire of the Sun,” this WWI novel evades the actual battlefield, to the benefit of everyone, I suppose. No—this one is more “Best Years of Our Lives” with raunchy sex and modern yearnings for release, than, say, other bloody epics like "Gone with the Wind" and "The War at the End of the World". The men in "The Ghost Road" are basically hydra heads—they converge in their collective destroyed psyche—they all survive that same dire illness: the aftereffects...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Victoria Gill rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Victoria by: Book Club read

Shelves: book-club-reads

I'd read The Eye in the Door many years ago so it was good to close the trilogy, though I now remember little about the earlier books. I thought the flashbacks that Rivers experiences whilst suffering from his fever broke up the two main characters narratives in an original way though I'm not sure how much I enjoyed this part of the book, it seemed misplaced. It did make me think about the questions that British colonialism raises and how some of those might also apply to the First World War.

I t...more

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Jul 20, 2012 Emily Harris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites

This book brings the trilogy - a trio of books highly engaging and deeply important - to a crashing end. Barker returns to her characters Rivers and Prior, now well-loved by her readers, and uses them to explore the messy, stunted end of the war and the human debris it left in its wake as it stumbled to an end.

By splitting the narrative between protagonists, and through time, Barker emphasises the sense of fragmentation that governed the soldiers' war experience. Her individuals are caught betwe...more

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Jan 29, 2012 Ensiform rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, war

England, late 1918. Billy Prior, an officer who has three tours of duty under his belt, goes back to France for a fourth time. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist who once dealt with Prior, Dr. William Rivers, feverish with flu, finds himself mentally plunged back into his experiences with a tribe of south seas islanders, headhunters drenched in mysticism and ghost-ritual who are no longer allowed to hunt heads.

This book, which won the Booker Prize, seems to be the third of a trilogy which I missed. I did...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Al rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

‘The Ghost Road,“ the final book in Pat Barker’s WWI Regeneration trilogy, may the one that won the Booker Prize, but it’s the least rewarding of the three. In fact, it strikes me that unlike “Regeneration” and “The Eye in the Door,” the third book doesn’t stand well on its own, though it does work beautifully as a sequel. The reader really needs to have experienced the backstory of the relationship between Dr. Rivers and the emotionally scarred soldier Billy Prior to appreciate the events of “T...more

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Sep 01, 2011 Lisa (scarlet21) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Central to this novel are two men divided by class and experience, but sharing a mutual respect and empathy. One is Lieutenant Billy Prior, cured of shell shock by famed psychologist Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase in the late summer of 1918. The other is Dr. Rivers himself, consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back...more Central to this novel are two men divided by class and experience, but sharing a mutual respect and empathy. One is Lieutenant Billy Prior, cured of shell shock by famed psychologist Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase in the late summer of 1918. The other is Dr. Rivers himself, consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back to the battlefields and almost certain death. Billy Prior is a working-class man on the rise, a "temporary gentleman," who inhabits a sexual, social, and moral no-man's-land. His sexual encounters with both women and men are tinged with a cynical fatalism that the war has engendered. Still, he is eager to join a fellow Craiglockhart "graduate," the poet Wilfred Owen, in France in time to participate in the great English offensive, the "one last push" intended to redeem all the shining heroism and senseless slaughter that has gone before.

When this was chosen as our next book group books, I admit to a slight sinking feeling in my stomach; this was because the woman whose choice it was always chooses very worthy books, tales with meaning, which, although not a bad thing, can sometimes mean the books are heavy going. Speaking to a couple of other members, my heart sank more as they described a depressing, sordid tale with horrific characters! So, the book arrived today and having just finished one book, I started it, fully expecting to take a full week to plough through it. Imagine my relief when after reading the first page my own thought was that it was entirely readable, so I settle down to read a couple of chapters....here I am 8 hours later..finished.

It is a tale full of the cruelties, barbarity, horrors and sordity of life but told with such humanity and humour to make the telling bearable and the story almost enjoyable, altough there is a sickening inevitability to it too. Based on historic characters, which was in itself a surprise to me, it brings the full horrors of WW1 to the fore with clarity and compassion.

An amazing piece of writing. As Peter Parker for The Times Literary Supplement said, "....Intricately plotted, beautifully written, skilfully assembled, tender, horrifying and funny, it lives on in the imagination..."(less)

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Mar 17, 2013 Fred Naughton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This can be read as a stand-alone, but I'd recommend reading the other two books first.

The Ghost Road is not a perfect book by any means, but if you can regard the first two books as about individuals fighting against their memories, the spectre of the war, this last book is effectively about those things overwhelming the characters. That feels true to me, and feels true about any massive event like the 1st world war.

Barker isn't terribly good at fleshing out characters [compare this with the...more

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Jul 14, 2012 Joyce rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is the perfect ending to the Regeneration trilogy. Barker manages perfectly to tie together Rivers' anthropological studies of Malaysian headhunters, for whom the ban on warring with neighboring tribes was a debilitating blow to their culture, with soldiers fighting WWI. The premise in the first book, advanced by Siegfried Sassoon,was that the government was unnecessarily prolonging a war that could be ended with diplomacy. By the end of Ghost Road the war is almost over, but soldiers are f...more

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Jul 09, 2012 Giedre rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker-winners, my-very-best, lgbt, war, british, historical-fiction

I have just finished the book today and I have to say that it totally blew me away.

The third book of the trilogy centers mostly on two of all the characters who were present in the previous books, Rivers and Prior. Throughout the books the characters are developed into vivid, compelling, independent personalities. You can almost feel you knew them in real life after you finish the trilogy, they are so real, so well-developed.

Prior, as a character, shows all of his sides. He's witty, intelligen...more

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Mar 20, 2012 Courtney H. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookers

The Ghost Road is a puzzling book to rate and review. I have not yet read the first two books of Barker's World War I trilogy -- this being the last of them -- so cannot compare; for now, this review will have to stand alone.
On the one hand, it is a brutal, frank portrayal of World War I. Barker does a truly excellent job at poking it, prying it apart, dissecting the war -- which seems so huge and horrific and chaotic and brutal, a war where no one was good, particularly the good guys (this b...more The Ghost Road is a puzzling book to rate and review. I have not yet read the first two books of Barker's World War I trilogy -- this being the last of them -- so cannot compare; for now, this review will have to stand alone.
On the one hand, it is a brutal, frank portrayal of World War I. Barker does a truly excellent job at poking it, prying it apart, dissecting the war -- which seems so huge and horrific and chaotic and brutal, a war where no one was good, particularly the good guys (this being the war where England shot boys for getting shell shock). Like the snake Rivers wanted to dissect, she's taken on a nasty job and handled it, the telling of the war, deftly. She succeeds largely because she focuses on a few people in particular; by telling the war through their eyes she can narrow the lens, go deep rather than wide, with mere hints at the breadth of the war: when the light washed over the bridge further down the field of an ongoing battle; when Dr. Rivers moved on to different patients, old names being replaced by new patients. She also did a very good job with her historical fictionalizing of characters like Rivers himself and Wilfred Owen; they became fleshed out but without it seeming gimmicky, as some historical fiction can. I actually liked that she focused a great deal on Prior, an entirely fictionalized character. His (bi)sexuality was at the forefront of too much of the story, I thought; but I suppose he was who he was, and it was a useful, if obvious, character trait to contrast with the war itself and the death that surrounded Prior always, while he was in war and then via memory when he was sent home.
On the other hand, the voice of the novel was difficult to go with. Barker is a fantastic writer, and had she simply maintained a third person narrative the entire book, it would have been fine. Instead, a good chunk of the book that belongs to Prior's life is told via Prior's journal. Unfortunately, Prior's journal voice is exactly the same as Barker's narrator's voice. It was too incredulous to believe that Prior -- whom did not, as far as I can tell, make his living as a writer, like Owen -- wrote in the same lyrical prose that drips with description as Barker, nor that anyone with such writing capabilities would choose to exercise such writing when they're keeping a journal in trenches, on the eve or immediately after battle on the French frontlines. Barker needed to separate her voices, and she didn't, making it seem like the journal was made merely by her adding in dates and changing the "He" to "I." It took me out of a story that I should have been right in the thick of.
I also was never quite sure what to make of Rivers' recollections of Melanesia and his friend/research subject, Nijiru. In another book I might have just accepted that Rivers, surrounded by his war survivor patients, might revert to recollections of an earlier period in his life, but Barker clearly was driven by purpose in writing this novel, and so I felt like I should spend a lot of timing working the two stories into one, never quite succeeding. I interpreted this part of the story as an indictment of British colonialism, the blithe way in which it negligently dismantled entire societies, in part on the basis of curtailing the colonized society's more distasteful habits (headhunting), when England itself was entirely willing to send an entire generation of men to kill another country's generation of men and civilians. It illuminated the bizarre lines that civilization draws about when killing and violence is acceptable or correct. But there was more to the story, so much linked to death, and the spirits, and our living link to the dead and the spirits. And this, too, made sense; Rivers felt somewhat haunted by the men who, by curing, he sent back to the frontlines, desensitized and on the doorstep of death. But the pieces never quite fit. I think, in part, because Barker never really fleshed these characters out; even Nijiru never became a character, was never demystified into a person. I understand that we were viewing this society from the psychoanalyst Rivers' perspective, but it is dull to read always about colonialism, even indictments of it, from the point of the uncomfortable white man, where the actual people subjugated by colonialism are mere puzzle pieces to catalyze thoughts or reactions from the protagonist.
It left me wondering why it was there; to flesh out Rivers, I suppose, a real person who actually did visit and study Melanesia. But did we really need these comparisons to highlight the vagaries and relentless violence of the war? Barker already accomplished that, with her skilled unfolding of the life and death of Hallet, for example. Indeed, perhaps this is what was frustrating. The bread and butter of this book is Barker's ability to unfold the truth of the war and England's class system during wartime, through her introduction and careful development of relatively minor characters, like Hallet and Ada; few Melanesians were given the same treatment.
These are real quibble that I had with the book, but overall Barker really did do a masterful job at cutting through the layers of heroism and whitewashed history to delve into the war -- not merely to indict or demonize it, but simply to lay bare the layers of mental, physical, and emotional tolls that the war as a whole had on society, and the war as made up of individual battles, deaths, sacrifices, had on the individuals who fought in it or were affected by it. And given that we know the ending of the book -- or at least, anyone who knows about Wilfred Owen's life -- it remained a compelling, if terrible, read. Barker leads us on an inexorable march toward the books end, and traps us in futility of hoping we come to the end of the war first, before we come to more deaths. The book is brutal, unforgiving, and relentless; and it is this, perhaps more than anything else in the book, that makes real the bloody slog of those final months.
Despite the book's imperfections, it accomplished what it sought to do. The rest of the trilogy is absolutely on my list of future reads.
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Jan 02, 2012 Kathleen Hagen added it · review of another edition

The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker, Borrowed from the Library Services for the Blind, but available from audible.com as well.

In this, the final book of the trilogy, we are in 1918 in the last months of the war. We now have Prior and Dr. Rivers returned to the field. This book, more than the other two, deals with what it actually was like for the soldiers to fight in the trenches and be exposed to poisoned gas, used by both sides in that war. Dr. Rivers comes to the conclusion, at least with regard to...more

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Feb 04, 2011 Basicallyrun rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Look. I'm not saying I disliked this book, only that I came to it expecting more, it being the end of a trilogy and everything. I suppose I'm far too fond of happy endings and nice, neat resolutions, which... don't really happen here. (And it is a novel about the First World War, so really, what did I expect?) Actually, the end of Prior and Owen's stories was very beautifully done, I thought (though, *sniff*, did I mention I like happy endings?) So my main gripe with this book had to be the fact...more

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Feb 07, 2010 Becky rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Ghost Road is the third book in the Regeneration trilogy, and I have to say, I was disappointed. Rivers has moved to war torn London, still dealing with the young fall out from the devastating World War. Prior, a character from the periphery of Regeneration, who moved to the fore in The Eye In The Door, returns to France against Rivers's advice, and the story takes them both to the end of the War. In this respect, the novel was just as captivating and equally sobering as the first. What I co...more

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Sep 11, 2007 Deanne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favouritebooks, 1001bookstoreadbeforeyoudie

Set in a hospital dealing with soldiers who've been sent back from the front with Psychological problems, only for them to be patched up and sent back. Many of the characters really did exist, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
I remember discussing Owen's poems in English Lit on the waste of life during the war. It was even more tragic to find out that he was killed only days before the end of the WW1.

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Jan 20, 2010 Martine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british, glbt, historical-fiction, modern-fiction, psychological-drama, war

The final instalment in the Regeneration Trilogy struck me as a bit unfocused and heavy-handed in its use of symbolism and parallel storylines. However, certain scenes were very powerful, and the ending packed a punch.

I'm not sure why The Ghost Road rather than Regeneration or The Eye in the Door won the Booker Prize. I can only assume the Booker judges wanted to honour the trilogy somehow and so picked the last book to show their appreciation, much like the Academy showered The Return of the K...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction, 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, england, psychology, gay, world-war-1

Nice converging and diverging perspectives on the experiences of a British psychiatrist treating the psychologically traumatized in World War 1 and that of his "successful" patients who return to the front. This is the third part of a trilogy based on the real-life Dr. Trivers and his work in treating the gay poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and other soldiers whose "disorders" were a normal reaction to war experiences. In this volume, the main characher is Billy Prior, who despite injur...more

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May 01, 2013 Barbara rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In this third book of the trilogy we focus on Billy Prior and Dr. Rivers and less on the other characters. Dr. Rivers dreams of his time in Melanesia studying the head hunters. Interesting is that he notices after the Western governments prohibited headhunting, the native people stopped reproducing at the same rate and the population was decreasing. They seemed to need that "high" of war to keep them active. t reminded me of Billy Prior who despite his asthma which could alone have landed him a...more

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Jan 08, 2012 Catherine rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookcrossing, more-than-once

How much research did Barker do for these?!

Following a link in Wikipaedia to the relevant part of Rivers' work, I was impressed by how credible her theory of the causes of his lack of visual memory became and how the writer of the latter meshed in my head with the voice given him in the novel.
For me this was less a story of the First World War and more one of the development of psychology and the role of reflection, discussion and challenging friends in the growth of ideas: Rivers' advances i...more

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Dec 03, 2011 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british-lit, war, historical-novels

I can't decide if it's a virtue or flaw of Barker's ability that by this last volume of the trilogy of historical novels the most compelling character is the only (among major characters) fully fictional one? Though intellectually engaging and vividly written in passages, the sections describing Rivers's experience among Pacific head-hunting tribes pale in comparison to Billy Prior's story. Though reasonably well intergrated within structure of entire novel, the Rivers's sections seem designed m...more

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Sep 06, 2010 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Barker's final volume of the "Great War Trilogy" does an admirable job of bringing the series to its expected but none-the-less tragic conclusion. Although The Ghost Road deserves the five stars I awarded it and the Booker prize, it does so in large measure because of what has come before. Barker has created a trilogy in which each volume points the way forward toward the inevitable ending, but in which the final volume suffuses the whole with a new level of meaning as the reader reflects on the...more

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Feb 11, 2013 AJ Sefton rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites

I read this as a stand-alone, and read the trilogy later. This is by far the best of the three books.

I enjoy any kind of psychological tale and the warfare element lent another level of psychological distress.I enjoyed the mix of fictional and historical characters (this is a period I know very well) and the real people were portrayed in a fresh new light.

Barker's use of language is quite original and it is this that makes her a worthy winner. The whole 'regeneration' concept is unique and made...more

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About Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. She was educated at the London School of Economics and has been a teacher of history and politics.

Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy Regeneration ; The Eye in the Door , winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road , winner of the Booker Prize; as well as seven other novels. Pat Barker is married and lives in Du...more

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Quotes from The Ghost Road

“We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.” — 6 people liked it

“Murder is only killing in the wrong place.” — 2 people liked it

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483606-the-ghost-road?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347448911l/3483606.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3483606-the-ghost-road?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Ghost Road by Pat Barker[/url]

The Ghost Road (Regeneration #3)

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