Regeneration
by Pat Barker
|
|
Sign in to Goodreads to see your friends' reviews of Regeneration.
discuss this book
friend reviews (0)
To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
lists with this book
This book is not in any lists. Go add it to a list.
other reviews (showing 1-20 of 879)
Read in January, 2002
recommends it for:
LOOKING FOR A LITTLE KNOWN MASTERPIECE
It may take a while to sort this Trilogy out as the British so charmingly put it. Who is the hero? Obviously, Rivers, the charismatic and conflicted psychiatirist who fixes up Sassoon and Owen and a fictional character named Billy Prior perhaps kin to Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five.
The story begins in Scotland far, but not that far in the landscape of the mind, from the trenches in France. The patients who occupy Rivers - an historical personage like many in this series---are the Paci...more
The story begins in Scotland far, but not that far in the landscape of the mind, from the trenches in France. The patients who occupy Rivers - an historical personage like many in this series---are the Paci...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in February, 2006
Trin got this as a present for me, telling me no more than that I should read it because I would love it. It's kind of scary how well she knows my tastes. Regeneration is the first of a trilogy of novels set during the Great War. This first novel centers on the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his time at a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, the place where he was sent to 'recover' under the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers after he began raising protests about the war.
There are no words for how m...more
There are no words for how m...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in March, 2007
recommends it for:
anyone
An excellent novel - well written and moving. Then again, I'm always a sucker for literature addressing WWI (actually, I think "the Great War" is a more fitting label for WWI) because it reminds me about the staggering losses that shook Europe early in the twentieth century and the enormous artistic response to the war. Although this was written in 1991, the novel manages to capture the artistic spirit, the disillusionment, and the horror of the Great War. I do have two criticisms, how...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in April, 2008
Regeneration is a quiet, but powerful book. You get an impression of what it might have been like to be a soldier in WWI, but since it's told from the perspective of a mental hospital, rather than the battlefield, you're able to stay detached and thoughtful about the experiences.
I didn't know much about the book going into it, and I wasn't aware that the stories that are told are those of (mostly) real people. Until I met the Wilfred Owen character, I simply assumed that all of these people...more
I didn't know much about the book going into it, and I wasn't aware that the stories that are told are those of (mostly) real people. Until I met the Wilfred Owen character, I simply assumed that all of these people...more
Like this review?
yes
1 comments
At the time of writing this I'm in the midst of reading Birdsong, which is what prompted me to come back to this book. I had previously given it five stars and listed it as a desert-island book, without having actually commented on it. There are a couple of great WWI novels out there: most of Erich Maria Remarque's work, some of Hemingway, perhaps The Enormous RoomThe Enormous Room ...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in April, 2008
I stumbled on this book because of a NY Times review/interview on Pat Barker's latest. I'm so glad I did and want to work my way through all of her novels.
Regeneration is set in a British mental hospital during World War I. An officer, who has written a letter opposing the war, is sent to the hospital to be "cured" of his opposition.
The novel follows the internal lives of him and several of the soldiers facing shell shock and that of the psycho-analyst assigned to work with t...more
Regeneration is set in a British mental hospital during World War I. An officer, who has written a letter opposing the war, is sent to the hospital to be "cured" of his opposition.
The novel follows the internal lives of him and several of the soldiers facing shell shock and that of the psycho-analyst assigned to work with t...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
I became interested in Barker after reading an article on her in The New Yorker and this book didn't disappoint. Set during World War I, in a mental hospital where soldiers are treated for psychological problems, Regeneration evokes the horrors of war and the damage that soldiers carry with them for years afterward. I appreciated the compassion of the doctor (a main character) and the very human struggle he felt in dealing with difficult, unlikable men. He suffered exhaustion and sometimes see...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Pat Barker is a riveting novelist who focuses in a variety of ways on human distress, disturbance, endurance, and recovery. She is an acute observer of British social class, women's lives, the inclination to violence, the difficult of wrestling with conflicting sides of personality. The trilogy Regeneration brings vividly to life the agonies of World War I. Her engaging historical research results in riveting portraits of W. H. Rivers, a celebrated psychiatrist noted for his work in developi...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in April, 2008
A quiet, deceptive look at WWI, based on real-life persons and their lives during it. Starring the famous psychiatrist William Rivers and his most famous patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who is best known for his satirical antiwar poetry, the book examines their time together in a hospital, as well as a look at many other patients. It's written quiet deceptively, with a quiet, gray sheen over the entire thing. You don't fully realize how devastating the book is until you reach the end and...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in March, 2008
An interesting novel to say the least, in particular how well it renders the issues of the characters during the first World War. Barker is an economical writer, as this novel clocks in at 250 pages but remains large, in terms of character and theme. In particular, Barker's almost unvoiced treatment of homosexuality in the book seems appropriate, in particular in her exchanges between Sassoon and Rivers, where it is present in their minds but, until the end, is unspoken. This one takes a litt...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
World War I is a favorite time period of mine. That said, I tend to dislike serious attempts at literature about a time other than our own, that is, I don't mind Gore Vidal writing an entertaining book about Aaron Burr, but I'm a little more suspicious of a contemporary writing literature about, say, 17th century Britain. However, Barker really pulls it off in this book, mostly set in a mental ward during WWI, a mental ward that happened to house Wilfred Owen and Sigfriend Sassoon. This was t...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
5 comments
This is an incredibly powerful piece of fiction. Barker has the perfect entry into World War One -- by placing us in a mental institution for shell shocked soldiers. With each patient, we get flashes of trench warfare, leaving you with the experience of WWI a history book could never provide you. The subject matter is so rich-- all the characters are historically accurate, and showing us the war through the two greatest anti-war poets is fantastic. You leave the book feeling passionate about poe...more
Like this review?
yes
(1 person liked it)
4 comments
Taught this novel in freshmen seminar titled "Law and Literature." Majority of class voted it their favorite work, a true testament to Barker's skill, as many of our students tend toward hyper-patriotic and conservative views, but by end of novel, they came to have great sympathy for Sassoon's dilemma of wanting to decry the insanity of the war's absurd strategy and stay loyal to his men. Though Barker's sympathies are pretty clear, instead of knocking down straw-men with two-dimensi...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in June, 2004
This is the first book of the Regeneration Trilogy (the other two are Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road). These books give a wonderful perspective on World War I for soldiers and doctors in Great Britain. Focusing on the mental health of soldiers, and treatment methods used on soldiers, Barker sets much of the three books in a psychiatric hospital in Scotland used to prepare shell-shocked soldiers to return to the front.
The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize, but I think it was really awarde...more
The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize, but I think it was really awarde...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in January, 2006
This book is part fiction, part reality. Set in a Scottish hospital during WWI, the story revolves around real life doctor Capt. Rivers and the soldier patients he deals with (including poets Wilfred Owen and Sigfried Sassoon).
It's an interesting psychological look at the effects of war on soldiers. My favorite aspect of the book was the focus on poetry: how Wilfred Owen worked and reworked his poems under Sassoon's tutelage, how war is too great an experience to completely exorcise completely...more
It's an interesting psychological look at the effects of war on soldiers. My favorite aspect of the book was the focus on poetry: how Wilfred Owen worked and reworked his poems under Sassoon's tutelage, how war is too great an experience to completely exorcise completely...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in March, 2008
Despite the cover, this book is more about the aftermath of war than war. Set in a remote mental hospital for war veterans, we hear and see all the ways war can scar a mind. We also meet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated hero turned war protester, who is sent to the hospital to reconsider his views and avoid court martial. Some of the book is very moving, especially some of the stories the patients tell about their experiences; but some how the part I liked best was a romance between a patient a...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in November, 2004
A magnificent novel of World War I. Siegfried Sassoon has been sent to a hopsital for shell-shocked soldiers, where his newly found pacifism is to be treated as a mental illness. Dr. Rivers, the brilliant, overworked physician assigned to his case, must try to change Sassoon's mind. But Rivers himself is beginning to have doubts, as he sees the way that the war has affected the men in his charge as as the casualties mount. One of the fascinating aspects of this novel is the fact that warfare at ...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in January, 1997
For a history loving Anglophile like myself, this book has almost everything one could ask for in a novel. Class conflict, snobbery, neurasthenia, boche killing poets (both homosexual and ambiguously bi-sexual), gentleman's clubs, Freudian analysis, and munitions stained factory girls. It's a faultless tempest! There are plenty of other reviews of this on here, so I won't add much except to say that this book is a classic. If you haven't read it, you really should. It's weighty and powe...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in August, 2007
I liked the idea of this book more than the book itself. It's a promising conceit - the lives of these WWI poets intersecting in a psychiatric hospital - but Barker kind of lost me in her attempts to 'flesh out' these characters. I felt there was too much direct description, too much her telling me the nuanced ways these guys felt rather than letting me discover them for myself. Some of the ideas in this book are compelling and several of the doctor's revelations toward the end enlightening, but...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
Read in January, 2006
Ever since reading Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est in high school, I've been drawn to and facinated by the psyche of those who survived the trenches of WWI, only to be savaged further once home. This is a sensitive look at the barriers that the British stiff-upper-lip put to the recuperation of England's war-wounded and the inadequacy of medicine and psychiatry at the time (still?) to deal with the damage of sens...more
Like this review?
yes
add a comment
