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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5872.Regeneration?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Regeneration" border="0" src="http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165553447m/5872.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5872.Regeneration?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Regeneration</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4000.Pat_Barker">Pat Barker</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8205975?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars 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 Pacifist Seigfried Sassoon, the vulnerable Wilfred Owen, and a fictitious poltergeist of a character named Billy Prior. Howeverm, I have been struggling with the role Ms. Barker assigns to male homosexuality in the second book, The Eye in the Door and the final Booker Prize winning The Ghost Road. 
 
 I was full of high praise for this book new to me, which tied in with my love of the late Victorians and the Trench poets. When I began the second volume, I experienced the shell shock of reading a very graphic homoerotic encounter. There was no warning that Billy Prior, after trying unsuccessfully to seduce a young woman in the greenery of Hyde Park, later meets a fellow officer, accompanies him to his bomb-damaged house and there follows a scene more appropriate for “Studs on Parade.” I was horrified, not by the act but by the brutality of the act. I was willing to accept Billy’s sadistic affair with Manning as a symptom of his dysfunction. He seemed genuinely in love with a munitions factory worker named Sarah whom he had met in Scotland while on leave from the hospital and enjoyed their rolls in the hay. What I did not realize was that this scene was just the preface for other surreal scenese like Prior in the alley with his drunken old wet nurse recreating his infancy
 
 
 Prior seems to be recovering under Rivers treatment, yet he careens between having quickies with the girl while the Mum is at a séance to bribing a young French peasant with cigarettes after he has returned to duty on the front. The scenes are unforgivingly brutal
 
 Some critics state that Billy’s dysfunction is analogous to the dysfunction of the world. While he loves, his love is reeling out of control. To complicate matters, Billy is asthmatic---he can’t breathe due to emotional distress but this is at least a reasonable connection to the suffocating slaughter on the fields of France and the drowning death of poison gas. 
 
 These scenes continue through the final book, The Ghost Road, but the denouement of the drama in the lives of these men is paired in a most unusual way with the recounting of Rivers’ past life in Melanesia when as a young anthropolgist, he lived among the Headhunters. He becomes close with Njiru, the shaman of a tribe, who teaches him the ways of the tribe of warriors. Rivers, an historic personality, never wrote his book on his soujourn but Barker connects the beliefs of these islanders, who come across as civilized, to the lowering demon of the World War that devoured so many young men’s hearts, heads and souls. One of the spirits that Njiru “knows” and can exorcise is named Ave. 
 
 Ave lives is Ysabel. He is both one spirit and many spirits. His mouth is long and filled with the blood of the men he devours…..the broken rainbow belongs to him, and presages both epidemic disease and war. Ave is the destroyer of peoples. 
 
 Njiru teaches Rivers the exorcism for this spirit of rapacious war and death, and indeed Rivers is able to face on the evils of war as they afflict and kill Prior, Owen and most of their comrades. There is no peaceful or happy future projected here. There is not even any heroism. There is the Peace eventually, but is it not a peace in this brutal society man seems to have spawned, that surpasses all understanding.
 
 
 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/453699?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Gina's review
rating:

recommended for: LOOKING FOR A LITTLE KNOWN MASTERPIECE
status: Read in January, 2002

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 Pacifist Seigfried Sassoon, the vulnerable Wilfred Owen, and a fictitious poltergeist of a character named Billy Prior. Howeverm, I have been struggling with the role Ms. Barker assigns to male homosexuality in the second book, The Eye in the Door and the final Booker Prize winning The Ghost Road.

I was full of high praise for this book new to me, which tied in with my love of the late Victorians and the Trench poets. When I began the second volume, I experienced the shell shock of reading a ver...more 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 Pacifist Seigfried Sassoon, the vulnerable Wilfred Owen, and a fictitious poltergeist of a character named Billy Prior. Howeverm, I have been struggling with the role Ms. Barker assigns to male homosexuality in the second book, The Eye in the Door and the final Booker Prize winning The Ghost Road.

I was full of high praise for this book new to me, which tied in with my love of the late Victorians and the Trench poets. When I began the second volume, I experienced the shell shock of reading a very graphic homoerotic encounter. There was no warning that Billy Prior, after trying unsuccessfully to seduce a young woman in the greenery of Hyde Park, later meets a fellow officer, accompanies him to his bomb-damaged house and there follows a scene more appropriate for “Studs on Parade.” I was horrified, not by the act but by the brutality of the act. I was willing to accept Billy’s sadistic affair with Manning as a symptom of his dysfunction. He seemed genuinely in love with a munitions factory worker named Sarah whom he had met in Scotland while on leave from the hospital and enjoyed their rolls in the hay. What I did not realize was that this scene was just the preface for other surreal scenese like Prior in the alley with his drunken old wet nurse recreating his infancy

Prior seems to be recovering under Rivers treatment, yet he careens between having quickies with the girl while the Mum is at a séance to bribing a young French peasant with cigarettes after he has returned to duty on the front. The scenes are unforgivingly brutal

Some critics state that Billy’s dysfunction is analogous to the dysfunction of the world. While he loves, his love is reeling out of control. To complicate matters, Billy is asthmatic---he can’t breathe due to emotional distress but this is at least a reasonable connection to the suffocating slaughter on the fields of France and the drowning death of poison gas.

These scenes continue through the final book, The Ghost Road, but the denouement of the drama in the lives of these men is paired in a most unusual way with the recounting of Rivers’ past life in Melanesia when as a young anthropolgist, he lived among the Headhunters. He becomes close with Njiru, the shaman of a tribe, who teaches him the ways of the tribe of warriors. Rivers, an historic personality, never wrote his book on his soujourn but Barker connects the beliefs of these islanders, who come across as civilized, to the lowering demon of the World War that devoured so many young men’s hearts, heads and souls. One of the spirits that Njiru “knows” and can exorcise is named Ave.

Ave lives is Ysabel. He is both one spirit and many spirits. His mouth is long and filled with the blood of the men he devours…..the broken rainbow belongs to him, and presages both epidemic disease and war. Ave is the destroyer of peoples.

Njiru teaches Rivers the exorcism for this spirit of rapacious war and death, and indeed Rivers is able to face on the evils of war as they afflict and kill Prior, Owen and most of their comrades. There is no peaceful or happy future projected here. There is not even any heroism. There is the Peace eventually, but is it not a peace in this brutal society man seems to have spawned, that surpasses all understanding.

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