I've finished reading Pat Barker's Regeneration, and gone straight out and bought The Eye In The Door and The Ghost Road, which complete the trilogy. I can't wait to read them. I love it when I get this excited by a book. Naturally it's all the better when there are subsequent volumes to be read.
It's often the ideas that the author explores in a book that grab me. Pat Barker has a lot of great ideas about World War I as a pivotal point in how we think about that triangular relationship between men, women, and those who govern us. It was a time when people were eager for change, and this was showing up in all sorts of areas. Barker connects several of these very neatly.
In Regeneration, World War I represents several breaking points. Battle-traumatised officers, in particular war poet Siegfried Sassoon, come to the conclusion that their political masters could no longer demand such systematic sacrifice from the men it governed. Female munitions workers, including suffragettes on temporary political cease-fire, attain new earning power and freedom. Each exemplify a group that reaches towards a new relationship with politics.
This is of course also the time when psychiatry was a new science. It's brought in alongside the other new technologies of war in the shape of Dr Rivers. His job is to cure the traumatised and get them back to the front. However, Rivers can't help feeling that the outwardly bizzare behaviours of his patients are in their own way perfectly reasonable reactions to industrialised mass warfare. Preventive medicine is the best cure - peace.
So poet and psychologist are united in their challenge to an archaic, partiarchal political culture. I like that.
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