Volume 43, Number 3 · February 15, 1996
Death's Gray Land
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Ghost Road
by Pat Barker
Dutton/A William Abrahams Book, 278 pp., $21.95
Regeneration
by Pat Barker
Plume, 252 pp., $10.95 (paper)
The Eye in the Door
by Pat Barker
Plume, 280 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Until Pat Barker's Regeneration, the first book of her World War I trilogy, appeared in 1991, she was modestly respected for her novels of life in the urban wastelands of northern England, harsh and knowledgeable and showing a wonderful ear for the local idiom. But in the trilogy—Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and now The Ghost Road—she found a subject that energized her work, sending it in a whole range of new directions, and making her one of the most deserving winners of the prestigious Booker fiction prize in recent years. The core of the subject was the meetings that took place in 1917 between Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and the psychiatrist/anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, recorded in several autobiographies. But she has branched out imaginatively around this factual core in a number of ways. Courage and its limits, love between males both Platonic and erotic, the nature of therapeutic healing, and—because of the appalling nature of that particular war—the brutality of dying and the tenuousness of any counterbalance to it, the themes unfold gradually throughout the three books.
Review, 3651 words
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