The Ghost Road

So, the basics first off.  The Ghost Road is the third book in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.  I read Regeneration itself when I was 18 and studying it for my A-Levels.  It tells the story of Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War protest, and his subsequent time in Craiglockhart hospital.  If I’m honest, the main parts of the story I remember are Sassoon’s discussions about poetry with fellow patient Wilfred Owen.  I skipped book two in the trilogy- The Eye in the Door (this in itself is big news for me, as I do like to read a complete trilogy in order).  All of this meant that I wasn’t too sure what to expect when it came to The Ghost Road.  Less sex, definitely.

The book follows two characters from Regeneration, real person Dr William Rivers and significantly more fictional Billy Prior, in the last few months of World War One.  As Prior shags his way through England and France, Rivers mopes, reminisces and occasionally does his job. 

I think I’m making it sound like I didn’t enjoy the book, but I really did.  The two stories play out almost entirely separately, barring one conversation and a few letters and it’s not until Barker gets all thematic that there’s a connection between the two.  Ultimately, it’s impossible not to draw links between the futile lives of soldiers unable and unwilling to stay away from the front and the concept of “Mate”- described as “a state of which death [is] the appropriate outcome"- that Rivers encounters.

There’s also a wicked strain of dark humour in the book that’s much appreciated.  It’s no real task to make a book that is, essentially, about the death and disease of a lot of people sad, but Barker makes it funny too.  One of Rivers’s patients is convinced his penis has been cut off and pickled by a nurse, and then he’s mortally offended when asked how he urinates.  Naturally, this dries up somewhat when the business of dying actually starts, but futile massacres do so rarely get belly laughs.

There’s another of Pat Barker’s books I have lined up.  It’s been sitting on my shelf for months, but (going by blurb alone), it’s about the War too, and its general inescapability.  There’s a childish part of me that’s been resisting reading it because the horrors of World War One are everywhere now we’re approaching the centenary.  It feels like you can’t turn on a history programme or even the One Show without some clued up expert shuffling in and muttering “War is Hell.”  Reading this has changed my mind (not about the documentaries- none of them can express the pity of war and all that as well as a single Wilfred Owen poem), but about reading Another World.  It’s definitely getting bumped up the list. 

Next time, I’ll be writing about much hated Virginia Woolf’s The Years…