A book I have owned forever! I genuinely have no memory of why I decided I needed to buy this, but it has the permanently affixed used book price sticker from my college bookstore, so I have owned it for at least...twenty years. And after finally reading it, I can say: it is very good!
This is set during World War I in Scotland, at the mental hospital where soldiers and officers are sent when their bodies are well enough to fight but their minds are not. The focus is on fictionalized portrayals of a doctor at the hospital, Dr. Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon, a poet who has been hospitalized for his pacifist views, and Wilfred Owens, a young man who experienced significant shell shock and also begins to write about it with Sassoon's encouragement, as well as a number of fictional characters. It is bracing and infuriating and also it had a really strong resonance for me today; the feeling of being stuck in something terrible and also so much larger than yourself that there's so little you can actually do about any of it is quite familiar! It's a book that I think I would have enjoyed if I had read it when I was in my early twenties, but I don't think I would have gotten the same punch from it. Or maybe I would have: that was just when the U.S. was about to invade Afghanistan, an invasion that has lasted for almost as long as I've owned this book.
This is the first in a trilogy, and my hope is to read the second and third books at the start of 2022. Here's hoping.
Grade: A
