The first book of the year! And boy, it kind of did me in. It's the second book in the Regeneration trilogy, and I think I may actually like it even better than the first one. But that may be because I have a better understanding of who these characters are now, rather than the inherent quality, and either way reading the second book made me want to immediately reread the first one.
Part of what made this book hit so hard is that the focus is narrower; the protagonist is very clearly Billy Prior, who we follow through most of the novel. He's left the hospital for shellshocked soldiers and is now working for the Office of Munitions in London, helping the government spy on the pacifist movement. He's also having quite a bit of sex, some of it with a man named Charles Manning, who's an upper class officer out of the war with a leg wound. Another reason why I immediately liked this book is definitely that it's gay in a very different way than the first one. Pat Barker writes about bodies and how they fit together with such simple yet visceral language, and using that for both sex of all varieties as well as war violence as well as medical treatments is so effective. There's a common thread there that feels so grounded, which matches the character of Prior. He's grounded in his body, but his mind is split - he disassociates and blacks out, repeatedly, which also gives the book something of a mystery feel.
Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. Rivers both come back as well, Sassoon after he's wounded in France. And he's also split, between what he told himself in order to accept going back and what the reality was. Dr. Rivers is also coming apart, even as he patches each of them back together.
The women in this novel are also wonderful: Prior's girlfriend Sarah, who he only gets two days with, and two women from his childhood who are both convicted on trumped up charges of anti-war behavior. The book captures the division between civilian life and the front beautifully, and you see how unworkable the fracture was, what the people back at home had to believe, or else the only thing they could do was work against the war effort. But of course, from Prior's point of view, that didn't help any of the boys in France, either.
I believe the first book in the trilogy was either the final novel assigned in a literature course I took, but we never got there in the syllabus, or it was required reading for a class I wanted to take but wasn't able to. Either way, I regret not having had the opportunity to study these books; there's so much in them that I actually want to be able to take the time with them and discuss them with others. But this will have to do. Onto the final one next.
Grade: A
