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Book Review: Regeneration
Sep. 12th, 2022 12:49 pmI truly intended not to buy any more books till I finished the items on my to-read shelf, but I was in Bloomington on Saturday and when I stopped by Caveat Emptor, Pat Barker’s Regeneration was on display, and it demanded to be read.
Regeneration is the first book of the Regeneration trilogy. (I have already put the other two on hold at the library.) Siegfried Sassoon has just sent a declaration denouncing the war to the newspapers, and his friend Robert Graves, desperate to keep Sassoon from being court-martialed (also perhaps desperate to avoid facing the reasons why he has not made a similar declaration when he agrees with Sassoon), has arranged for Sassoon to face a Medical Board that can pronounce him mentally incompetent and send him to Craiglockheart, the premier hospital for shell-shock cases.
Here Sassoon meets Rivers, the competent, compassionate doctor in charge, a sensitive and empathetic man who sees the damage the war has wrought to the young men in his care. And yet it’s his job to convince Sassoon to go back.
They develop a thorny and ethically complicated friendship: a sort of ongoing cat-and-mouse conversation where both are the cat and both are the mouse and both half-want to be caught. Sassoon wants to go back, so he can stop living in this hellish safety while his friends fight. Rivers wants to believe the war isn’t worth it, so he can stop sending young men back to die. And yet with equal force they also both believe the opposite thing: Sassoon that he must stay out of the war to complete his protest, Rivers that the war has to be fought.
This friendship forms the backbone of the book, but threaded throughout are other subplots involving Rivers’ other patients, as well as the developing theories of shell-shock and the treatment thereof. There is a hellish chapter where Rivers witnesses another doctor treating a man’s psychologically-induced mutism with hours of electroshock. I would put “treating” in quotation marks, except that the method does in fact work… but at what cost?
(There is one chapter where Rivers visits a released patient who is now living in a seaside cottage, where said patient suffers a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown during a storm. Glad I didn’t read this book while I was writing The Larks Still Bravely Singing or the comparison might have robbed me of the strength to go on.)
It’s just really good, so well-done. So many of the characters have complicated, contradictory feelings, which they often barely understand (or sometimes can’t bear to confront), and Barker sketches them in with a light deft hand so they’re always comprehensible to the readers.
And I just love books that are structured in part as a conversation between two characters. I’ve seen this done really well in stories featuring an interrogation (Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s The Far Side of Evil; the movie Sophie Scholl - The Final Days) and there is something of that quality here, as well, even though Rivers is a doctor and he is, technically, supposed to help Sassoon get well - where “well” is defined as “ready and willing to go back to battle.” And Rivers is painfully aware that this is a definition of wellness that makes him in a sense Sassoon’s antagonist, indeed the enemy of all his patients, because he is getting them well enough to go off and die.
Regeneration is the first book of the Regeneration trilogy. (I have already put the other two on hold at the library.) Siegfried Sassoon has just sent a declaration denouncing the war to the newspapers, and his friend Robert Graves, desperate to keep Sassoon from being court-martialed (also perhaps desperate to avoid facing the reasons why he has not made a similar declaration when he agrees with Sassoon), has arranged for Sassoon to face a Medical Board that can pronounce him mentally incompetent and send him to Craiglockheart, the premier hospital for shell-shock cases.
Here Sassoon meets Rivers, the competent, compassionate doctor in charge, a sensitive and empathetic man who sees the damage the war has wrought to the young men in his care. And yet it’s his job to convince Sassoon to go back.
They develop a thorny and ethically complicated friendship: a sort of ongoing cat-and-mouse conversation where both are the cat and both are the mouse and both half-want to be caught. Sassoon wants to go back, so he can stop living in this hellish safety while his friends fight. Rivers wants to believe the war isn’t worth it, so he can stop sending young men back to die. And yet with equal force they also both believe the opposite thing: Sassoon that he must stay out of the war to complete his protest, Rivers that the war has to be fought.
This friendship forms the backbone of the book, but threaded throughout are other subplots involving Rivers’ other patients, as well as the developing theories of shell-shock and the treatment thereof. There is a hellish chapter where Rivers witnesses another doctor treating a man’s psychologically-induced mutism with hours of electroshock. I would put “treating” in quotation marks, except that the method does in fact work… but at what cost?
(There is one chapter where Rivers visits a released patient who is now living in a seaside cottage, where said patient suffers a brief but comprehensive nervous breakdown during a storm. Glad I didn’t read this book while I was writing The Larks Still Bravely Singing or the comparison might have robbed me of the strength to go on.)
It’s just really good, so well-done. So many of the characters have complicated, contradictory feelings, which they often barely understand (or sometimes can’t bear to confront), and Barker sketches them in with a light deft hand so they’re always comprehensible to the readers.
And I just love books that are structured in part as a conversation between two characters. I’ve seen this done really well in stories featuring an interrogation (Sylvia Louise Engdahl’s The Far Side of Evil; the movie Sophie Scholl - The Final Days) and there is something of that quality here, as well, even though Rivers is a doctor and he is, technically, supposed to help Sassoon get well - where “well” is defined as “ready and willing to go back to battle.” And Rivers is painfully aware that this is a definition of wellness that makes him in a sense Sassoon’s antagonist, indeed the enemy of all his patients, because he is getting them well enough to go off and die.
