This is by Pat Barker, and it was published in 1991. Though not originally planned that way, it became the first of a trilogy.

I'd read it before, but was up for a re-read when Simon Haisell chose it for his book group.

We began reading at the beginning of April... The Iran debacle had been unfolding for just over a month then. Israel had been pounding Gaza for two and a half years. The Ukraine meat-grinder had dragged on for more than four years. More than ever, the curse brought down on our heads by poor global leadership seemed to make this book doubly relevant.

Regeneration opens with the open letter of protest that Siegfried Sassoon sent to the British authorities in 1917. Its phrases seemed eerily timely: "the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation"; "ends which I believe to be evil and unjust"; "political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed"; "protest against the deception which is being practised on them"... Etc.

The novel introduces us to W.H.R. Rivers, a former anthropologist who is now serving as army psychiatrist at Craiglockhart Military Hospital near Edinburgh. This is where officers who were victims of shell shock were sent during World War I. Rivers is a real historical personage, as are some of those he treats: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Among the fictional characters introduced to provide contrast are Billy Prior, who is admitted with mutism and memory loss, and Sarah Lumb, a local "munitionette", who becomes his girlfriend. Many of the fictional characters' stories are based on the case histories Rivers recorded in a posthumously published book.



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I'm going to record the impressions from my first read, completed at the end of January 2013. I was positive then, and nothing has changed my mind:

"Barker's description -- very lightly but effectively done -- is excellent. The weather in the various scenes (storms, melancholy autumns) underlines the turbulence of the characters and the historical events; the locales (hospitals, cafes, British seaside places) are brilliantly evoked.

"The sense of reality released by the snippets from Dr Rivers' case-notes is intense. Every doorway at Craiglockhart offers a cameo of the horror still unfolding across the Channel (audibly if you're in within southern England. And each is a little puzzle that needs to be solved, as he probes the particular anguish that has reduced grown men to stammering, vomiting, nightmare-ridden shadows of their former selves.

"Rivers is a fascinating character in himself -- compassionate, conscientious, but obviously fighting many demons of his own.

"The novel concludes with a paradox. Sassoon, the once and now always war-doubter, is off to fight in France again (which is what he wants). Rivers, who once believed in the war's necessity, despite its awfulness, has had many yards of this particular rug ripped out from under his feet.

"Barker ably (but never portentously, mostly through the medium of conversation) explores the many levels of warfare wracking Europe at that time. Geopolitical warfare, obviously, with a continent bifurcated along alliance lines. But also class warfare (officers were on average five inches shorter than their "men"; and Billy Prior's class background means he is never quite at home among his brother officers, and is much more comfortable with Sarah); gender warfare (Sarah's mother believes there can be no real love between the sexes, and changing mores were then stirring that particular pot even further); sexuality warfare (glimmers of greater pre-war tolerance of homosexuality were being extinguished in an era when comradeship was extolled, but only if rigorously stripped of any sexual connotations); and political warfare (even conservatives like Rivers start to turn on a polity that so callously consumes its youth)."


Rivers, photographed outside Craiglockhart, 1917


Siegfried Sassoon, taken by Lady Ottoline Morrell

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As always, Haisell's "footnotes and tangents" brought to the surface elements I'd missed, and added depth to those I was familiar with. Most of the links below derive from his weekly postings:

1. The poetry that came out of WWI

There are numerous references to Sassoon's and Owen's work in Regeneration. And there's an interesting conversation about Anthem for Doomed Youth, which Barker built on the basis of Owen's manuscript corrections.


Anthem for Doomed Youth

Many of these famous war poems first became part of me in high school. I'm not exaggerating when I say "part of me". I remember very clearly how they moved me; I remember reciting them quietly to myself. They shaped me, I would say. I'm not a pacifist. Some wars have to be fought. But most don't... And there's no war that isn't a tragedy. Peace is always better.

So it was instructive to be reminded of poems I knew, and introduced to new ones. I particularly appreciated Haisell's links to clips where actors read some of the best known:

-- Suicide in the Trenches (Sassoon), read by Stephen Graham
-- Anthem for Doomed Youth (Owen), read by Sean Bean
-- Dulce et Decorum Est (Owen), read by Christopher Eccleston
-- Attack (Sassoon), read by Helen Mirren


Arms and the Man, by Siegfried Sassoon

I didn't really know about The Hydra, Craiglockhart's in-house journal. Its work was encouraged by Arthur Brock, one of Rivers' colleagues, who championed the idea that physical and mental work was the best way to treat his shell-shocked patients. Much of The Hydra's content was the run-of-the-mill stuff of community life, but it also become an outlet for some of the most important poetry to emerge during WWI.


The Hydra. The contents have been preserved here

2. The idiocy of war

It's generally Billy Prior who spills the beans about the bumbling and cruelty of WWI. We hear of the barbaric punishments imposed at the front. And of the authorities' absurdly anachronistic faith in cavalry charges. (By contrast, they underestimated the role of the Maxim, the world's first fully automatic machine gun. Haisell tells us: "The future military leaders of the First World War, Herbert Kitchener, Douglas Haig, and Winston Churchill, were all present at the Battle of Omdurman [where the machine gun had decimated the Sudanese]. And yet in 1914, they were still convinced the Maxim would not play a significant role in a war in Europe.")

Details aside, the whole WWI shitshow comes across as one gigantic obscenity. Ably led by Barker, we feel invested in the lives of these characters. So we react when Sassoon and Prior both want to go back to France (for different reasons). I was totally with Haisell when he said, "I find myself deeply affected by their desire to return. I sense my own terror, my own need to be as far away from this harm as possible, and my hindsight knowledge that this never-ending war will be over in twelve months. I desperately want these men not to go... I felt palpable relief when [David] Burns was ruled unfit for service, and when Prior was saved from the front [because of asthma]. So I am struck hard by these men’s alien desire to fight, motivated by entrenched societal ideals of masculinity, honour and courage, and the shame of weakness, illness and insanity. If the book began with Sassoon’s argument that the war continues because of ignorance of horror and a failure of imagination, it ends on a more sobering thesis: we’ll keep fighting as long as fighting is what it means to be a man."

And, in the end, Sassoon does indeed return to the Western Front. Rivers feels bad about it. But what else can he do, given the rules of the game, except discharge Sassoon back to the machine of war? Haisell: "Thus, the novel’s title feels ironic. Or at best, uncertain. Is this regeneration? Or is it repression? Fleeing from doubts and scruples, conflict and complexities, a 'headlong retreat towards the front.'"

3. Women at war

The character of Sarah is a great addition to the narrative, as she and her friends demonstrate some of the changes under way in women's lives. It's not an easy life, working in the munitions factory. But Sarah exudes confidence and agency, and doesn't want to fall back into the old tramlines of marriage and childbirth that women had been stuck in for so long.

The Imperial War Museum has an interesting compilation of the ways WWI affected women's lives.



4. The difficult lives of gay men

We get few details, but it's clearly tough. Rivers may have inclined that way, it is suggested, but he doesn't talk about it; Sassoon comes out to Rivers; Owen may well have been gay; Oscar Wilde and Robert Ross and Edward Carpenter float around in the background; and Robert Graves insists he absolutely isn't (after a friend, Peter, is arrested for "gross indecency", and "placed under medical supervision": "In a grim bit of symmetry, Peter and Sassoon are both sent to a psychiatrist to cure them of what society regards as pathological: homosexuality and pacifism").

5. Ottoline Morrell

This is a name that has floated around my Virginia Woolf excursions. Interesting, then, to find out more. She and Bertrand Russell, pacifists, were blamed for "encouraging" Sassoon's protest about the war.

She was a society hostess around whom revolved a varyingly appreciative circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals: Bloomsbury Group adherents, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and more. Haisell: "In the summer of 1916, Sassoon was back in England on sick leave, and he visited Lady Ottoline at Garsington Manor near Oxford. Ottoline was married to the anti-war MP Philip Morrell, and they had made their home a refuge for conscientious objectors, whose farmwork on the manor allowed them to comply with the Conscription Act. It was here that Sassoon found a sympathetic ear for his growing doubts about the war."


Ottoline Morrell

Her relationship with Sassoon was somewhat strained, however, and the meeting in Edinburgh that's mentioned towards the end of Regeneration did not go well. As Haisell explains: "Sassoon was embarrassed by Morrell’s bohemian eccentricity, and she appeared to be hopeful of more from him than he was prepared to give. Rivers is humorously empathetic towards Sassoon’s aristocratic patron, thinking 'Poor Lady Ottoline' when he hears Sassoon had talked about homosexuality while Morrell 'listened.' Lady Ottoline’s own account of her visit to Edinburgh leaves us with the impression that Sassoon was rather rude and cruel to her -- even if we can imagine his emotional state and reasons for giving her the cold shoulder: 'He rather surprised me by telling me that he found me very complicated and artificial and could not understand me and that I ought to become simpler. He seemed to come quite near in his confidence and then the tide turned and went far out, leaving me alone on the beach. He always had an odd way of going off without a word and without attempting to say good-night or good-bye.' Despite this strange and frosty exchange, the two remained friends after the war, with Sassoon orbiting the literary and intellectual society centred around the Morrell home at Garsington."

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Clearly, Regeneration resonates with many other books that have featured on The Velvet Cushion: Robert Harris's Precipice; D.H. Lawrence's England, My England; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Soul Brother by David Diop... And on Vintage Travel, I presented a long exploration of the way WWI came much closer to home: My Grandfather in France.

These stories ought to be compulsory reading for politicians. Bar them from office until they understand...