Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy

Pat Barker's novel Regeneration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize but it was the third novel in the trilogy, The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize the year it was published.  Sometimes this can smell like a consolation prize for not winning earlier but in this case I think the right novel won. If, of course, only one novel was going to win.  All three are wonderful works. But, in my opinion, The Ghost Road packed more of an emotional wallop than the other two and I believe Barker was able to create that wallop because she created a fictional character.

That may sound odd because novels are, by their very nature fictional.  But historical novels, in particular, often have real life characters in them.  I find that I tend to like historical novels where the real life characters are peripheral to the main action.  And the Regeneration Trilogy has many real life characters. 

In the first novel,  Regeneration, Barker used real life World War I poet, Siegfried Sassoon, as one of the central characters.  Sassoon is an interesting person.   He was a decorated hero who grew to believe that the War was wrong.  When he spoke out he was placed in a mental institution where men suffering from shell shock were treated - he was put there mostly for PR purposes because it was easier for the authorities to claim that he was out of his mind than to take action against a decorated officer for speaking out against the War.  His friend, the poet Robert Graves (of I Claudius fame), was instrumental in convincing him to go along with the institutional route. But, in the end, Sassoon chose to go back to the front and he survived the War.  The tension between his feelings about the War and his sense of duty to his men and the others who were still there fighting is one of the stronger parts of the novel. 

But ultimately Sassoon's story, interesting though it is, is bounded by the facts of his real life.  And there are other real life characters.  While in the mental hospital Sassoon formed a close relationship with his treating physician, Dr. Rivers, whose job it is to rehabilitate men so that they can go back but who knows there is nothing really wrong with Sassoon.  Rivers is a principal character in all three novels and he, too, was a real life person.  Sassoon also became a mentor to young Wilfred Owen who would ultimately become perhaps the most famous World War I poet and who would not survive the War.  Too much knowledge about the fate of the characters can detract a bit from the usual dramatic tension of a novel where the reader wants to know what happens.  If the reader knows the fate of Sassoon and Owen right from the beginning, the author needs to find some other hook

In Regeneration Barker ultimately makes the Sassoon story a novel of the mind in which the varying perceptions of the War are debated.  Sassoon is against the War but is not a pacifist.   He ultimately returns to the War on his own volition but not because he has changed his mind, ultimately, about the War.  This tension in his character is what Barker explores and, while it is fascinating, I'm not sure she really explained it to me.  The anti-war sentiment of Sassoon is easy to understand when you understand the slaughter that was going on in Europe.  I had a harder time understanding why his anti-war feelings seemed to be based on the ultimate purpose of the war.  He believed that the British people were being lied to.

And probably they were being lied to in many cases.  ]Most wars are fought for monied interests and not the altruistic reasons that are given to the public.  Propaganda is a part of every War and it is good to try to spot it.  But in the case of World War I, notwithstanding the propaganda there was an actual invading force to fight.  Did Sassoon really think that the people of Belgium, France and, perhaps ultimately, Britain should live under German domination?  He thought that peace should be made but Barker gives no evidence that anyone really thought it was possible at that particular point in the War to make peace without simply caving into German will.  That is what makes the debate particularly interesting but ultimately unsatisfying as a core component of a novel.

It seemed to me that the War was a travesty on the Allied side not particularly because of its purpose but because the people running the War were either inept and/or unable to match tactics to modern weaponry. To refuse to condone the War for that reason seems reasonable to me.  I remember reading that at one point the French soldiers refused to advance because they were simply being slaughtered.  On the other hand, they didn't walk off the field - they didn't want to allow the Germans into France they just didn't want to move an inch forward.   The cost of advance was too high but the cost of defense was still supportable. If Sassoon were a fictional character Barker might have been able to have brought some of that into his reason for opposing the War.  But since he was a real person who wrote an actual manifesto against the War she was stuck with using what he actually stated were his reasons for opposition.  And those reasons didn't seem particularly coherent to me.   And the reasons he went back weren't particularly coherent to me.

Barker also created a few fictional characters in Regeneration who I thought were in some ways more successful than Sassoon as characters. One of them was Billy Prior who was rendered mute by what he had experienced at the front.  Dr. Rivers eventually helped him get his speech back.  Prior wanted to go back to the front but Rivers discovered that he had asthma and the medical board denied his request to return the front, assigning him to home duties.

Prior is the one of the main characters of the second and third novels.  In The Eye in the Window he is working for the War Department and in The Ghost Road he finally convinces them to send him back to the Front.  Sassoon makes another appearance in The Ghost Road as does Wilfred Owen.  And Dr. Rivers is in every novel, moving from the suburbs of Edinburgh down to a London hospital where he continues to treat men suffering from shell shock.   The main intent of his treatments is to be able to send them back to fight and what is surprising in the novel is how many of them do want to go back to the Front.

Billy Prior isn't always a particularly likeable character but he seems much more coherent to me as a character than Sassoon or even Rivers.  I think that is because Barker created him and could make of him what he needed to be for the novel.  Although hindsight is 20/20, when writing an historical novel it seems useful to use that hindsight to good purpose.  The real characters like Sassoon and Owen must do whatever they actually did and think whatever the historical records indicates they thought.  Billy Prior can do and think things that possibly no one could actually verbalize at the time - only with 20/20 hindsight can certain things be said.  That is useful.

There was so much in these novels that made me think that the world just hasn't changed much.  The men back from the Front, especially Billy Prior, find it incredibly difficult to be around civilians whom they find particularly out of touch.  But of course civilians "at home" are always out of touch - it isn't really possible to understand war unless you've been there.  And for the men who do come home, they find a world far removed from the world they left.  Things have moved on without them.  In World War I, especially, there were great social upheavals - women going to work in factories and doing urban jobs that, previously, only men did was a huge social change. 

Billy Prior says:

'You know if you were writing about ... oh, I don't know, enclosures, or the coming of the railways, you wouldn't have people standing round saying ... ' He put a theatrical hand to his brow.  '"Oh dear me, we are living through a period of terribly rapid social change, aren't we?"  Because nobody'd believe people would be so ... aware.  But here we are, living through just such a period, and everybody's bloody well aware of it. I've heard nothing else since I came home. Not the words, of course, but the awareness. And I just wondered whether there aren't periods when people do become aware of what's happening, and they look back at their previous unconscious selves and it seems like decades ago. Another life.'

Of course people can look back over a five or ten or fifty year period and marvel how much life has changed.  My Grandma would occasionally do that.  But when you are living through an upheaval like World War I, perhaps you are aware of it minute by minute.  Wondering where your old life went.  Not sure you necessarily like the new life.  In some ways I think 2001 through about 2005 was a time of hyper awareness here in the States but it was nothing compared to what WWI would have been like.

It is hard to know if the words that come of Barker's characters mouths are representative of what someone would have said or felt at that time or if they are more representative of the times we live in.  Or maybe things just don't change.  As an anti-war character says, talking about her anti-war mother who also would help women who wanted to terminate pregnancies:

You know, killing a baby when it's mother's two month's gone, that's a terrible crime.  But wait twenty years and blow the same kid's head off, that's all right. 

That could be said then.  That could be said now.

In the end I liked The Ghost Road the best because, while it was just as much an "intellectual" book as Regeneration, it was also more personal and brought the cost of the War much more into focus. The novel ends at the beginning of November, just days before what we know will be Armistice Day and the end of the War.  It ends with an insignificant battle over a canal that, in the end, will be irrelevant.  Insignificant, that is, for everyone except the men who die in it.  And their families and loved ones who will live with those deaths.  With 20/20 hindsight we can say that it was insignificant to the course of the War because we know what happened a few days later.   All I kept thinking was ... what a waste.  What a terrible waste.

I'm not sure this series ultimately sated me on WWI novels.  I wouldn't mind reading more.  But I also feel ready to move into other universes too. 

Wow! It's July Already?

I can't believe how long it has been since I posted anything here.  Life ...

Well, let's just pretend that all this time hasn't gone by and plow right in to what I've been reading. Mysteries. Lots and lots of mysteries.

Last summer I read one of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs novels and swore I was going to go back and read all of them from the beginning. I did. Then I moved on to Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge novels which in turn led me to Charles Todd's Bess Crawford novels. And those led me to Anne Perry's Joseph Reavely novels. Finally, I just finished The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller.  The common theme? The First World War.

I enjoyed all of them but I would rate the Inspector Rutledge novels as my favorites. Charles Todd is the pen name for an American mother-son writing team who set their mysteries in the English countryside in the years immediately following World War I. Ian Rutledge is a detective inspector with Scotland Yard who has returned from World War I a damaged man, suffering from what was then called shell shock. As an officer, he was required to execute one of his sergeants for refusing to obey an order to go into battle. Rutledge is now haunted by the memory of the man, Hamish McLeod, and hears his voice as though Hamish is standing just behind him.

The cases that Rutledge is sent to solve are fairly standard mystery fare. What I really like in these books is the portrayal of Rutledge himself. His recovery from the war is very slow. Each novel takes place over a short period of only a few weeks and the next novel always seems to pick up almost immediately after the previous story ended. After 14 novels we have moved less than two years in time. I like this slow pace. The struggles that Rutledge goes through, his aversion to sleeping anywhere that might allow others to hear his screams in the night, his hesitation to get involved with any woman, all ring true to me. Todd creates, for me, a very believable universe that I can envision and relate to and yet still is clearly of another time and another place.

Todd uses the same universe for a second series of mysteries: The Bess Crawford mysteries. The universe is clearly the same because a minor character in the Rutledge books is distantly related to Bess Crawford, although so far Bess Crawford has not met Ian Rutledge. Bess 's stories are set a few years before Rutledge's stories, during the course of World War I where Bess is a nurse in France.

Although there are things I like about the novels, they have too much of a Nancy Drew feel to them for me to take them very seriously. Where Rutledge is a Scotland Yard professional, Bess is an amateur sleuth who is thrown into situations where mysteries need solving. Like Nancy Drew, Bess has a well connected father (in this case a retired army officer who is involved in some way with British intelligence) and there is even a Ned Nickerson-like character - a handsome escort who is always there for her but never gets in the way emotionally or otherwise. If the story were at all realistic he would be her gay best friend. But these aren't particularly realistic stories.

Although Bess is a nurse in France much of the stories take place in England where Bess always seems to end up. Don't get me wrong, they are enjoyable books but seem more like fluff than the Rutledge books.

The Maisie Dobbs books take place in the 20's, after the war. Maisie is still dealing with the after affects of the war in which she was a nurse. Now she has opened her own investigation agency and is trying to move on with her life. Although born to humble parents, Maisie was fortunate to find a sponsor in a wealthy woman who paid for her schooling and helped set her up in life. I didn't really have too much of a problem with this fairy godmother but I do find the storyline where Maisie falls in love with the wealthy heir to be a bit much. Fortunately this isn't a large part of the story, so far.

What is interesting is that I don't find Maisie herself particularly likeable. I constantly think she is too uptight and needs to lighten up. And I regularly think to myself that I wouldn't like her in real life. But I don't find her so annoying that I don't want to read the next book.

The Anne Perry books are different because there are only five of them and they attempt to encompass one long mystery that runs the length of the war itself. The first novel begins with the summer that the war starts and the series runs through the war, taking place partly in France where one character is a military chaplain and partly in London where another character works in military intelligence. I thought Perry did a better job than Todd of depicting the actual war, especially the smells of the trenches. But I found that I had little interest in the over-arching mystery and didn't really care when they finally solved it.   But I did like the characters that she created and I did think that she made the war and the trenches seem very real.

I finished The Return of Captain John Emmett a few days ago.  I don't think this is intended to be a series as the main character isn't a detective.  Perhaps because I have glutted myself on World War I stories, this one didn't hold any surprises for me.  The actual mystery was tied up in a way that seemed a little unbelievable to me, but not so much as to spoil the whole book. The characters were realistic enough.  But at this point I just can't be surprised by stories of the British shooting their own men and strong, healthy men coming home in vegetable states.

Someone recommended to me that I should read Pat Barker's Regeneration, which is a fictionalized account of the time spent by the WWI poet, Siegfried Sassoon, in a mental hospital during the war.  So I've picked it up and we'll see how it goes.

The Great War

A couple of years ago when I read AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, I remarked:

Because I knew my history and knew what bloody carnage the War was, I began to suspect that many of the characters I had grown to love were not going to make it.  I didn’t worry only about the boys, but also about the girls because they went over as nurses and, in Dorothy’s case, as a doctor.  I found myself adopting a very fatalistic attitude about it and began to assume that all the boys would die.  And possibly some of the girls. 

I was thinking about this as I tuned in to last week’s episode of Downton Abbey on PBS.  We met the Crawley family and all of its servants last season, before the War began.  The first season ended with the surprise announcement that Britain was going to War against Germany.  This season has tried to show the effect of the War on the house called Downton Abbey and its inhabitants.
Just as when I read The Children’s Book, I assumed that there would be a lot of death and that most of the men we had met in the first season would be dead by the end of the second season. But until last week we really hadn’t seen much in the way of death and I thought this was a failing of the series. Certainly many of the staff members have experienced deaths, but they have happened off screen.  The cook has lost a nephew – shot to death by his own side.  O’Brien, the ladies’ maid, has lost a brother to shell shock.  We’ve seen the soup kitchen that was set up for the returning men.  And of course the house has been converted into a hospital for soldiers recovering from their wounds – we’ve seen many of the wounded come through the hospital.  At one point early in the season, Lady Sybil remarks that all the men she knows are dead and this spurs her to become a nurse.  But we don’t meet any of those dead men.  The male characters have come through the War singularly unscathed – both the doctor and the Earl not being sent to the front and Bates being unfit for duty having been wounded in the Boer War.  The former footman, Thomas, goes to the front but intentionally wounds himself so that he may return home.
The writers tried to remedy this in last week’s episode, which was very sad.   One of the younger footmen died and the heir to the title is gravely injured. 
And yet I still felt as if the show still has not really brought out just how overwhelming the War was for society. Even setting up the house as a nursing hospital hasn’t really shown the true horrors of the war.
This week I read Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle, which was written by the current Countess of Carnarvon.  As a book, it isn’t perhaps the best biography I’ve ever read, but it introduced me to a fascinating real life character who lived through World War I much as the fictional characters of Downton Abbey are supposed to be living through World War I.
Highclere Castle is the stately home that is used as the fictional Downton Abbey.  During World War I, the occupants were the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon.  I knew a bit about the Earl because he and Howard Carter had been the pair who discovered King Tut’s tomb.  But I knew nothing about his wife Almina.
Almina was allegedly the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild, who undoubtedly showered her with money.  Although not allowed into “good” society until she married the Earl, she led a privileged life and never wanted for anything.  The Earl certainly married her for her money.  Prior to World War I Almina was a typical socialite, the perfect hostess at Highclere Castle.  But she also discovered that she was good with sick people, so when War loomed she made the decision, on her own, to convert the castle into a hospital.  Unlike in the television series, the real Highclere Castle was used as a real hospital with rooms set aside for surgery rather than just rooms for recuperation. 
In reading about all the work Almina and her daughter put in at this hospital, I realized that she wasn’t at all sheltered from the true horrors of war.   And unlike the fictional countess of the television series, she didn’t just happen into the situation of running a hospital, she took the reins into her hands and made it happen.
Then, when the numbers of wounded became more than the Castle could accommodate, Almina, with the financial assistance of her father, opened a hospital in London.

Almina secured the lease on 48 Bryanston Square, a delightful town house in Mayfair overlooking a peaceful garden behind the railings.  The Cadogan Trustees noted in their minutes that ‘they were loath to entertain the application’ from Lady Cararvon but, if they declined it, the War Office might use their powers to commandeer the premises.  So, they agreed to Almina’s request.  The house had two distinct advantages over Highclere:  specialist doctors were never more than half an hour away, and it could be far better equipped to treat a wider range of injuries than the Castle ever could.  Almina installed a lift, a purpose-built operating theatre and an X-ray machine.  Then she transferred all her staff from the country up to town and put them under the charge of sister Macken, the head matron.

It seems amazing today, in an age of professional hospitals including military hospitals, that private persons were obliged to set up hospitals to care for the wounded men coming back from the continent. Almina seems to have been completely involved in the running of the hospital and grew attached to many of the men who came through its doors.  She only returned to Highclere to stay with her family on occasional weekends. 
Because this book was written by “family” it portrays Almina in a very good light and doesn’t say much about her life after the untimely death of Lord Carnarvon. In fact, this biography is noticeable for not really finishing the story in any detail, which made me google Almina.  I understand that there are other biographies that go into her life after the death of Lord Carnarvon, in which she ran through all of her money.
But it is a fascinating account of Almina’s time running the private hospital during the War.  I found myself thinking that the story of the real Countess is more interesting than the story of the fictional Crawley family. I could feel Almina’s exhaustion as hundreds of thousands of wounded were shipped home and her beds were constantly full.  The War seemed more real to me than it has seemed as I was watching the television series.