Regeneration (Penguin Essentials) - Classic War Novel by Pat Barker | Historical Fiction Books for Adults | Perfect for Book Clubs & Literature Lovers

Pat Barker's novel details the real-life encounter of the WW1 poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychiatrist William Rivers in Craiglockhart Hospital for officers suffering from mental trauma as a result of their experience in the trenches. Sassoon, a decorated hero, is saner than most and certainly no coward, but he has published a declaration denouncing the war, which presents a problem to the government. It is Rivers' job to persuade him to go back to France, but he is also acutely aware of the risk of destroying his patient's individuality in so doing. Although the horrors of trench warfare are always there in the background, the author's sympathetic treatment of the leading characters is such as to make it very pleasant to spend time in their company, and it is only towards the end that the novel fully generates the moral force promised by its theme.Perhaps I was conditioned to respond in a certain way to this book. As an Englishman of a certain generation, the dialogue and texture of the writing was warmly familiar. As an English major, I was absorbed by Pat Barker's treatment of Sassoon's process of distilling his experience into poetry; although he was already known to me, the book made me think of him even more highly, and likewise his contemporary Wilfred Owen, who also appears as a character. A further personal factor is that my own father, like Sassoon, similarly served as a lieutenant in the trenches; he was similarly decorated and I think similarly traumatized. This book makes me wish that I had been able to ask, and he to talk, about the events that clearly destroyed even the survivors of an entire generation.There is horror in the book for certain, but its greatest effects, like those of the War itself, linger on in the souls of the men who are supposedly out of it. Nothing that Pat Barker descibes of trench warfare come close in immediacy to what I consider the masterpiece of the genre, Sebastian Faulks'