This week being in the company of the various damaged souls inhabiting Craiglockhart War Hospital in Pat Barker's Regeneration has done me a tremendous amount of good. At the simplest level it's been a reminder that the pressures I face are of utter insignificance compared with those extremes of human experience I was born, luckily, not to face (well, so far, at least.)
Oddly and appropriately it's the kind of novel that works well when read in a fragmented fashion. To some degree it's built out of intense cameos, underpinned with strong thematic links, particularly the metaphor of the pain of 'regeneration', so, though it hangs together with assurance, it invites a kind of dipping into. I finished it this morning, finding myself surprised (and horrified) by the scenes of Yealland's electrical treatment of the soldiers in the final segment simply on the level of not seeing anything like this coming. But I did have a problem with the use of real life people as characters. (I can't imagine the descendants of Dr Yealland have been too thrilled by his portrayal in the novel.) This is not so much on moral grounds as on the simple fact that no matter how powerful the insights of the writer are they cannot possibly do justice to the complexities of what really did take place, yet the frame is that of the traditional novel with an omniscient narrator. It's almost as if too much is being claimed. For example, the scenes between Owen and Sassoon have an odd charm and powerful readability, but there's the ghost of a bad Hallmark movie lurking around them.
What works brilliantly is the slantwise approach to the central concern of the war and war in general. Detachment and intensity. Sometimes distance is the only way to get close enough to say something worth saying.
3 comments:
Not directly related to the above: With regard to the question of whether or not Celie physically writes the letters in 'The Color Purple', letter 55 on p. 117 strongly suggests that she does.
Thanks. My edition, not with me at the moment, has different pages to yours (I think) but I'll check this in letter 55. I've never been able to pin this issue down so this could be a bit of a breakthrough moment for me.
Yes, see what you mean. The reference to poor handwriting is very concrete - but it all feels a bit contrived. I'm not sure Alice Walker really sells this one to the reader. But it's clear we are meant to accept the letters as actually written.
Post a Comment