Leaving Gaps

A bit of advice for anyone intending to read Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy: leave something of a gap between each book rather than moving on immediately. I finished The Ghost Road today and it occurred to me that the reason I got bogged down in the first half of the novel was because I started reading it on the day I finished The Eye In The Door and sort of expected more of the same - which I didn't get. In contrast, it was quite a while after reading Regeneration that I picked up the second book so I was rather more open to an entirely different kind of novel. In the early part of The Ghost Road I just couldn't get the hang of the Melanesian chapters featuring Rivers as a much younger anthropologist. It was only when Prior went back to the front towards the end that I began to understand the part that the headhunting material plays thematically.

One of the triumphs of the series is the way in which the writer avoids repeating herself. Instead Barker gets us involved in new and unexpected ways of looking at the conflict that forms the backdrop to the three novels. As I've mentioned before, the avoidance of any kind of cliché about WW1 is in itself a remarkable achievement.

The other thing that's so striking about the trilogy is the spareness and restraint of the writing. Nothing is over-written or goes on too long. In fact, I had the odd feeling that what the writer was not saying, was leaving out, was almost as important as what was in the texts. One example of this is the way in which Wilfred Owen is dealt with in the final segments. You cannot help but think of his poetry as you read, but none of this makes it into The Ghost Road so that the poetry becomes itself a kind of ghostly presence haunting the novel.

I found the final pages the most potent I've read for quite some time in terms of their emotional power. Reviewers tend to bandy words like 'shattering' around rather too freely for my tastes - but it's the only word I can think of that does justice to just how devastating the ending is - even though you know it's coming.