Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant culmination to this great trilogy
Review: Although "Regeneration" is my favorite of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, I thought "The Ghost Road" was a brilliant and tragic ending. The novel takes us to the final days of World War I, where we witness the tragic fate of Billy Prior, the working-class anti-hero of the trilogy. Interspersed with his experiences in France we also join the psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers. Rivers deals with his unpleasant duty of preparing men to return to battle as he remembers his anthropological work in the Melanesian islands, amongst the members of a culture that was slowly dying out.Barker's restrained style is extremely moving -- far more so than the florid prose of Sebastian Faulks' World War I novel "Birdsong." Every time I've read this novel, I've been moved to tears. P.S. The reader from South Africa who was so incensed at Ms. Barker's "factual inaccuracies" might want to check again: There were indeed air raids over England in World War I -- they were carried out by the infamous Zeppelins! Also, Dr. Rivers was living amongst the head-hunters of Melanesia in the Pacific (probably Borneo or thereabouts) NOT Africa.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant culmination to this great trilogy
Review: Although "Regeneration" is my favorite of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, I thought "The Ghost Road" was a brilliant and tragic ending. The novel takes us to the final days of World War I, where we witness the tragic fate of Billy Prior, the working-class anti-hero of the trilogy. Interspersed with his experiences in France we also join the psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers. Rivers deals with his unpleasant duty of preparing men to return to battle as he remembers his anthropological work in the Melanesian islands, amongst the members of a culture that was slowly dying out. Barker's restrained style is extremely moving -- far more so than the florid prose of Sebastian Faulks' World War I novel "Birdsong." Every time I've read this novel, I've been moved to tears. P.S. The reader from South Africa who was so incensed at Ms. Barker's "factual inaccuracies" might want to check again: There were indeed air raids over England in World War I -- they were carried out by the infamous Zeppelins! Also, Dr. Rivers was living amongst the head-hunters of Melanesia in the Pacific (probably Borneo or thereabouts) NOT Africa.
Rating: 
Summary: I've Met Several South Africans On My Travels
Review: And they were all arrogant and predictably wrong about their views on life. This dude must feel really embarrassed about his review (which has gone worldwide) so let's give him a break. After all, he's human too and just in need of a little tlc. This book rocks, dude.
Rating:
Summary: As a blossoming psych...
Review: As I enter the field of psychology, Barker's ability to share the thoughts, feelings, motivations and conversations around self-exploration illustrate the profession with clarity and eloquence, and are especially meaningful to me. Although 'fiction,' Prior, Rivers and other assorted (and sordid) characters are alive and, at times, well. Barker's trilogy reads real.
Rating:
Summary: Great juxtaposition of death & life from opposing viewpoints
Review: Barker's "The Ghost Road" is a wonderfully fresh examination of death and war in our society. Barker carefully represents the elements of a Melanesian culture focused on ghosts, death, & dying -- good material in itself! -- in contrast to the story of Billy Prior's fatalistic WWI experiences. The two stories, which alternate throughout the book, force the reader to realize that war in our society is abhorrent for many reasons, not least of which is that it forces people to become what they are not -- fatalistically one dimensional -- marching toward death or life or whatever. And those that fail to make this transformation go mad with the incongruity of their situation. The Melanesian culture, on the other hand, intertwingles life & death through the living and through further deaths. Death and life are balanced and solidly tethered one to the other. Actively maintaining the strength of that balance is in large part what life is about. Billy Prior's experience represents a life severely out of balance, but not in ways we might expect. In fact, it's the insane in Dr. River's asylum who are far more human in my eyes. Besides all this, it's just simply an very engaging book. we are presented with the notion, I believe, that death, a part of life, may be alternatively shunned or embraced, that death can be viewed as an inextricable -- but not by those soon to die, but by the living.
Rating: 
Summary: The Booker Prize (Upper Class Novels Only Please)
Review: Dull. Dissapointing. Snobbery is evident within the narrative - i.e. from the writer not the characters, - ranks below officer are as a seperate species. Some of the images created within the trilogy are worthwhile and memorable. Strange to see the author obviously relishing the deliberately crude language of the extremely graphic sex scenes, and yet shy away from the more extreme graphics of trench-warfare, but perhaps this is intentional; showing we are more disgusted by descriptions of sexual extremities than by the extreme violence of war. Billy Prior suddenly becomes a Poet in his diary. -This fluency does not fit with his earlier appearances. Generally, I thought, a very average book. Can't understand why she felt the need to make a trilogy of this story - it may have made one good book. Still, glad everyone else found it so brilliant. Maybe I'm just thick.
Rating:
Summary: Great war literature -- great book
Review: Everyone living in the 21st century who cares about the future of humanity -- not to mention fine literature -- should read this extremely skillfully written, emotionally powerful novel of The Great War. Pat Barker has perfect control over her material, and manages to write with power but never goes over the top or gets melodramatic -- a tough thing to do when you're writing about any war. Starting gently, subtly, even humorously, the book builds quietly until it reaches its final, wrenching chapters. It's a touching, compelling, beautifully told tale that deserves a worldwide audience. I can't wait to read more by Pat Barker!
Rating:
Summary: Betrayal on All Fronts
Review: First, a comment on the review from the "Top 50 Reviewer" from NH: I find his(her?) entire review willfully odd in many regards, not the least of which is the claim that to read the historian John Keegan is to discover that the war was well conducted. But I digress... The point of the novel, indeed the trilogy, seems to me to be betrayal. Whatever else he is, Billy Prior seems to have been betrayed, to varying degress, by most of those whom he has encounterd: father, mother, priest, military superiors, Empire, and, most probably but at least humanely, Rivers himself. In the final tally, there seems to be little difference between governments prosecuting the war to its last gasp ("And then the next day in 'John Bull' there's Bottomley saying, No, no, no and once again no. We must fight to the bitter end.")---and the headhunting Melanesians. To the (possible) credit of the Melanesians, they at least understand that they are unreconstructed headhunters. The manipulative, sexually voracious, and profoundly self-aware Billy Prior is an unforgettable fictional creation. (And, yes, the homosexual scenes distressed me and made me queasy.) And yet, there he is, in all his fictional power and extremely sloppy humanity: neither pauper nor prince, neither straight nor gay, neither hero nor coward, neither fully sincere nor totally duplicitous, neither pacificist nor Johnny Bull, neither sane nor insane, both the hunter and the hunted. In his multiplicity he becomes Everysoldier. And the power of Pat Barker's prose is to make the reader care profoundly about Billy Prior's fate, consigned, as we all knew that he would be, to the "ghost road" of the title. One of John Keegan's major points, by the way, has been that by World War I, technology had brought to mankind the means of destruction on a massive scale without the ability to adequately control it: thus misguided artillery barrages, poison gas blowback, constant breakdown of telephone wires affecting command and control. The inabilty to communicate effectively helped to trigger, then to prolong the conflict, and contributed to the death of millions. As the mortally wounded Hallet keeps intoning and only Rivers is able to translate into comprehensible language, "Shotvarfet"---"It's not worth it." Indeed.
Rating:
Summary: Trench warefare more horrible than head-hunting.
Review: For the first 100 pages I wondered why I was spending time on this book but then it began to come together. Pat Barker, a women, captures the horror of trench warfare with descriptions as: "I got something damp on my face that wasn't mud, and brushing it away found a glob of Hollet's brain between my fingertips." and even poetically "...eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arrange...The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps towards them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, ending the rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields." A soldier expresses: "The war isn't being fought for...(the benefit of anyone). Nobody benefits. Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop." And yet in spite of this horror and hopelessness, Lt. Billy Prior says, "What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to have come back." This irrational belief may be understood from statements made by other soldiers, such as: "...far from having fled from the scene, he had behaved with exemplary courage and loyalty..." and "He might even have missed the war altogether, perhaps spent the rest of his life goaded by the irrational shame of having escaped." Several sections should be read aloud to appreciate their power.
Rating:
Summary: Great war literature -- great book
Review: Not your ordinary war read. I love authors that take a topic of huge proportions, say World War I, and write a book that actually stands taller in the imagination of the reader as great a couple weeks later.
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