Rating: 
Summary: I was disturbed and intensely involved with this 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.
Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: Only "The Triumph and the Glory" can rival "The Ghost Road" as a profoundly moving novel of war and the psychology of combat. No war novel in recent memory can touch it. This is a stunning novel, it has a few flaws but the overall virtuosity of the book overcomes them with ease. A great novel, I suggest that you read it, you won't be sorry.
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Summary: There were air raids
Review: Our South African friend should have checked the history books before making his attack on the verisimilitude of this author. The Germans did indeed mount several air raids on London during the Great War. Many of these were by Zeppelin, but some were also by aeroplanes. I believe the first raid occurred in 1915.
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Summary: The Regeneration Trilogy
Review: Pat Barker's magnificent trilogy is not only a profound contribution to our literature on the First World War - it is also one of the most distinguished works of contemporary fiction in any genre. Barker doesn't skirt around the central issues with a po-faced patriotic reverence, but rather tackles them head on: the agonizing contradictions of patriotism and protest; the politics of social and self-surveillance; the homoerotic undertones of trench camaraderie, especially among the war poets; the horrendous physical and psychological costs of war; and the sense of personal duty which drives us, nonetheless, to fight. These are big themes, but Barker's talent is to handle them in a way which makes her novels feel like an easy read. They are accessible, engaging, seemingly simplistic in their style - but in the end profoundly moving in a way which only the highest literature aspires to be. The trick is that she makes her characters so real for us - Prior and Rivers, the consistent protagonists, are completely human. She makes us experience a world-historical incident on a very human scale. Harrowing, intelligent, moving and funny, Barker has crafted a fictional epic that will stay with you forever. Walking through Sydney's Central railway station months after finishing these books, I came across the honour boards listing the hundreds of railway men and women who died in the Great War. Barker's books made the war real for me, made these lives - these deaths - real. If they do nothing more than that for you, they've succeeded.
Rating:
Summary: A Gathering Storm
Review: Pat Barker's trilogy, "Regeneration, "The Eye in the Door," and "The Ghost Road," was like reading a gathering storm. The first two novels essentially set the stage for me for her Booker Prize-winning "The Ghost Road." There the two most powerful characters in the trilogy, Dr. William Rivers, and Lt. Billy Prior, seized me by the brain and would not let go until the final page of the novel, a profound and powerful elegy to the senselessness of war, and to World War I in particular. All three novels, spare and trenchant, make a nifty read on the bus--which is where I enjoyed them going back and forth to work.
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Summary: The Ghost Road of Human Civilization
Review: Recalling the books of Lost Generation enriched with psychoanalytic experience and author's brilliant style, Ms Pat Barker's sad story takes all your attention from the first pages. Two main lines of the novel's plot tell us about Lt Billy Prior, who returns to the Field Forces in France in the last months of the WWI, and Dr William Rivers, whose memory revives the days of his life amidst the head-hunters of Melanesia. So we have two different rungs of the social ladder of human civilization - Europe as the upper edge and Melanesia as the bottom one. Former head-hunters, whose cruel practice was strictly proscribed by 'civilized white men', can restrain their passions (though coveting for past bloody raids) and even have reverent attitide towards human death and complicated rituals of interment. Intertwining episodes of both main lines Ms Barker delineates a hideous picture of insensate and endless ('Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.') human abattoir of the last battles of the war in Europe where 'civilized white men' destroy themselves in madness unknown for the Melanesian barbarians. Yet the heroes of the novel do not know that this war is only the World War I: the Ghost Road of human civilization...
Rating: 
Summary: This book is an abomination
Review: Statement against the continuation of the War (1917) I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize. -Siegfried L. Sassoon, July 1917 I read and mildly liked Regeneration, the first volume of Pat Barker's WWI trilogy. It dealt with the true story Dr. William River's successful effort to heal the "mentally unsound" poet/hero/war protester Siegfried Sassoon and get him back to the Front. With cameos by fellow poets Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, there was a subtle homosexual subtext, but the heart of the story was the relative sanity or insanity of participating in war. I could not read the second volume, The Eye in the Door, which concerns a secretly gay soldier's work with the domestic intelligence services, trying to expose gay officials who would be security risks. And I tried to read this final volume, but will admit to skipping to the end after one too many ankle grabbing episode. Near the end of the book I finally figured out what the point of the entire exercise is. There is one scene where a drunken soldier confides to Wilfred Owen that the horrible thing about the War is that it is depriving them of "Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and boys." There it is in a nutshell. Pat Barker's series conveys the strange sense that World War I was senseless because it upset a number of gay British poets and killed a fair number of their potential lovers. To the extent that it has a broader premise, it is merely that war is bad and World War I was really bad. She accepts all the stock premises about how incompetent the commanding generals were and how government officials cynically prolonged an unwinnable war for their own domestic political purposes. And of course the noble soldiers, who had never wanted any part of this War, simply suffered for their nation's sins. And if that was true of the coarse and uncultured commoners, imagine how much worse the sensitive poets must have suffered. All of this has been the accepted wisdom about the War, the official Left version of events, so it is little surprise that these books have received such accolades. But the last year has seen the publishing of the two best nonfiction books ever written about WWI, The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson and The First World War by John Keegan (read Orrin's review) and they explode these myths. Upon further review, it turns out that the War was an unnecessary but popular endeavor, well lead though obviously ugly and the "winning" of it proved more disastrous than the fighting and carnage involved. One of the folks reviewing this book said that: It was not until 1914 that words became inadequate to describe the horrors of war. This appears to accurately reflect Barker's view, but it is completely asinine. First, the idea that words can adequately describe war, second, the idea that the WWI generation was exceptional, that the presence of a bunch of minor poets on the front lines means that a great literature or a unique understanding came out of the war. In truth, no soldier of WWI produced a work of literature that can approach the Civil War Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a man whom these effete poets would have dismissed as brutal and dull. WWI was a war like any other: those fighting it hated it, the combatants included everyone from gifted authors to cretinous scum, those who won the War mythologized it and the losers were left with a festering sore in their souls, which would eventually trigger the next World War. So the book is based on a series of unexamined misconceptions, which is bad enough. But by the time you get to to the scene of a British soldier buggering the living daylights out of a French farm boy, you'll be ready to burn it. Actually, you may be lucky enough never to get that far, because I'm warning you now: This book is an abomination. GRADE: F
Rating:
Summary: Betrayal on All Fronts
Review: The author's note at the end of The Ghost Road is a cold splash of water. Up until then, the reader is so caught up in the lives of Barker's characters, their battlefields, their memories. Making the reader care about her characters is a singular achievement given how unsentimentally they are drawn and given how historical characters can sometimes sound stilted in lesser hands. In The Ghost Road, Barker picks up where she left off from the earlier books in the series. Lt. Billy Prior has battled his demons and is ready to return to the front in France. His doctor, William Rivers, suffering from the Spanish flu, finds himself harking back to very different days when he was in the South Seas among natives who once celebrated head-hunting. Barker sets up these two parallels: Rivers' natives mourning their lost rite of head-hunting and Rivers' soldiers back on the battlefields mourning a way of life prior to the war, prior to the horrors of watching your comrades -- the people one eats with, drinks with, shares dreams with -- falling to their anonymous deaths. In essence, one group mourns death; the other mourns life. Skillfully she weaves these two strands together in a poetic ending that leaves the reader wholly satisfied and yet regretful, regretful that there is no more, that this is the last book in her superb series, that we will never see these characters again.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent conclusion to superb series!
Review: The author's note at the end of The Ghost Road is a cold splash of water. Up until then, the reader is so caught up in the lives of Barker's characters, their battlefields, their memories. Making the reader care about her characters is a singular achievement given how unsentimentally they are drawn and given how historical characters can sometimes sound stilted in lesser hands. In The Ghost Road, Barker picks up where she left off from the earlier books in the series. Lt. Billy Prior has battled his demons and is ready to return to the front in France. His doctor, William Rivers, suffering from the Spanish flu, finds himself harking back to very different days when he was in the South Seas among natives who once celebrated head-hunting. Barker sets up these two parallels: Rivers' natives mourning their lost rite of head-hunting and Rivers' soldiers back on the battlefields mourning a way of life prior to the war, prior to the horrors of watching your comrades -- the people one eats with, drinks with, shares dreams with -- falling to their anonymous deaths. In essence, one group mourns death; the other mourns life. Skillfully she weaves these two strands together in a poetic ending that leaves the reader wholly satisfied and yet regretful, regretful that there is no more, that this is the last book in her superb series, that we will never see these characters again.
Rating: 
Summary: Not quite there, but close
Review: The Ghost Road draws the reader in immediately with very restrained lyrical prose -- it reminded me of tight, well crafted poetry that is full of raw imagery and free of sentimentality. The book then bounces back and fourth between our two narrators, Dr. Rivers and Billy Prior, both somewhat unreliable. Prior's experiences on the front are interwoven with River's memories of his time spent with a head hunting tribe; both are an in-depth study of death, its worship, and the struggle to survive -- as a man in the midst of a war, as a culture, as a man capable of emotion. I read another reviewer mention that the book brings them tears. I had quite the opposite reaction: I felt as indifferent as Prior and as numbed as a disillusioned soldier. The Ghost Road left me feeling sour, cold and even blank. Like the aftermath of the war itself, this book kills any remaining idealism or heroism that surrounded war before the devastating reality of W.W.I. One criticism with the book may stem from my out-of-context reading. I have not read the previous two novels, and, when at the start of the book I read that Prior could simply "split in two," I spent much time looking for this second personality. River's and Prior's similar pasts and same first name led to think that they may be the same person. I felt that Barker was laying hints to something that was not there, or never clearly explained if it was. I also did find myself in disbelief at times with the vocabulary Barker gave to some of her characters, even minor ones. While Rivers is believable, and Prior -- though a stretch -- acceptable, some minor characters spoke as if they were Oxford scholars, not men breaking down after horror on the front. But on the whole, a stunning and moving novel certainly well worth a read.
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