Siria's Reviews > Regeneration

Trin got this as a present for me, telling me no more than that I should read it because I would love it. It's kind of scary how well she knows my tastes. Regeneration is the first of a trilogy of novels set during the Great War. This first novel centers on the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his time at a psychiatric hospital in Scotland, the place where he was sent to 'recover' under the psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers after he began raising protests about the war.

There are no words for how much I adored this book. The characters are so perfectly drawn. It amazes me how good a grasp Barker seems to have on Sassoon's personality and motivations, and even those people of whom I hadn't heard before, like Rivers, seem tangible and real. The prose in the book is the real revelation. Simple, stark and bleak, it helps make a two hundred and fifty page long piece feel like an epic in novella form.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the book is Barker's insights into people and class conditions, into how we treat our wounded and our less-than-perfect, into the stupidity and pointlessness and heroism of war. There were a couple of points where I had to actually put the book down and go away and make a cup of tea in order to think over parts of the book.

"You must speak, but I shall not listen to anything you say."

Definitely one of the most impressive novels I've read in a long, long time, and highly recommended.