Regeneration Trilogy

Regeneration Trilogy, trilogy of novels written by British novelist Pat Barker, published 1991–95, that are set during World War I and focus on the experience and treatment of soldiers suffering from what was then called shell shock. The Regeneration Trilogy explores the imagined relationships between the real military psychoanalyst W.H.R. Rivers, the poets Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, and the fictional working-class officer Billy Prior, during the time each of them spent at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, Scotland, in the final years of the war.

The first book, Regeneration (1991) begins with Sassoon, who had been decorated for bravery, being sent to Craiglockhart at Graves’s behest after having made a public declaration of opposition to the war and stating that it is being deliberately prolonged. Other soldiers at the hospital suffer from such things as an inability to eat and, in Prior’s case, mutism. This novel focuses largely on Sassoon, and Barker reveals interesting comparisons between Sassoon’s homosexuality and the comradeship of soldiers, so vital to their survival of the horrors of war. The poet Wilfrid Owen is also a patient at Craiglockhart, and he and Sassoon become friends. Rivers is aware that his job involves curing soldiers so that they are able to return to the front, but he is unwilling to force Sassoon to return. The novel focuses on methods used to try to cure soldiers, such as hypnosis, and it show Rivers’s horror at a doctor at the National Hospital in London using electro-shock therapy in hopes of effecting a quick cure. By the end of the novel, Sassoon has decided to return to the front because of his responsibility toward his men, Rivers has taken a job in London, and Prior has recovered his speech, begun a romantic relationship with a female munitions worker, and been granted home service.

The Eye in the Door (1993) deals chiefly with the bisexual Billy Prior, who has been assigned to investigate a plot to assassinate the prime minister. During the investigation he has a sexual encounter with a male government official, and he suffers increasingly from episodes of amnesia. Prior learns that these are episodes of dissociative disorder and that during one such episode he betrayed a pacifist childhood friend to the government. He continues to be treated by Rivers, and he decides to return to the front. This volume focuses on the demonization of both homosexuality and pacifism in Britain during the war.

The final book of the trilogy, The Ghost Road (1995)—a winner of the Booker Prize—further explores the relationship between Rivers and Prior. Chapters from Prior’s point of view are intercut with chapters about Rivers. Rivers sees parallels between the culture of the Solomon Islanders that he studied as an anthropologist and the British culture relating to war. He also begins to feel that he has failed to help his patients. Prior returns to the front, eager to help win the war, but he becomes increasingly disillusioned, and both he and Wilfrid Owen are killed a week before the end of the war.

As a whole, the trilogy offers a complex portrait of the effects of World War I, encompassing various sorts of trauma, moral confusion, and injury to the sense of self. It also shows how the war impacted culture and the personal lives of people living through it. It is regarded by many critics as among the best fiction written about that war.