Fact meets fiction at Craiglockhart during World War 1 – Regeneration by Pat Barker
Regeneration – the blurb
Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’s job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker’s Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men.
Can’t eat, can’t sleep
The graphic horrors of World War 1 are addressed in this fictional retelling of poet Seigfreid Sassoon’s attendance at psychiatric hospital Craiglockhart. Whilst not physically wounded his fellow patients have suffered so much they can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t speak. The men attend Craiglockhart to heal and ultimately to go before the Board to be deemed fit for service or discharged. Various psychological treatments are detailed – Freud and his dream theories for one – although some (most notably not at Craglockhart) were just about as brutal as the trenches.
I love a good historical fiction and particularly liked the blend of fact and fiction. Everyone has studied Wilfred Owen at school but not necessarily his ‘mentor’ Sassoon. You can’t help but agree with his stance as a pacifist when faced with these battered, hollowed out men. I did however struggle to separate the different men, to bring them to mind quickly when the book changed from one to another. For that reason it left me slightly disconnected. It is part of a trilogy and I’m not sure where Barker leads the next book. I’ll keep an eye out for it as I did like Regeneration but I won’t be rushing to buy it.