The Ghost Road
By Pat Barker
Dutton, 278 pages, $21.95
In a letter to Edith Wharton, Henry James described the outbreak of World War I as “this crash of our civilisation.” To another friend he wrote, “It seems to me to undo everything . . . in the most horrible retroactive way.” As James saw it, it wrecked the commonly held belief that “through the long years we had seen civilisation grow and the worst become impossible.”
The agony James expresses at his civilized world being unraveled and cruelly exposed by the war is echoed throughout Pat Barker’s remarkable World War I trilogy, consisting of “Regeneration,” “The Eye in the Door” and “The Ghost Road” (which just won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize). What makes Barker’s epic gripping and even invigorating is the wry intelligence she brings to bear on wartime horror and its aftermath, and the nimbleness with which she darts between acknowledged ordeal and repressed traumatic memory.
Though James doesn’t turn up in Barker’s pages, other writers do–notably, poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen–along with another real-life character, psychologist-anthropologist Dr. William Rivers. Rivers, as Barker portrays him, rivals James in his ability to read character, and he puts that ability to admirable use, decoding both the nightmares and evasive behavior of his shellshocked patients in order to help them reconnect with their surroundings and themselves.
With Rivers as its keen observer and Barker’s own fictional Billy Prior (one of Rivers’ patients in the book) as its wayward trickster, the trilogy brilliantly re-creates the various collapses, social and individual, that the war precipitated. Barker examines not just the bedlam of the trenches but also the delusional hypocrisy–an almost innocent double consciousness–that allowed carnage to exist alongside conscience. In so deftly tracing the resulting toppling of longstanding pillars and pieties of the British social tradition, she emerges as one of the most ambitious and accomplished British novelists of our time.
First, a word to newcomers. While “The Eye in the Door” could be read independently of “Regeneration,” full appreciation of “The Ghost Road” depends on a familiarity with the two preceding volumes. Loose ends from both earlier novels are picked up in the new book without much background being given. Reference is made to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where, in “Regeneration,” Rivers treated Prior and Owen along with that novel’s main character, Sassoon. Allusions to other stricken soldiers at Craiglockhart color the new case histories in “The Ghost Road” to powerful effect.
Barker also returns to Prior’s poignantly comical engagement to working-class munitions worker Sarah Lumb. Their hands-off relationship, a mixture of fondness and frustration, keeps the omnisexual Prior on the lookout for anyone, male or female, who might alleviate his pent-up lust.
As he was in “The Eye in the Door,” Prior is a wild card. There’s no predicting where his thoughts will take him or who will be drawn into his embrace. His unvarnished, skeptical, even prurient take on wartime phenomena amounts to a kind of iconoclasm. No piety here. Just a live heart, beating–and some stirrings in the groin, which are dealt with frankly.
In picking up the strands of earlier books, Barker doesn’t offer a narrative so much as a mirroring of Prior’s and Rivers’ inmost thoughts as they move toward dire moments of reckoning in the last weeks of the war. As Sassoon did at the end of “Regeneration,” Prior returns to the battlefront, having been “cured” by Rivers of a shellshock-induced amnesia. He will be Rivers’ experiment: a shakily reassembled man seeing if he can re-enter “breakdown territory” without once again cracking apart.
Meanwhile Rivers, succumbing to the Spanish influenza epidemic, feverishly explores both past and present, going well beyond the conclusion he came to at the end of “Regeneration”: that a “society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance.” Indeed, “The Ghost Road” confirms the impression given by the earlier books that Barker has something more complicated than a straightforward anti-war novel in mind.
Rivers’ past includes time spent doing anthropological field research with former “head-hunters” in Melanesia, an experience that, in Prior’s eyes, gives the psychologist a “slightly odd perspective” when it comes to dealing with the fallout of the European conflict. Rivers’ Melanesian investigations, alluded to in the earlier books, are given a full treatment here, with aboriginal ghosts shedding light on the ghosts that trouble Rivers’ war veterans in their hospital beds. Rivers’ familiarity with the tropical island counterparts of those ghosts, along with his graphic familiarity with dead bodies (gleaned from Melanesian funeral practices), helps him connect with his patients in ways that might elude another therapist.
More disturbingly, in recalling the demoralizing effect of the British suppression of his tribal subjects’ raids of neighboring islands, Rivers comes to wonder if a people can “perish . . . from the absence of war.” If so, what does that say about the wartime violence of his own culture? And does it explain why Prior, Sassoon and Owen feel compelled to return to the trenches when all common sense argues against it?
Rivers’–and Barker’s–answer is anything but clear. Instead, the urge toward collective violence is grasped simply as a mystery too large for any one individual to encompass: something to be endured rather than explained. Aboriginal chief and British soldier alike seem almost to relish their doom, once they’ve caught sight of it. Having entered extreme territory, Prior acknowledges what a Melanesian native would have taken for granted all along: “Ghosts everywhere. Even the living were only ghosts in the making.” Prior shruggingly accepts their presence.
Barker’s mind delights in paradox, including one stemming from Rivers’ realization that his Melanesian subjects’ view of British society is as valid as his of theirs: “(W)ith that realization, the whole frame of social and moral rules that keeps individuals imprisoned–and sane–collapsed.”
That linking of “imprisoned” and “sane” is typically Barkeresque.
While “The Ghost Road” does much to give Barker’s portraits of Rivers and Prior their finishing touches, it raises, in delving into Rivers’ childhood, new questions that are left unanswered. Passages about the relationship of Rivers and his invalid sister, Katharine, with Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) open up a psychosexual territory that bristles with possibilities. Little is made of it, except to suggest Dodgson’s marked preference for little girls over little boys scarred the young Rivers in some way, a “deformity” that in Prior’s estimation might be the source of Rivers’ “power over people, the power to heal if you like.”
It’s an intriguing notion, and a piece of unfinished business that can only whet readers’ appetites for whatever Pat Barker offers next.
