The final novel in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy is The Ghost Road, which I bought for 20 pence from a stall in a Dorset town square. You may recall that I enjoyed the first one – Regeneration – a great deal, the second – The Eye In The Door – much less, though always impressed by the skill with which she capture Rivers’ relationships with his psychiatric patients, and the superb dialogue. Well, The Ghost Road is another fine novel, closer to the first in feeling and style (with one key exception), and I was very pleased to read it.
Rivers is still practising at a hospital in London, but much of the action takes place on the Western front, where Billy Prior has returned, in spite of his poor physical and mental health, and where his self awareness – aroused through his consultations with Rivers - is illuminating and despairing. He is joined by keen young greenhorns, and by Wilfred Owen, whose death, very shortly before the armistice is one of the fading notes of the trilogy. Rivers himself has a succession of difficult and unhappy patients, riven by shell shock and deeper neuroses, and always finds a way to assert their and his humanity in a way which sheds a little light, even a little humour, into the darkest corners of their selves.
But the astonishing part of this novel, and a new departure, is the extended reference, through flashbacks and dream like memory sequences, to Rivers’ ethnological explorations as a young man in the Pacific islands of Eddystone and Simba in the western Solomons, which gave me a strong and reverberant connection to my own trip to Vanuatu last year, and my reading of the books of Tom Harrisson. These islands, and Rivers' interest in the dangerous, the tabu, and the sacrificial, form a powerful of echo of both the physical events in the mire of France, but also to the shadowy but resilient forces in his patients’ minds – and in all our minds, too. Here, Rivers is led into understanding by the witch doctor Njiru, just as he leads others into understanding in his clinic years later. For example, he is privy to the death of the chief Ngea, the temporary immural of his wife, the way the society reclaims her - though without the traditional capture of a skull, now outlawed by the British - and the placing of the Ngea's skull in the newly built skull house. Finally, he and Njiru together hold the skull of Homu, the greatest of the skull hunters, "the most precious object in the world". He learns how a man's fears and beliefs position him in the world, often in a way the world and he find uncomfortable, dangerous, miserable but how they can also do the opposite.
Rivers is an astonishing character, but not at all an unbelievable one, and his strength of mind and his insight is seen in the smallest ways as well as the largest. For example, he cures a military officer of hysterical paralysis through an extraordinary ritual of drawing on his legs, moving the ‘tidemark’ each day, forcing the paralysis to retreat then abandon the leg altogether, in spite of the patients extreme scepticism. “I suppose I’m meant to be grateful”. “No”. In that “no” is all his understanding, all his humanity, all his generosity. In France, his patient Prior follows his own reactions, both mental and physical (he has stress induced asthma), and concludes, in a letter to Rivers, that:
My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is to run away, and I will not do it. Test Passed?
I was not convinced by all of these three novels, particularly The Eye in the Door, and I found the gluttonous and wanton sexuality of some of the characters a messy and distasteful distraction from the real story. But they are all worth reading, this one most of all, for Rivers alone.
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