Couldn't read this novel. Not my type of book. Gave up in the 2nd chapter

Can I say I enjoyed this book? That sounds a bit wrong, given the subject matter. Nevertheless, I found it compelling and moving. The prose is lucid and never wasteful - there's barely a foot put wrong in the whole novel. The characters are wonderful - likeable and comprehensible in a way that isn't easy for people living in an incomprehensible time. Part of the genius of the plot, I think, is that Barker realises there's no point in writing about the war, both because it's already been done and because it doesn't necessarily help to bring the reader any closer to understanding it. Instead, the plot revolves around reactions to the war, or in fact the reactions of a doctor to the reactions of the officers to their experiences in the war. Seeing at such a remove, like observing the transit of Venus through a pinhole camera, I felt as a reader I could get closer to seeing the truth than I ever could by staring at the sun and reading directly about the horror.

I read this at university, for one of my courses, so technically this is a reread, but books read for class don't count, I think, and although the tone and the character of Rivers were familiar, it was otherwise like reading something for the first time. ( )

Perhaps even 4½ stars. This historical-fiction novel centers around the poet Siegfried Sassoon and his psychiatrist Dr. Rivers during his stay at the mental hospital Craiglockhart during 1917.

The central theme is conflict between duty and survival which Rivers recognizes as the basis for most of the cases of "war neurosis", shell shock or as we now call it PTSD. Where do we draw the line between a soldier's duty and a completely reasonable desire to survive? The heart-wrenching part was the fact that many of the men (especially officers) didn't want (at least in the conscious part of their brain) to be posted in a "safe" position because they felt it was shameful to desert their men. The stress of being responsible for others without having any power to control conditions must have been enormous... ( )

184 "The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay."
184 "He had missed his chance of being ordinary."
222 "It was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks and bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition."

War is not my usual reading topic but the characters were so interesting. I was unfamiliar with the term "neurasthenia" but consider it the equivalent of PTSD or shellshock. There are wonderful descriptive detail: "the silvery sound of shaken wheat, the shimmer of light on the stalks" (p.6) when passing a windblown wheat field.

It took me a couple weeks to read because I would stop to take in the message, to think about the implications. Barker isn't just writing about soldiering, but also about how our social customs and expectations affect us, and she uses Rivers' experiences as an anthropologist as comparative alternative. Can men be nurturing or express tenderness without being considered deviant (includes homosexual in that era)? The biblical story of Abraham sacrificing his son as the basis for patriarchal (Euro-American) societies which imply "If you, who are young and weak, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be a ble to exact the same obedience from your sons" (p.149). "The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay" as the caterpillar in its chrysalis (p.184). The difference in symptoms of the emotional conflict or protest of what they are required to do between those who have power (i.e. upper class officers=stuttering, nightmares, tremors, memory lapses) and those who don't (working class=paralysis, mutism). The similarities of stress symptoms between the soldiers and low-income women: "The look of people who are totally responsible for lives they have no power to save" (p.107). The psychiatric treatment of PTSD in soldiers as really a silencing of them as humans, controlling people not to keep them from engaging in self-destructive behavior but allowing them to resume fighting which is positively suicidal (p.238).

I assumed from the blurb that Barker wanted to protest current wars but chose to clothe this perspective in the WWI era to make the topic more universal. And then I found out after reading the book that Siegfried Sassoon was a real person. Still, it does allow us the hindsight of knowing the WWII consequence of this trying to "shell the militarism out of the Hun". This turns out not to be a pacifist book so much as one which asks us to examine whether the purpose for any particular war is worth the cost.

Unrelated to the main themes, I wondered if Sassoon's advice to Own on writing poetry, and selection of words was advice this author used as her own guide. It is quite admirable writing. ( )