Though I suppose that has already been addressed in the previous two novels. I would have preferred to hear more about the people on the wards. Because each protagonist is given alternating chapters, I found myself wanting to get back to Prior because I wasn’t sure what the backstory truly added. He hallucinates about his time in Polynesia before the war, presumably quite straightforwardly. Rivers comes down with the flu virus that ultimately killed more people than the war did. Prior and Rivers only meet once, briefly, in The Ghost Road. I found this interesting the gulf between what Prior has written, what might survive, and the things that he thinks. Prior’s narration when he is on the front-line changes intermittently with diary and narration. He notices birds at the station, an omen of death. The final scenes are wrenching even though there have been lots of omens it’s his fourth time, he’s used all of his luck. Wilfred Owen died a few weeks before the war ended. Wilfred Owen, another real-life fictionalised character, is with Prior and they fight together. It is heart-breaking to know that it is 1918 and that the war would be over soon. The Ghost Road sees Prior about to go back to the trenches for his fourth time.
The writing isn’t so simplistic to suggest that this is a story of patient and doctor: Rivers seems, in his own way, equally traumatised. The novels also follow Billy Prior a working class soldier who, in the first book, is mute because he is traumatised. The Regeneration trilogy follows Rivers, a doctor in WWI who was an actual person he used tentative talking therapies in shell-shock patients. I kept remembering things mid-way through sections I wish I had read them all in one go. I had forgotten a lot of the intricacies which I feel would have had much more impact had I read them one after the other. I read Regeneration in 2012, The Eye in the Door last year and The Ghost Road was my first book of 2015. I regret reading these books so far apart.
0 kommentar(er)
