Book Review

[kenjari]

The Ghost Road
by Pat Barker

There are so many things to say about this book, I don't even know where to begin. It is the final volume of Barker's WWI trilogy, and it is incredible. I think the main themes have to do with the conditions of living in a society deeply entrenched, invested even, in war and death. And there is a lot of death in this book. Not just the death of characters, but the fact of death itself. The issues this novel tackles are big: what does it mean when people's lives are lived in the midst of death? what happens when a society anchors itself in war and death? is it worth it and what if the answer is no? Yet the story and the writing are intimately human and rooted in the details of daily living. I cannot recommend these books enough.

Comments

[iralith.livejournal.com]

I ought to read that again some time. I went through the whole trilogy in college, while I was working on my B.A. thesis about Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves; at the time I wasn't able to pay as much attention to The Ghost Road as I'd have liked to, because it gets away from some of the issues Pat Barker is working with in the first two books. Billy Prior, in the second book, is such an excellent medium for Barker's exploration of class and sexuality and so forth that he almost suffers as a human character . . . but that made him very useful to me in connection to the stuff I was thinking about at the time.

Broadening, dealing more with human universals than Regeneration or The Eye in the Door do—that, I'd guess, is why I'd think of The Ghost Road as a more successful novel than its predecessors if I read all three over again.