#cbr10bingo This is the End The Ghost Road is the third and final volume in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy. Set during WWI in England, the trilogy tells the story of both real and fictional characters trying to make sense of a senseless war. The first book focused on the patients at Craiglockhart Hospital, an asylum for soldiers suffering from shell shock and being treated so as to be sent back to the front. Book two centered on the fictional character Billy Prior, a soldier recovering […]
Psychological Conflict Management
In volume one of Pat Barker’s award winning Regeneration Trilogy, readers experienced life in a hospital for English soldiers suffering from “war neurosis” (PTSD) during WWI. Barker uses both fictional and real historical characters (Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Dr. Rivers) to show the trauma of war for soldiers expected to heal and return to action, and the impact of their experiences upon the doctor treating them. At the end of that novel, Rivers’ patients are being released back to action, which was his goal, but […]
Los Angeles Nightmare
My James Ellroy kick continues, this time with a book that’s more of a horror novel than mystery. Book two of Ellroy’s LA Quartet, this is where he began to find his voice. One could see glimpses in The Black Dahlia of the writer he would become. The Big Nowhere proves he can handle a story with a larger scope than a typical paperback mystery. Ostensibly about the police squeezing the communists who hold the line for unions combating their studio employers, The Big Nowhere manages to mesh in the mob […]
Not just another WWI novel
#cbr10bingo And So It Begins Pat Barker’s Booker-nominated first volume of the Regeneration Trilogy takes place during World War I and, unsurprisingly, deals with the trauma and horror of that conflict. What sets her work apart from other WWI novels, however, is that the action takes place not at the front but at an asylum for British soldiers suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Many of the characters in Regeneration are real people who really knew each other in London and at Craiglockhart […]