The Ghost Road

First, a comment on the review from the "Top 50 Reviewer" from NH: I find his(her?) entire review willfully odd in many regards, not the least of which is the claim that to read the historian John Keegan is to discover that the war was well conducted. But I digress... The point of the novel, indeed the trilogy, seems to me to be betrayal. Whatever else he is, Billy Prior seems to have been betrayed, to varying degress, by most of those whom he has encounterd: father, mother, priest, military superiors, Empire, and, most probably but at least humanely, Rivers himself. In the final tally, there seems to be little difference between governments prosecuting the war to its last gasp ("And then the next day in 'John Bull' there's Bottomley saying, No, no, no and once again no. We must fight to the bitter end.")---and the headhunting Melanesians. To the (possible) credit of the Melanesians, they at least understand that they are unreconstructed headhunters.The manipulative, sexually voracious, and profoundly self-aware Billy Prior is an unforgettable fictional creation. (And, yes, the homosexual scenes distressed me and made me queasy.) And yet, there he is, in all his fictional power and extremely sloppy humanity: neither pauper nor prince, neither straight nor gay, neither hero nor coward, neither fully sincere nor totally duplicitous, neither pacificist nor Johnny Bull, neither sane nor insane, both the hunter and the hunted. In his multiplicity he becomes Everysoldier. And the power of Pat Barker's prose is to make the reader care profoundly about Billy Prior's fate, consigned, as we all knew that he would be, to the "ghost road" of the title.One of John Keegan's major points, by the way, has been that by World War I, technology had brought to mankind the means of destruction on a massive scale without the ability to adequately control it: thus misguided artillery barrages, poison gas blowback, constant breakdown of telephone wires affecting command and control. The inabilty to communicate effectively helped to trigger, then to prolong the conflict, and contributed to the death of millions. As the mortally wounded Hallet keeps intoning and only Rivers is able to translate into comprehensible language, "Shotvarfet"---"It's not worth it." Indeed.

This book shouldn't be read without its two predecessor volumes, which introduce and develop the two central characters, one based on fact (Rivers), one totally fictional (Prior). The sense of impending doom grows inexorably as the plot unfolds, but the ending nevertheless has power to shock.

Recalling the books of Lost Generation enriched with psychoanalytic experience and author's brilliant style, Ms Pat Barker's sad story takes all your attention from the first pages. Two main lines of the novel's plot tell us about Lt Billy Prior, who returns to the Field Forces in France in the last months of the WWI, and Dr William Rivers, whose memory revives the days of his life amidst the head-hunters of Melanesia. So we have two different rungs of the social ladder of human civilization - Europe as the upper edge and Melanesia as the bottom one. Former head-hunters, whose cruel practice was strictly proscribed by 'civilized white men', can restrain their passions (though coveting for past bloody raids) and even have reverent attitide towards human death and complicated rituals of interment. Intertwining episodes of both main lines Ms Barker delineates a hideous picture of insensate and endless ('Nobody's in control. Nobody knows how to stop.') human abattoir of the last battles of the war in Europe where 'civilized white men' destroy themselves in madness unknown for the Melanesian barbarians. Yet the heroes of the novel do not know that this war is only the World War I: the Ghost Road of human civilization...

Whilst it took me a while to get into, it was well worth the perseverence. Barker goes deep into the human psyche and into the grim reality of war and ritual violence. The very complex characters of Prior and Rivers are so excellantly developed you dont want it to end as it races towards its conclusion. More satisfying than "The eye in the door". A classic!.

Although "Regeneration" is my favorite of Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, I thought "The Ghost Road" was a brilliant and tragic ending. The novel takes us to the final days of World War I, where we witness the tragic fate of Billy Prior, the working-class anti-hero of the trilogy. Interspersed with his experiences in France we also join the psychiatrist, Dr. Rivers. Rivers deals with his unpleasant duty of preparing men to return to battle as he remembers his anthropological work in the Melanesian islands, amongst the members of a culture that was slowly dying out.Barker's restrained style is extremely moving -- far more so than the florid prose of Sebastian Faulks' World War I novel "Birdsong." Every time I've read this novel, I've been moved to tears.P.S. The reader from South Africa who was so incensed at Ms. Barker's "factual inaccuracies" might want to check again: There were indeed air raids over England in World War I -- they were carried out by the infamous Zeppelins! Also, Dr. Rivers was living amongst the head-hunters of Melanesia in the Pacific (probably Borneo or thereabouts) NOT Africa.