Summer Reading: The Ghost Road

Pat Barker's The Ghost Road is the third installment of the Regeneration trilogy. While the first two books focus on the immediate effects of war on British society (as the war continues in France) the last book spends more time outside of Britain. One of the main protagonists, Billy Prior, goes back to France and we follow his diary of the days leading up to his death, which poignantly takes place at the well known battle where Wilfred Owen died just a week before the Armistice. Paralleling Prior's diary is the memory of Dr. Rivers of his experience on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia.

Summer reading: The Eye in the Door

I'm trying to figure out what to write my autobiography paper on (still) and so I decided to get my brain back into World War One mode by listening to The Eye in the Door, the second installment of the Regeneration trilogy, a series of novels that takes place in England, on the "home-front", during the war. The books are about injured and "shell shocked" soldiers receiving psychological treatment from the neurologist and cultural anthropologist Dr. W.H.R Rivers. Nearly all of the characters are based on the lives of real men, including Dr. Rivers, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, except for our protagonist Billy Prior, a temperamental Northerner who'll unapologetically have sex with anyone (homosexuality features as a primary theme in the novels as a threat to national security and something which is frequently treated at the hospital in which Dr. Rivers works), who hates his father and seeks to replace Dr. Rivers as a father figure, and who is a fighter as well as a lover. Prior is a bit over the top, but I am absolutely in love with him.