Recommended Reading

Ok. So I have a mountain o'things to tell y'all about. Like getting a job in Brussels (oh my life) and spending the weekend there and how the beer is ALL over 5% and inordinately cheap. And watching that documentary about Death Row and feeling a little depressed. And my sister being Quite A Bit Pregnant. And my ACTUALLY awesome interview outfit (awesome in the original, uber-religious sense of the word. Not an empty adjective. No siree.)

Did I mention I got a job in Brussels? Did I? Ah, but did I?

But shush. All this will come in good time.

Meanwhile, I've been planning on writing a more regular thang (I actively resisted the word 'feature' there on account of being far too wanky). A book review of sorts. Books you should read - at least in my humble opinion. Recommended reading.

So here goes number one. Regeneration, by Pat Barker.

Now, it was a total coincidence that I happened to be reading this in an airport on the way to Brussels. And I should probably admit at this point that WW1 literature isn't really my thing. I haven't read Birdsong; I know some people will feel I need to be crucified for that admission. I have a sketchy knowledge of the big names in war poetry from teaching it, usually to disinterested Year 9s.

The story is set largely in Craiglockart War Hospital - the actual war hospital where Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were treated. Owen was referred for trauma and Sassoon after writing his famous letter 'Finished With the War: a Soldier's Declaration' and it was considered to be less of a threat to morale to lock him up and declare him mad than deal with his statement in any way that appeared to take him seriously.

While there, they were treated by Rivers - the enigmatic neurologist at the centre of the novel. Rivers has his own demons, though, and is constantly fighting between his sense of patriotic duty and his buried conviction that the war is responsible for untold, unjustifiable horrors. His patients arrive at Craiglockhart in many forms - paralysed, mute, plagued by insomnia - and he attempts to fix them. With some he succeeds; with others, he doesn't. Some have gone too far. And probably my favourite passages comes from Rivers' contemplation of this very fact:

...Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half-caterpillar, half-butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. Burns was young, after all. If today really marked a change, a willingness to face his experiences in France,then his condition might improve. In a few years' time it might even be possible to think of him resuming his education, perhaps persuing that unexpected interest in theology. Though it was difficult to see him as an undergraduate. He had missed his chance of being ordinary.

And that final line - he had missed his chance of being ordinary - there it is. Hit-the-nail-on-the-head writing. For what other way is there of saying it? They missed their chance of being ordinary.

Some of it is clunky. I think the part where Sassoon casts a critical eye over Owen's early verse and comes up with the 'like cattle' simile for Anthem for Doomed Youth is a little heavy-handed - although perhaps I'm being unfair and only screaming 'This is, like, WELL obvious!' in my head because I already know the story.

And Pat Barker isn't a writer I'm much fond of. I read Blow Your House Down over the Christmas holidays and left it on the plane. It was just too hideously depressing and graphic. If you think I'm being a prude, well, go and try your luck. Reading about a war in which millions died a futile death? Sobering. Thought-provoking. Reading about a sicko killing prostitutes and then doing unmentionable things to their corpses? Gah. No ta.
But in Regeneration I discovered a different side to Barker away from all of that salty Virago 'what women read' stuff. Have a read. Recommended.