I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the other two. We are still following the same characters. Dr Rivers is working and living in London, remembering his time as an anthropologist in PNG. We have Sassoon who has completely moved on from his thoughts of the first book. And then there is Billy Prior, who could have stayed safe in the war office but decides to return to the front line. He has no regard for his safety and is eventually killed in a pointless battle just days before armistice.

A terrifying novel about the aftermath of trauma and the contradictions in the soldiers' psyche, where the war is both terrible and never to be repeated and at the same time experiences derived from it are given enormous value.

I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another language would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a bombardment or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme. There are no words. There are no words for what I felt when I saw the setting sun rise.

I have a hypothesis that the muddled history I've internalized of whether The Lord of the Rings is a single work or a trilogy has something to do with the fact that reading [b:Regeneration|5872|Regeneration (Regeneration, #1)|Pat Barker|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1365925619s/5872.jpg|9250] the way I did meant that its sequels were destined for five stars regardless of intervening time or space or change of tune. Of course, the sequels could have really fucked up to the point that this fate was broken and denied, but in this case, Barker kept up her streak of leaving the reader broken in her wake. A warning, perhaps, but with the subject at hand, to be denied would be the more dangerous route, as that would involve withholding some amount of the truth, a mechanism which must occur if ever one is to convince others to go to war. Not revolution, mind you. Not rebellion, nor mutiny, not even resistance. War.

By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

I have my doubts about the reception of Barker's other works, especially the ones that also take place in merry old WWI-era England. On the one hand, the writer in the Regeneration trilogy has her finger on its pressure point in the ways that forgo all talk of being 'of the times' that it's nearly impossible for that to have all evaporated by the time the first words began forming for another project. On the other, it'd be a downright shame, as while I've already committed to finding a nice three-in-one edition to reread every ten years or so, I've grown tired of going over the same old territory in various media. Sticking to the same author is hardly adventurous, and I don't think I'll be dislodging R.L. Stein off my most read authors list anytime soon, but many-tomed classes in the vein of Austen and Shakespeare have given me an appreciation for bibliographical evaluations. If Barker isn't worth this endeavor, I don't know who is.

I suppose what one should be asking is whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.

The strange part is that this trilogy doesn't treat with war at its most creative. This isn't Haiti in 1812, or South Sudan in 2011, or anything lending to postcolonial or anti-settler state. You can't even make an argument for genocide, or at least not on any level other than the peripheral. The statement made by one of the characters that poison gas and trenchfare was the worst the twentieth century had to offer was made by a brain firmly in its present, the skill of an author rather than an imagination and thus the sort of hubristic perfection no one alive would ever want to be able to afford. Some things, however, never go out of style: post-traumatic stress disorder, homophobia, biphobia, toxic masculinity. One could make an argument for racism, but as far as fictional ethnography written by a white author goes, Barker was more than willing to hand off the baton to someone who has the right to talk about such things.

We have to die, we don't have to worship it.

At the end, I have to say, I regret the ending. It wasn't a horrible ending, practically the best one, but a better one than that would have been to never end, which is so overwhelmingly selfish a statement that I can only make it after having gone through each of the three books in the order intended. Due to the matter of various prizes and places on esteemed lists, as well as the way in which the writing is constructed, this is one of the more pulled apart series, some reading the first and no other, some heading straight to the third, the oft-neglected second suffering from both middle sibling syndrome and the mystique of the loner piece of literature, without sequel and thus without close compare. Even I wasn't the most orthodox about my road to completion. After leaving the first in the series to itself for three years and rushing through the following two in the last month, I'm nearly drunk with the bone-raking pathos of what I remembered and what I've just experienced. One way of reasoning it out is that the books were there when I needed them. The power of them, though, suggests that I was there when they needed me.

A curious, old-fashioned romantic poet, though I don't know why I say that, there's plenty of them about...But then they don't all quote, 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' as he did, quite without embarrassment, the other night while I was getting ready for bed. I said very sourly indeed that a more appropriate quotation for this stage of the war might be: 'I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more...' His leap across the room was rather remarkable. He'd slapped a hand across my mouth, and we were staring at each other, dumbstruck, before either of us had time to think, his face chalk-white and I suspect mine as well, each trying to remember what the penalty is for smacking an officer in the gob. Quite possibly death.

4.5 very good

The whole Regeneration series is gorgeous.

MUCH better than the middle book in the series. Barker knows what works and writes a much tighter book here. Everything I loved about the series and a great ending.