It's difficult to convey how engaging and satisfying Barker's writing is: returning to a well-crafted character, Rivers, and keeping him at the centre of a shifting novelistic space allows Barker to explore the chaos around and within him.
Amongst strips of very human dialogue, humour flashes through in a surprising manner, mingling with dark images and underpinned by an anti-war commentary.
This is a war novel which goes back to society: the war asked men to be something they were not, and this novel shows how a process of reversal unravelled. A society held in war revealed what it truly was, whilst its men donned the masks of soldiers and left what they were.