On the surface, Regeneration is a psychological war novel, the story after all takes place in Craiglockhart hospital which is attune to an asylum, where soldiers in trauma play golf all day to recover. It does sound pretty chill, except it’s not. This is where soldiers scream at night and wake up the next day without remembering what they went through the night before, even though everybody else did. They hallucinate their comrades in the war while they are fully conscious in bed. Some refuse to speak and only communicate by handwritten notes, and some are convinced that they no longer have the use of their legs. Each case is unique to a degree, but they all come from the same source.
The characters depicted in the novel are real life historical figures, and quite a few did not make it before the Armistice. I was surprised to see old mate Robert Graves in here, who actually suggested that Sassoon be committed into the hospital for being shell-shocked. I was surprised to know that this happened in real life, among many things in this book. Rivers, the psychiatrist, was also a real person who advanced the field of psychology at the time, especially in treating traumatised soldiers.
I felt like there was no such thing as a plot here, although there are two focal characters — Sassoon and Rivers, but the chapters meander loosely to the soldiers and civilians around them. As such, the book is Barker’s attempt to portray the psychology of war at the epoch, and though the book is short, she covers a lot of ground. Should the war be fought on moral grounds? Rivers and Sassoon spar every time, the former a pacifist who cannot see the purpose of it, as he publicly states in his letter; and the latter believing that the war must be fought for the next generation’s posterity. How do soldiers approach sex? We get to see a bit of this in Prior’s relationship with Sarah, who also has her own trauma from the war. Where does art fit in the war? The poets chat and tussle with each other on wordings of poems — real poems that have been published. To them, writing and poetry is not merely a means to rationalise, but also a cathartic necessity.
Most importantly, the novel deals with trauma — deciphering each soldier’s colourful and singular issues, raking into their stories of how they just ‘lost it’. It is not an instant reaction of repulsion or an explosion of emotions which breaks down a soldier, but the wear and tear of the small unsurmountable challenges overtime — the shells in the night, the muddy boots, the endless rain, inevitable lack of sleep — that runs them down into what we know as a breakdown. Psychology is young at the time and Freud’s theories and practices are novel but highly regarded. On the other side of the coin, there are more extreme means. The novel deals wonderfully into the contradictory ethics of trying to heal a soldier, so that he may be sent away again to his death.
It is hard to read at times, but in general, the novel is drily writ. For such a heavy subject matter, I rarely felt the gravity. I suppose you’d need to read between the lines for that — the convalescent soldier, Burns, who wound up one night in the middle of nowhere, unable to wake from a dream. The screaming soldiers in the night, the seething rage over lost games of golf, the sexual frustration. And perhaps the novel suffered a little from this cold tone and the lack of focus.
The novel’s title refers to an experimental treatment where a patient’s radial nerve is severed and sutured, and the healing is closely observed. The effect of this is adverse, as the patient ends up feeling an enormous amount of pain all over his body from something simple as pin prick. The treatments of the patients seem to have this same effect, where at some point, as the nerve regenerates and sensation returns to the nerves, the smallest things can trigger the patient. Is there a point therefore to the attempt to “regenerate” the patients, as some of these patients will not recover even after having been discharged?
But we can take the novel as the bickering viewpoints of Sassoon and Rivers. It was Sassoon’s duty to regenerate Sassoon, to convince him to go back to his troops. But the more he discourses with Sassoon, the more he felt self-contradictory — why send the young men to die for whom we were meant to save for future generations? Rivers himself is no longer a young man in the novel and that is an important factor. Who is regenerating who?
