Regeneration

"It’s one of the classics of WW1 literature. It’s interesting that several of the novels I’ve chosen to recommend were written after the fact, by people who weren’t there. I think the reason it’s such a rich vein to draw on, for contemporary writers, is that we can so easily read first-hand accounts and then reconfigure that into literature, whereas that is obviously much less true for, you know, the Seventh Crusade. Regeneration is a war book that’s not really set in the war. I seem to remember Pat Barker saying that writing from the perspective of this doctor, Dr Rivers, who had also never been to war felt like a very honest place to start from. Dr Rivers specialises in shellshock. A lot of the methods they used on the soldiers returning seriously disturbed from their time at the front are, to our minds now, barbaric. It was just: shout at them until they behave. But what Dr Rivers was trying is much more recognisably modern, more like talk therapy. The book is a little bit about his relationship with his patients, in particular with Siegfried Sassoon. “The term ‘First World War’ started being used, in 1918 or 1920” The starting point of the book is, in 1917, Sassoon writes a letter condemning the war. This was a big deal as by then he was already a well-respected war poet, and had a medal for valour. So he couldn’t be easily dismissed as a coward. If an honoured soldier is saying this war is bad… that is very bad press for the war. So the book begins there, and it’s just a really fantastic read. It’s a good story, she’s an incredible writer—I mean, at a granular level, she uses punctuation really interestingly, and her dialogue feels incredibly vivid. I learned a lot about how to write historical fiction from this book, which I read after writing the first draft of In Memoriam . She doesn’t explain to you, the reader, what the world is like. She just drops you into it. So there will be tons and tons of references to things you don’t understand or know about. The characters will refer to someone as a “conchie”, and you just have to figure out that that means a conscientious objector, she doesn’t tell you that. And the characters are constantly exchanging pieces of news with each other, the way you do. So it feels really rich and vivid, as if you were there. It’s a very clever and engaging and wise book. I think quite closely. Pretty much all the physical facts of the plot happened. I went to Craiglockhart while I was writing my book. When you read accounts, like those of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon, they are always talking about how ugly it is, but I thought it was beautiful."