The Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
In deck-chairs all along the front, the bald pink knees of Bradford businessmen nuzzled the sun.
-- from The Ghost Road by Pat Barker.
The Ghost Road is the final book in Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, beginning with Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. She won the 1995 Booker Prize for The Ghost Road. I'm reading it right now.
The trilogy is not like other WWI books I've read. I expected the usual muddy trenches and battle scenes. I think I'm going to get some of that in the second half of The Ghost Road, but the first two book and the first half of this one have been set during the war, but in England. The books center on psychiatrist William Rivers treating soldiers with shell shock and other mental conditions. The patients talk about what happened to them in the war, which is traumatic enough, but none of the action (so far) takes place on the battlefield.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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He wasn't particularly surprised: the removal of hysterical paralysis was often -- one might almost say generally -- as dramatic as the onset. Moffet lay still, his face sallow against the whiteness of the pillow, making no attempt to hide his depression, and indeed, why should he?
In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all “ghosts in the making.” In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his—and our—understanding of war.
