[In the following review, Greenlaw asserts that Barker's skill with style and characterization is at its height in The Ghost Road.]

The authenticity of history is useful to writers of fiction. It can be challenged or invoked; and its scale can be adjusted to amplify or to diminish human drama, either way providing props, backdrops and special effects at comparatively little imaginative cost. The dangers are obvious: fiction is authenticated by its evidence of research—details of the real place, people, technology. Anecdotes and arcane practices impress us primarily because they are “real.” The First World War has been extensively treated in fiction. Some of the most influential novels of this century were written in its aftermath, several by those who had fought: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Good Soldier Schweik, A Farewell to Arms. （Even Hemingway saw a month's action before getting blown up.） A sense of disintegration and the unimaginable characterized the contemporary artistic response. The struggle to find adequate language resulted in its renewal through being broken open or pared right down. In the 1990s, however, there can be no such struggle when writing about the First World War, no such sense of renewal. We have enjoyed decades of retrospective consensus: known good and evil, agreed right and wrong. Yet we are seeing a strange revival of interest among novelists in the subject. This may be a matter of timing, of opportunism: the war represents both a lost world and the beginnings of the place in which we now live; ancient enough to be history and recent enough to be inherited. When writers now turn to the First World War, they must find some way of disturbing dust that is thickly settled. Otherwise they make costume drama, something too integrated and too imaginable. The British novelist Pat Barker has chosen to write a trilogy on the war. Her concerns are not those of drama and history, but of psychology and society. Still, these three novels do not escape the dangers inherent in historical fiction, and particularly the problems which flow from the size and the familiarity of their subject. Barker's early novels, based on the world of the British working-class women of her childhood, were acclaimed for their authenticity, so much so that their author felt they were being read more as sociology than fiction. So she set out deliberately to write beyond her established and expected territory as a “northern, regional, working-class feminist,” and produced a trilogy of novels about the lives of a group of officers who were patients in the same psychiatric hospital during the First World War （Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and, most recently, The Ghost Road）. From a subject （working-class womanhood） that traditionally had little voice, Barker chose one which, as she has said, “has whole libraries devoted to it.” She has made good use of them: most of the characters, and many of the events, are historical. The setting of the first book, Regeneration, is Craiglockhart Hospital outside Edinburgh, where the doctors include the pioneering anthropologist and neurologist W. H. R. Rivers, and where among the patients are the poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. The symbolism of these three real-life figures is elaborated upon in the trilogy by appearances from or references to a number of equally famous radicals, each of whom is an obvious motif for a particular ethical dilemma, social stance or milieu. Robert Graves, Bertrand Russell, Ottoline Morrell, Sigmund Freud, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Richard Dadd and Charles Dodgson all make appearances. This is not altogether successful. The attempt to animate these personalities is hampered by the reader's prior knowledge and preconceptions, while passing allusions to a renowned pacifist or psychotic also read, irritatingly, as shorthand for what a writer should try more originally to evoke. It is where Barker is less self-consciously factual, less awed by her research and more confident of her fiction, that the books come to life. Regeneration opens with Siegfried Sassoon publicly stating his refusal, in 1917, to take any further part in the war and condemning the futility of the continuing slaughter. He is diagnosed as shell-shocked and consigned to Craiglockhart to be “cured.” Rivers embarks on a gentle and gentlemanly analysis, even arranging for Sassoon to go to his Club. At the same time, Rivers also begins treatment of the belligerent Billy Prior, a working-class officer or “temporary gentleman,” who is intelligent and articulate, aspiring to amorality but with a weakness for big ideas. He proves a perturbing patient for Rivers, whom he mimics, teases and confronts, making for far more interesting reading than the mutually admiring and self-consciously understated exchanges of Rivers and Sassoon. The contrast between the two characters is instructive: it is as if Barker knows how Sassoon should speak but can let Prior find out for himself. The First World War has been saturated in popular imagery; in addition to its literature, there is the more pervasive influence of the war movie. Alas, aspects of Regeneration bring these common influences to mind. As Sassoon agonizes over his position with the languid elegance of a cinematic hero and Robert Graves rushes to help with the bluff efficiency and dogged devotion of the hero's best friend, the dialogue seems disturbingly secondhand, as if, while written in one medium, it has been sieved through another—the book of the film of the war. Barker's dialogue becomes more convincing, but her narrative often takes the form of indirect speech that wobbles uncomfortably between the characters' language and Barker's own, with sudden shifts from the colloquial to the literary within the same voice. Plain language is embellished with rich metaphor, adding unlikely formal contrivances to otherwise carefully un-self-conscious speech. This problem is still evident in The Ghost Road: “his skin had a greenish pallor, though that might be the reflection of the light from the green screens that surrounded his bed, creating a world, a rock pool full of secret life.” Still, there is a sense of deep engagement between Barker and her subject. Her exploration of mental and physical devastation shows us how estrangement and incapacity not only call into question identity, values and belief, but provoke the redefinition of morals, gender and sexuality. Throughout the trilogy, Prior and Rivers encompass this sense of disintegration, as they become more complex and ambiguous, and lead more dislocated lives. That Barker has chosen to write three books on the war suggests how much there is she wants to say. Perhaps as a consequence, Prior and Rivers are pushed to encompass her themes, and at times their characters are engulfed by the issues Barker so palpably wants to air. Regeneration's sequel, The Eye in the Door, deals with the scapegoat groups of homosexuals and pacifists. Prior is stretched, at times improbably, to cohere the plot. Working for domestic intelligence, Prior is sent to trap a childhood friend who is charged with an antigovernment plot. He is also revealed to be bisexual, in a vengeful, exploitative way, the background to which is only properly explained in the subsequent book. The Eye in the Door has an epigraph taken from Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and it is Barker's depiction of Prior's increasingly split personality that is the most intriguing and successful part of this book. Otherwise, his coincidental contacts and neatly all-encompassing psyche and sexuality are hard to take. The most rewarding volume of the trilogy is the latest, The Ghost Road. It probes the formative experiences of Rivers and Prior but is less talkative and less self-explaining than its predecessors. On picking up a prostitute, Prior is disturbed by memories of his own childhood abuse: “he'd begun to charge, not so much resorting to prostitution as inventing it. … First Father Mackenzie. Then others.” As with the revelations about Rivers's childhood stutter and his family's uncomfortable association with Charles Dodgson （signaling questions of innocence and child sexuality）, there is a frustrating sense of the characters' motives trailing a long way behind their actions. Conversely, vague references to Prior's split personality mean little to the reader without the information given in The Eye in the Door. There are other challenges to writing books in sequence. Not only should each novel stand alone, but the act of reading the entire series should be rewarded with the added pleasure and understanding gained from resonance and allusion that reach back and forth between the individual works. There should be a sense of each book being a discrete but vital part of a whole. Barker's dramatic structuring across the trilogy, and her verbatim repetition of key anecdotes and analyses, annoy. In Regeneration Rivers concludes that “it [is] the prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness” that causes soldiers to break down. Again, in The Eye in the Door Rivers, we are told, “had long believed that the essential factor in war neurosis … was the peculiarly passive, dependent and immobile nature of their experience.” And in The Ghost Road “the whole thing was breakdown territory, as defined by Rivers. Confined space, immobility, helplessness, passivity. …” Barker can be extremely good at showing something; the problem is that she cannot resist also saying what it means, even beyond the analyses that are in keeping with Rivers's character and work. Readers are not trusted to draw conclusions or to make connections for themselves. Though this is less overt in The Ghost Road, such intrusions persist. For instance, when Rivers cures a patient whose shell shock has left him unable to walk, his treatment, attitude and sudden recovery are powerfully conveyed in the dialogue between the two men alone. The pleasure of such writing is then marred:

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? His sole defense against the unbearable had been taken away and nothing put in its place.

In The Ghost Road, the tragi-comic backdrop of Rivers's other patients is brought to the fore, and it is interesting to compare the above passage, about Moffet, with the more drawn-out story of Hallet. With fine timing and restraint, Barker traces the fate of this young soldier from his naive enthusiasm to his grotesque injuries and slow death. Barker is at her best when she resists directing and simply observes, allowing Rivers his insight without it becoming intervention. As here, in the scene around Hallet's death bed:

And then the girl, whose name was … Susan, was it? She sat, twisting a handkerchief between her fingers, often with a polite, meaningless smile on her face, in the middle of the family she had been going to join and must now surely realize she would not be joining. And the boy, who was almost the most touching of all, gauche, graceless, angry with everything, his voice sometimes squeaking humiliatingly so that he blushed, at other times braying down the ward, difficult, rebellious, demanding attention, because he was afraid if he stopped behaving like this he would cry.

Prior is now engaged to his munitions-worker girlfriend Sarah Lumb. Barker uses her world to examine the effects that the war had on women's lives as they found themselves suddenly independent and out at work. For Prior, women “seemed to have changed so much during the war, to have expanded in all kinds of ways, whereas men over the same period had shrunk into a smaller and smaller space”—an impressive distinction, but one that sounds more like Barker's retrospection than any believable prescience on Prior's part. Sarah is a strong if opaque character, whom Prior tentatively associates with whatever hopes he has left of a future. In his dislocated life, he makes no connection between her and his professional experiences or other sexual encounters. Their relationship is characterized by a mixture of honesty and restraint, particularly moving given their knowledge of what is likely to come—for Prior has finally got his wish to return to France. There is no sense of liberation or hope, not least because the monolithic structures of class and gender remain. Rivers is also facing the erosion of his aspirations and beliefs. Feverish with Spanish influenza, he is haunted by disturbing associations between the effects of the war and the death-centered culture of a group of former headhunters he studied on Eddystone Island in Melanesia. While Rivers helps soldiers come to terms with the atrocities they witness and commit, and struggles with them to find the justification that will release them from their guilt, he recalls this Melanesian society, where beliefs were so strong that the people were devoid of introspection and resolute about the more barbaric customs they practiced. The world of these islanders is surprisingly involving and credible. There is a formality and a detachment to these passages that play down the exoticism and the symbolism they entail. We remain conscious of Rivers as a professional observer without this detracting from the emotional force of what unfolds. Elaborate rituals of death, skulls picked clean, suggest the relief and release of justification and completion. There is little of either to be found among the rotting corpses and shattered minds of the Front. But life on Eddystone Island is no less vulnerable to change; colonial repression is forcing an end to headhunting practices. So as Rivers now observes a modern society shattered by war, he remembers an ancient one for which war, killing and death were the foundations. Rivers is a wise and compassionate man but also a man of his times, and it is interesting to compare the enlightened views that Barker gives the fictional creation with the hidebound perceptions and dubious intent suggested in the preface that the real-life Rivers wrote to his History of Melanesian Society in June 1914. In that preface, not quoted by Barker, he thanks two islanders who gave him much of his material, adding that these two men were doubtless above the average of their fellows, but their capacity shows how much might be done by the encouragement of independent industry and the preservation of such features of native culture as do not conflict with the better aspects of our civilisation. This is not how Barker's Rivers sounds. The real-life Rivers's uneasy coupling of colonialism and anthropology mirrors his paradoxical role as an innovative therapist whose job it was to send soldiers back to the war. Barker's emphasis in her fictional version on his enlightened aspects evades properly confronting this complexity. Regeneration is a talking book about the talking treatment, in which lengthy dialogues are studded with emphasized abstracts: “despair … meaning … courage … sense … reason … integrity.” The Ghost Road is altogether less emphatic, less given to bluster. It is an impressive summation, in which Barker has clearly got the measure of her characters and ideas and found the confidence to be both more ambitiously imaginative and more controlled. The diary that Prior keeps when he returns to the Front is an impressive portrayal of tension and tedium, of the overriding preoccupation not with battle but with the immediate concerns of food and sleep. Here is Prior's final diary entry:

Patriotism honour courage vomit vomit vomit. Only the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres … there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there.

It is these “little words,” the “us” and “them” of class, gender and convention, that are Barker's big themes. The weight of her chosen historical context pulls her insights badly out of focus at times, but the level of her questioning is impressively profound.

In a book full of questions, the only one that is answered is why those who do not believe （Sassoon, Prior, Owen and all） continue to want to fight. The war has taken or turned upside down everything that gave them a sense of themselves, estranging them from civilian life. Perhaps the only bond left to these men is the one they have with each other. The actual battle recounted in the closing pages of this book was just as futile and devastating as Barker conveys. With admirable judgment, she leaves us without the relief of knowing that within a week the war was over.