[In the following review, Rubin cites the strengths and weaknesses of Barker's writing in The Ghost Road.]

History is full of lessons; the problem lies in recognizing which past precepts best apply to present circumstances. If the Vietnam War provided an argument for isolationists and World War II inspiration for interventionists, then World War I, begun in a burst of military overconfidence, managed to transform many patriotic soldiers into impassioned pacifists.

The Great War, as it was called, produced a significant body of antiwar literature, much of which transcended the scope of mere protest writing, from Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth to the powerful poetry of Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Owen and Sassoon are featured characters in Pat Barker's widely praised trilogy of World War I novels. A writer whose previous fiction dealt with the lives of working-class women in the north of England, Ms. Barker has managed to research and imagine her way into the hearts and minds of young men raised in the belief that it was sweet and fitting to die for one's country, then plunged into the unimagined horrors of machine guns, mustard gas and trench warfare.

The Ghost Road, winner of this year's Booker Prize, completes the story begun in Regeneration （1992） and continued in The Eye in the Door （1993）. The action unfolds over the last 18 months of the war, on the homefront and the battlefront, involving a fascinating cast of characters, some based on real-life personages.

Regeneration introduces Sassoon, a decorated officer who in July 1917 stuns his superiors by declaring his opposition to the war. Thanks to the efforts of his fellow officer and fellow poet Robert Graves, but against his own wishes, Sassoon escapes court-martial by being sent to a hospital in Scotland to be treated for a “nervous breakdown.” There he is attended by Dr. William Rivers, a humane, self-critical psychiatrist well aware of the grim ironies of his own job—restoring men temporarily unhinged by the horrors of war back to a state of mind where they feel ready to reimmerse themselves in pointless slaughter Regeneration also introduces the soldier-poet Wilfred Owen and a man he will later return to the battlefront with, Lt. Billy Prior, a character （one presumes） of Ms. Barker's own creation.

An upwardly mobile lad of working-class origins who has acquired an impressive degree of polish, Billy proves a challenging patient with a disquieting habit of attempting to analyze his analyst. Resourceful, self-protective, attractive to both sexes, Billy disconcerts many people simply because they find it hard to classify him, sexually or socially. In the trilogy's second novel, The Eye in the Door, Billy comes center stage, reassigned to London as a domestic intelligence agent. His mental stability and his conscience are severely tested as he works behind the scenes to investigate the truth behind an innocent pacifist's conviction for treason and as he witnesses the public hysteria unleashed by a deranged man's claim that the war is being lost by 47,000 British homosexuals in thrall to Germany.

In The Ghost Road, Billy Prior and Wilfred Owen return to the battlefront. Like Sassoon, they are strangely eager to return to a war they no longer believe in: The sight of civilian complacency, mindless chauvinism, rampant xenophobia and resurgent homophobia sickens these soldiers, who have endured the harsh realities of war and who have come to feel a profound tenderness, in some cases sexual, for their comrades-in-arms.

Sharing the spotlight with Prior in The Ghost Road is his former physician, Dr. Rivers, now transferred to a hospital in London and suffering from an attack of Spanish influenza. Dr. Rivers, another of the real-life figures whom Ms. Barker painstakingly evokes, spent time before the war on an anthropological expedition studying the beliefs and rituals of South Seas island headhunters. Now, as he broods over the still-vivid details of his encounters with that nearly extinct tribe, he is struck by the strange parallels between his culture and theirs, and shaken by his realization that “their view of his society was neither more nor less valid than his of theirs.” Like his soldier-patients, Dr. Rivers experiences a disorienting sensation of “free-fall,” as old assumptions and beliefs collapse all around.

In portraying the immense social changes unleashed by the war, Ms. Barker combines a gritty realism with a surprisingly imaginative use of symbols and leitmotifs. Even so, her ambitious three-novel enterprise is somewhat thinner than one might expect, given the potential of the subject. The characters are convincing, but their depths are implied rather than plumbed. Themes and concepts such as feminism, masculinism, culture shock and Freudian psychology are crisply presented but not explored to the point where fresh insights are generated. Ms. Barker has taken on a challenging and important subject, which affords proof of her strengths as a novelist but which also reveals what may be her limitations.