Billy Prior We May Never Meet Again
Dec 31, 1995
Shell ShockBy CLAUDIA ROTH PIERPONT
THE GHOST Route
By Pat Barker.
t was not until 1914 that words became inadequate to draw the horrors of state of war. ''Indescribable horror'': the very notion, at present so worn with utilise, in fact marked a sharp reversal of our most enduring literary impulse, from the ''Iliad'' and Moses' song over the drowned Egyptian cavalry through to Tolstoy. By the second year of the Great War, amid unprecedented carnage and the sense that no one could explain anymore what crusade it served, there grew up in Britain a soldiers' literature obsessed with the divide between available language and actual experience. Countless messages and poems and diaries condemned their own habits of eloquence equally a betrayal of truth. But still they were written; it was, afterward all, a prodigiously literary war. In Pat Barker'due south novel ''The Ghost Route,'' the final volume in a trilogy that makes this war the close and pressing history of our present moment, Lieut. Baton Prior sits listening to the sounds of pens scratching and pages turning -- ''at least two would-be poets in this hut alone'' -- and, in his own diary, tells us why these men write: ''I remember it's a way of challenge immunity. First person narrators can't dice.''
Pat Barker has incorporated many of the actual words of the war's most eloquent narrators in her circuitous and ambitious work, forth with several of those narrators themselves: Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, the psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, all have parts to play. Ms. Barker's field of study is the dawning, growing protest of the state of war's insanity, expressed overtly through political defiance and unwittingly through the epidemic of ''trounce shock'' that fills the psychiatric wards where much of her story takes place. She is concerned not simply with man's fully revealed capacity for inflicting pain but with history'south nearly simultaneous discovery of the inner means by which he bears it.
While Ms. Barker is meticulously true to both the military and personal aspects of her history, she is never constrained by her sources. ''Regeneration'' (published here in 1991), ''The Middle in the Door'' (1993) and now ''The Ghost Road'' are too imaginatively complimentary-ranging and immediate to seem quite ''historical novels,'' too concerned with moral and sexual battles to seem quite ''war novels,'' too striking as hybrids of fact and possibility, easy sense of humor and passionate social statement to be classified as annihilation only the masterwork to date of a singular and ever-evolving novelist who has consistently made up her own rules.
In England, where ''The Ghost Route'' recently won the Booker Prize, much has been fabricated of the perception that the book could easily be taken for the work of a man, and that this should be viewed every bit a kind of triumph. There is more than to this claim than the ''male'' bailiwick of state of war; Ms. Barker's female characters are few and their interior lives unplumbed, her language is for the most part unsparingly directly, the book'south numerous sex scenes are ruttingly unromantic -- experienced from the signal of view of men and occurring as ofttimes and as interchangeably between men as between men and women. (Billy Prior'south engagement to be married earns him scant congratulation from a former officer who has to desist from fellating him in society to say anything at all.) All this is equally firmly controlled and convincing equally the far more unrelievedly intense, batteringly graphic scenes and linguistic communication of ''Union Street'' and ''Blow Your House Down,'' the books that beginning brought Ms. Barker to observe, which might too accept been characterized as masculine if not for the fact that they were nearly the lives of poor and desperate women.
Pat Barker grew upwardly poor in the industrial Northward, and her work has always stood out for what might exist called its anti-Merchant-Ivory view of English civilisation. Her arduous, unsentimental care for those at the bottom -- and the fact that in her world women have always been ground into the layer farthest down -- ghettoized her early books twice over. Ms. Barker herself has said that the decision to write virtually the war was a deliberate response to patronizing reviews of her working-class settings, and to the inevitable critical words '' 'But uh, can she do men?' -- as though that were some kind of Everest.'' The writer has certainly proved that she tin ''do men,'' but her real tour de strength may lie in having reinvented herself while retaining all the vigor of her old unrespectable themes. This war trilogy is as feminist and as class-embattled a work every bit Pat Barker has always written.
''Beat shock'' -- an disease originally indistinguishable from cowardice and malingering -- was a new name for the symptoms known as hysteria when they occurred in women: loss of retentivity, loss of speech, loss of the use of limbs for no credible concrete reason. The causes were eventually understood by the trilogy's immensely sympathetic hero, Dr. Rivers, in terms of the detail psychology of Cracking War combat. ''It was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the harm, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors,'' he explains in Ms. Barker's recasting of his notably un-Freudian ideas in ''Regeneration.'' Rivers sees that ''the war that had promised then much in the fashion of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a calibration that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke downward.'' It is the doctor's brunt to cure these soldiers of their private ruptures of sanity so they may be sent back to serve the greater public one.
The real cure for men came near the end of the war, when the troops were finally out of the trenches and moving; but the cure for women was the war itself. Dorsum at habitation, Billy Prior watches women seeming to abound younger, women walking with sudden purpose -- to jobs, even to pubs to share a drink together. ''On August four, 1914,'' 1 such freed soul announces, ''Peace broke out. The only little scrap of peace I've ever had.'' Prior's girlfriend Sarah earns the first decent money of her life making detonators in a munitions factory; the dear that Ms. Barker bears this honest daughter and her manufactory cronies, in their stalwart esprit, warms these books directly through. The beloved that Prior bears for Sarah brings a shock of physical joy to this smart and aroused working-course boy. He finds his other joy in the bombed-out remains of bourgeois houses, torn betwixt pleasance in their beauty and pleasure in their ruin.
The stark still proud squalor of Prior and Sarah's world shows Pat Barker at her effortless best, precipitous-sighted and with a streak of vaudeville: the neighboring mum whose chest milk is lxx proof, the mock genteel accents and sexual fumbling, the knickers tossed over the family Bible (Book of Job). But as well such vivid passages, in all three volumes there are flat and schematic expositions of the author's social letters. ''The Ghost Road'' suffers virtually in long recollections of Rivers'due south experiences on a visit to Melanesia, where he lived among a people barred by the English from their headhunting traditions and ''perishing from the absence of state of war.'' (We hardly need Rivers to remark on ''flashes of cross-cultural recognition.'') The experiences here may exist real -- the historical Rivers trained as an anthropologist, and wrote upwards the trip himself -- but the upshot is not.
Still less credible is Billy Prior's transformation from a bad male child with spelling problems to a beau who thinks ''the past is a palimpsest.'' Mute with trauma when he first appears in ''Regeneration,'' Ms. Barker's ''alley cat'' of an antihero comes to dominate the trilogy with a voice that is startlingly, bookishly clear. Or does this objection reverberate the very prejudices that Prior is meant to mock? Ms. Barker, after all, emerged from a background as fated as Baton's and spent 13 years, by her own account, working toward a literary voice that didn't come up from books. As a portrait of up-from-under literary aspiration, Prior'due south awkward evolution may be understandable. It does seem gratifyingly logical when halfway through ''The Ghost Road'' he buys a fancy notebook and, overcoming his sense of inadequacy, begins to write.
''I honestly think if the war went on for a hundred years another linguistic communication would evolve, one that was capable of describing the sound of a battery or the buzzing of flies on a hot August day on the Somme,'' reads Prior's diary from France in the autumn of 1918, when information technology seemed the war might get on that long. ''Patriotism honor courage vomit vomit vomit. Simply the names meant anything. Mons, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Verdun, Ypres.'' This is hardly a new thought. Hemingway said much the same in ''A Farewell to Artillery,'' and Wilfred Owen taught his whole generation to say it -- to beware abstractions, rhetoric, poesy -- in the preface to his poems, published only subsequently his death in battle at the Sambre Culvert. In ''The Ghost Road,'' Prior is prepare down beside Owen in that boxing, and his last diary entry is marked with the date: November. 3, 1918.
Beginning-person narrators never complete their ain histories. It is left to Ms. Barker to record how Prior saw Owen die, how the bridge they'd been building was destroyed by a single shell and how the newly risen sun, ''discovering hither the back of a hand, there the side of a cervix,'' went on to probe the distant fields. These last scenes are equally tersely lyric and stunned with meaninglessness as the work of the soldier-poets the author has drawn on. She does not choose to relate how the post-obit week, merely every bit church bells were ringing the Armistice, the telegram announcing Owen's expiry arrived at his parents' door. This did happen -- but it seems as well literary a touch, besides artistically rounded, too almightily knowing for the stories the war taught u.s.a. to tell.
Render to the Books Home Page
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/16/specials/barker-ghost.html?_r=2
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