After reviewing ‘Noonday’ last week, and mentioning that the Regeneration Trilogy is in my top ten, and was also much loved by Mum, one of our lovely regular Mum’s Books readers told me she had never heard of it and would be looking for it. This was all the prompting I needed to go and rummage on the shelves and find Mum’s copies….no excuse needed for me to re-read this brilliant work, and so here is the first volume, ‘Regeneration’.
I’ll let you all know right away that Catherine has already reserved this book and I shall be posting it to her this week, but I’ll pop an Amazon link in at the bottom for anyone else who would like to read this…and I certainly recommend that you do, it is simply brilliant!
It is an absolutely masterful blend of fact and fiction, characters from history given additional and authentic voices by the author. This book opens in 1917, and the novel revolves around the meeting of two men. The poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon is on his way to Craiglockhart Army Hospital where he will be treated by the psychologist W.H.R. Rivers. Both men existed, both are notable. This story explores in depth the impact they have upon one another, alongside the gruesome and barbaric background of the trenches in France, and the additional stories and experiences of other characters, both fictional and real..
It is a profoundly anti war book. In a narrative from Rivers in the final pages, we read,
‘A society that devours its own young deserves no automatic or unquestioning allegiance’.
Words that we would do well to remember, as we also recall the millions of young men who died on both sides with the approach of the hundred year anniversary of the Armistice.
The other characters are also brilliant – both fictional and historical. Wilfrid Owen is also undergoing treatment at Craiglockhart for ‘shell shock’, and Ms Barker tells us of help given to the young Owen by Sassoon in amending his ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ – Sassoon had been published, Owen was an unknown. The fictional Prior is a fascinating and complex creature, a working class lad who’s an officer with all the class distinctions and difficulties that that combination entailed back then, and we shall see far more of him in the next two books. His girlfriend, Sarah Lumb, a munitions worker, and her terrifying mother Ada. Burns, an affable youngster with an appalling consequence to his time in the trenches. Honestly, all superb.
It can certainly be read as a stand alone book – but I intend to re read the other two volumes now, and am thoroughly looking forward to it. If you are looking for a Great War read, you cant go past this trilogy. It has a definite massive thumbs up from both Mum and I.
I am sure I can put these links in in a more tidy manner! Another challenge for my technically challenged brain! But that will take you to the book on Amazon UK.
As always, I welcome your comments, either here or on the Facebook page. Happy reading!
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