Following on from Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, Barker keep this book more tightly focused on Billy Prior and Dr. William Rivers. Prior has, despite the asthma and the shell shock that originally landed him in the Craigslockhart hospital, managed to pass muster to be sent back to the front lines. Most of his section of the book is related as journal entries he makes. They're dated, raising the question of whether he's going to survive until the Armistice or not.
The issues Prior had in the second book, where he lost chunks of time as a second personality or alter emerged, are absent. Prior had been intent on going back into combat, rejecting offers of a Ministry desk job , seemingly because he wants to prove he hasn't cracked. So perhaps having been granted the opportunity has settled the more acerbic alter that kept taking control.
I don't think it's a matter of Prior being at peace with himself, because that's not how Barker writes him. Prior seems in a constant state of agitation, like he can't help provoking reactions in others, and then can't help feeling a bit guilty about it after. We see a letter he sent to Rivers near the end of the book, where he makes a caustic reference to something Rivers brought up about how men like Prior will be the test of whether anything the psychologists did actually helped. On the next page, Prior notes he took the wrong tone, but had no time to get it right.
It reminds me of some of the stuff I've read about Hemingway, where he'd accuse a friend of hateful stuff in a letter, then apologize to them 3 paragraphs later in the same letter. Don't know what that says about Prior, except maybe he had problems before he ever went to war.
As for Rivers, he's still treating other patients, but much of the book devoted to him focuses on an anthropological study he and another man did of a group of islanders in Melanesia before the war. Head hunting featured prominently in the island's culture, but the British have outlawed it since colonizing the islands. Rivers feels like the prohibition of it has robbed the islanders of a certain level of vitality, and their cultural practices are also not quite adjusted for the new circumstances. Like the practices were necessary for the survival of these people, and a consistent alternative hasn't been found.
It seems to relate to Rivers "fixing" men like Prior so they can return to charging into machine gun fire. Guilt seems to factor heavily in the issues of his patients, going back to Siegfried Sassoon seeing the ghosts of men he knew on the battlefield, demanding to know why he's not there. I'm not clear on the link, however. Is it that it's ultimately destructive to have a practice where a widow must sit alone in a small house after the husband dies unless someone brings a head, like it's destructive to encourage people to go to war, but it's worse to try and take that away?
The islanders seem to regard death as a series of stages, as Rivers at one point disagrees with a wise man who tells him another member of their people is dead. Rivers points to the man's chest, still rising and falling, and argues he's not dead. The wise man has to explain that's a different kind of death. Some of the soldiers die entirely on the battlefield. Others make it home but are dead inside, and of those, how obvious the death of the soul is varies. One of Prior's fellow officers is badly wounded and ends up in Rivers' ward. He's alive, but in a lot of ways, he's already beyond the reach of his loved ones. The books don't deal much with the people who get left behind, the wives and parents and such. Not their story, I guess.
'My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is run away, and I will not do it. Test passed?'
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