Chapter IV

THE GHOST ROAD

The Ghost Road is the third in a trilogy of novels by Pat Barker, about the First World War, having been preceded by Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. The Ghost Road is a novel published in 1995 and winner of the prestigious Bocker Prize. It is the third volume of the trilogy that follows the fortunes of shell-shocked British army officers towards the end of the First World War.

A. Plot:

Like Regeneration, The Ghost Road is, for the most part, set back of the front lines, primarily in the Scottish mental hospital, Craiglockhart, where officers suffering from shell-shock are patched together to be sent back to the trenches of France again. Also like the first volume of the trilogy, its characters are both fictional figures, principally Billy Prior, a bisexual lieutenant of working-class origins, and real life ones, such as the poet-soldiers like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, an anthropologist and psychiatrist.

The novel moves even further from the front lines, all the way to Melanesia in the Pacific,, where Dr. Rivers went ten years before in 1908. Dr. Rivers, the psychologist who treats Billy and others, remembers the anthropological research he did in Melanesia among the tribes that once were head-hunters until that practice was outlawed by colonial administrators. This allows him to make some nicely understated •• 66 comparisons between the two war-obsessed societies, i.e. European and Melanesian. Each in its way, Europe and Melanesia, worships the dead. Each finds its own rationale for killing. It seems that Dr. Rivers dealing with the Melanesians is in a position similar to that of Billy Prior facing the prospect of combat for the fourth time.

Britons and Europeans, on the other hand, are the people detesting the horrific, immediate presence of war. On the other hand Billy, Owen and Sassoon are dying to get back into it. Back in France, Billy thinks, “What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to come back.” (Pat Barker, The Ghost Road, Viking, Penguin, London, 1995, p. 258) Little wonder they all, Europeans and Melanesians alike, see ghosts. Only their reasons for seeing them differ.

The Ghost Road is a story of war and struggle, both internal and external. It is set against the backdrop of the First World War, reflecting the lives of Billy Prior and Dr. Rivers, While Billy may be the first character introduced, it is Dr. Rivers who is truly the protagonist.

The Ghost Road completes Pat Barker’s powerful, prize-winning First World War Regeneration Trilogy. The novel features Dr. Rivers whose job is to rehabilitate the shell-shocked officers assigned to his care, with a goal returning them to active, front-line duty. In this novel, Dr. Rivers experiences a bout of influenza which triggers vivid fever-induced memories of his early anthropological work in Melanesia where he lived with a tribe of former head-hunters. These memories now colour the doctor’s analysis of the so-called “civilized” warfare.

In The Ghost Road, as it is the story of war and struggle, Billy Prior meets Dr. Rivers when he is a mental patient at Craiglockhart War • • 67

Hospital, following his third tour of duty in the Royal Army. Their friendship continues even after he is discharged through ongoing outpatient treatment. This treatment is more for Billy to cure his emotional wounds rather than any specific mental problem he is experiencing.

Billy wants to return to the Front for the fourth time. The fact is that he does not know what else to do with his life. Fighting is the only thing he knows. His inner struggle comes from his inability to determine who he is as a man. He continually cheats on his fiancee with both men and women. It is his fourth trip to war that causes his ultimate demise, as he is finally killed in the battle.

Dr. Rivers struggles daily with his own demons. His most significant problem is a perceived lack of effectiveness. In the novel, Dr. Rivers is shown through flashbacks of his mission trip to Eddystone, a Melanesian island. There he compiles research on the villagers and plans to write a significant treatise, but his own ghost haunts. The treatise is never completed or published. The title of the book speaks of the ghosts, both seen and unseen in all of us.

Ghosts are portrayed, in The Ghost Road, in many different ways. This novel was titled The Ghost Road because we are taken back to a time in Dr. Rivers’s past where he lives through a tribal experience with new customs and ways of dealing with death. In this novel, a lot of the tribal language is used, which makes Dr. Rivers’s experiences life-like.

The Washington Post Book World observes that in Barker’s trilogy’s final volume “her shell-shocked lieutenant returns to France and her noble psychologist to his part - both perilous terrains” and concludes •• 68 •• that The Ghost Road mixes “the single-bullet understatement of the best war fiction with a bottomless grasp of its tragic ironies”. (Linda Lesher, The Best Novels of the Nineties : A Reader’s Guide, McFarland, 2000, pp. 187-188). The New Yorker notes that Barker has rescued Dr. Rivers from historical obscurity by inventing “a consciousness for him - a deep - flowing and somewhat turbulent one. And she also invents a patient for him; tough, libidinous Billy prior. His energy is what makes this trilogy more than mere historical fiction. Through him, Pat Barker presents the First World War as the test tube of the modem spirit”. {The Best Novels of the Nineties : A Reader’s Guide, p. 188)

Publisher Weekly, in its stained review, concludes that “The whole trilogy, which in its entirely is only equivalent to one blockbuster serial killer frenzy, is a triumph of an imagination at once poetic and practical.” {The Best Novels of the Nineties: A Reader’s Guide, p. 188) The Times Literary Supplement calls The Ghost Road “a startlingly good novel in its own right” and concludes that with “the other two volumes of the trilogy, it forms one of the richest and most rewarding works of fiction of recent times. Intricately plotted, beautifully written, skillfully assembled, tender, horrifying and funny, it lives on the imagination, like the war it so imaginatively and so intelligently explores. {The Best Novels of the Nineties : A Reader’s Guide, p. 188)

B. Themes:

Pat Barker’s prize-winning novel The Ghost Road explores various themes. Apparently, it becomes the story of Prior as he prepares to return for his fourth stint in the trenches, with Dr. Rivers eager to know how he •• 69 •• will react. Refusing the chance of staying home on medical grounds, Prior is himself no less curious about his own reactions. And he passes the new test of nerves.

Perhaps surprisingly, Prior’s recovery from shell-shock was not unusual. Using analysis, neurological surgery and electric shock treatment, Dr. Rivers and other doctors were often able to eliminate such common symptoms as mutism, paralysis and hysteria. In 1917, when Owen had his breakdown, 80 percent of shell-shock cases were dealt with within sound of gunfire and 80 percent were back in the line within fourteen days.

The Ghost Road consists the themes like war, sex, exploitation, marginalization as well as the past memories. Accompanying Prior’s story, Barker shows Dr. Rivers reliving memories of his pre-war work among the headhunters of Melanesia in the Pacific. Based on River’s writings, these stories of ritual death and psychological enslavement to evil spirits in turn serve as mirrors of the physical carnage and mental devastation caused by the set-piece battles of the First World War.

At the first sight The Ghost Road is an anti-war novel, but in many ways it tells more about the strange nature of British society. And in that sense. Barker’s fascination with Prior is ununderstandable. Like the author, who raises a rare northern working-class voice in London, Prior is an outsider. He is an officer who does not belong to the officer class; he is engaged to be married but is actively bisexual.

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road is a masterful literary integration of sex and war. The novel’s protagonist, the lascivious, bisexual Billy Prior once remarks : “whole bloody western front’s a wanker’s paradise”, • • 70 • •

{The Ghost Road, p. 177) a statement with far-reaching implications concerning aggression and eroticism. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize Award in 1995, The Ghost Road delves into many standard Booker motifs, such as war, the British class system, memory and childhood, but Barker revitalize these worn out subjects. With prostitutes, lecherous priests, and the naked body, she intersects the motifs of sex and dominance. “Homoeroticism, pedophilia, and prostitution deepen the dark hues of her narrative, fleshing out what might otherwise have been a tired war novel. It is at the intersection of sex, dominance, and gender that The Ghost Road earns its place among the Booker greats.” 123helpme.com/search. asp? text=The+Ghost+Road-15k>

War is a theme of The Ghost Road, both overt and hidden. Although the most obvious theme is the war between nations, The Ghost Road also details war between individuals and war within oneself. The novel is written against a background of the end of the First World War in 1918, but it is also filled with flashbacks to a pre-World War 1 time on a South Pacific island. While the Melanesian island of Eddvstone is not caught up in the world’s woes, it constantly fights for its own existence.

The war between individuals is seen both in present day and m flashback. Billy Prior is fighting with the military so he can be sent back to the Front in France for the fourth tour of duty. Dr. Rivers battles against his patients and his memories.

The Ghost Road details the theme of exploitation and marginalization : the exploitation of young soldiers, the working class, children and women. The most obvious example of exploitation is the waste of the lives of the young men. They are sacrificed in millions on •• 71 both sides for the old ruling elite. Regardless of the reasons, it can be viewed simply as the old exploiting the young. So many young men died in France. Six months of war made them old. Prior notes, in “trenchtime” he was Hallet’s great-grandfather. {The Ghost Road, p. 46) Hallet is an obvious example of exploitation of youth. Barker purposely makes him a likeable, good-looking young man, and then signals the sacrificed youth symbolism with the riderless rocking horse in Amiens. When Hallet finally dies, surrounded by his grief-stricken family, his own idealism shattered by the sense of exploitation is very strongly evident - his young life was used to prolong a meaningless conflict.

The exploitation of the working-class is also one of the allied themes. Prior, being from the working-class himself, finds class inequalities distasteful. The ruling people see the working-class as a commodity, something to be used. Birtwhistle calls his working-class lovers :

“Working-classes. Water-closets. The men who’re getting their ballocks shot off so he can go on being the lily on the dung heap. God, they make me sick.” {The Ghost Road, p. 100)

Another example of the exploitation inherent in such a distorted society is sexual exploitation. There are several examples of this in The Ghost Road, many involving children, another marginalized group. Prior was abused by a Catholic priest, Father Mackenzie, who tried to include young Billy in his guilt. This exploitative introduction to sex leads Prior into a lifelong search for sexual control. He views sex as a way to gain power and control over his partners. Instead of linking sex .. 72 •• with love - as he starts to do with Sarah - Prior generally links sex with power and control. Barker is using the theme of exploitation to point out the sickness of early 20 century European society. It is a society of inequality and exploitation made worse by the false idea that Europe is a civilized and caring society.

C. Characterization:

The prize-winning novel, The Ghost Road by Pat Barker, is a fascinating story of the First World War, told through the eyes of several characters : a doctor, an officer, and several enlisted men. It mixes history and fiction : real historical characters appear along with totally fictional men. It examines class issues in Britain and provides an unflinching portrait of the horrors and futility of war. The book is more masculine as the protagonists are male, and the sex and violence are graphic. The female characters are not plentiful, but are well done.

The Ghost Road contributes to follow the two main characters from the earlier volume, The Eye in the Door : Dr. Rivers, a psychiatrist, and Billy Prior, a soldier who has suffered both mental and physical breakdown. In the first two novels most of the action takes place in England, away from the war front. Concentrating on the home front Barker presents experiences of the war through the eyes not only of soldiers but also of the women, conscientious objectors, essential workers and older men who were back in England during the World War 1.

Among the characters in this astonishing novel is Dr. Rivers, a physician, struggling to help shell-shocked British soldiers recover their sanity. Overwhelmed by their suffering, he finds himself fearing that the .. 73 •• tales they tell him would become one story. The voices blend into a single cry of pain. Dr. Rivers’s character is entertaining and interesting. The important thing of this character is his thought process as he treats and reflects on the treatment of his patients. Also interesting is his retelling his experience as an anthropologist on Eddystone Island, a place occupied by people who are culturally different from him and who teach him lasting lessons about all manner of things - especially love and death. Throughout The Ghost Road there are interludes of Dr. Rivers’s trip to Melanesia with Hocart. These things from Dr. Rivers’s past show the development between two different cultures, as Dr. Rivers becomes friend with Njiru, a witch-doctor.

The novel also depicts Dr. Rivers’s childhood experiences. Dr. Rivers explains how Mr. Dodgson was the first adult he had met as a child who stammered as badly as he did himself. He was therefore hurt when Mr. Dodgson stated :

“I 1-1-1-love all ch-ch-ch—” “children, M-Mrs. R-Rivers, as 1-1-1-long as they’re g-g-g-girls.” “Boys are a mistake.” {The Ghost Road, p. 26)

Dr. Rivers’s view on Prior’s returning to France has not changed. He tries to prevent Prior from going to the Front giving reason of his ill-health due to his asthma. Dr. Rivers always fears how the trauma of the war won’t finish with the war.

Another central figure in the novel is Billy Prior. The Ghost Road follows the efforts of several characters to come to terms with the horrific effects of the war on their lives and their souls. Lt. Billy Prior is a temporary gentleman elevated from the ranks of the working-class by his •• 74 •• battlefield commission. He discovers that the only place he feels alive or at home is the war front. In the hospital, he fights stubbornly to get back to his troops.

Billy Prior is fatalistic, intelligent, isolated from everything and a remarkable creation of Pat Barker. His experience of war is also remarkable. In her portraits of Billy Prior and his fellow soldiers, Barker has recreated the singular experiences of individuals who reveal, in their particular stories of grief and horror, the war’s true cost and tragedy. In the battlefield he leads his troop bravely. When he sees Wilfred Owen dying in the battlefield, he takes the charge of his troop and shows his brave instincts.

Like Dr. Rivers, Billy Prior is exploited in his childhood. He prostituted himself as a child. His bisexual nature is also presented in The Ghost Road. But, with his lady love, Sarah, he is moderate and passionate. He becomes upset to see that Sarah still had a picture of her dead fiance. In The Ghost Road, Prior keeps a diary of his time in France. His diary describes both the lead up to the battle and Prior’s experience of battles.

As Barker reveals in the Author’s Note at the end of The Ghost Road, Njiru as well as other Melanesian characters, are based on actual people. In the course of healing his patients, Dr. Rivers becomes the victim of influenza and in the spell of his illness he recalls his visit to Melanesian Island, Eddystone in Pacific in 1908 with Arthur Hoeart. He narrates his experiences that he had got there. There he befriends with Njiru, the witch-doctor and head-hunter. He, like Dr. Rivers, cures his patients but his way is different. The language, customs of the islanders, •• 75 •• give a different touch to the novel.

There are many other minor characters supporting the protagonists of the novel. There, Melanesian people as well as the shell-shocked soldiers glorify the character of Dr. Rivers. Billy Prior becomes favourite among the soldiers and fellow-patients. Wilfred Owen has a bit access in this novel. He is portrayed engaged in war-fare. Manning, Birtwhistle, and others are representatives of the upper class English society. They convey the class-instincts.

The Regeneration Trilogy> involves the war novels, and the characters are mainly males. Barker is effectively perfect in using moderate female roles in her novels in trilogy. Sarah Lumb, her mother, Ada and sister Cynthia and other minor females have a place in the novel, The Ghost Road.

Dr. Rivers’s real experiences of Melanesia include several tribal folk who represent their tribal culture. Barker’s skill of characterization is praiseworthy. She combines historical figures and fictional ones together. Her fictional character like Billy Prior achieves the sympathy of the reader due to the life-like portrayal.

D. Symbolism and Imagery :

The trench imagery is significant in The Ghost Road. The trenches are themselves named after London Streets, and Britain’s urban landscapes, devastated by poverty and deprivation. Prior describes the trench experience as ‘a sort of morose disgust’ with one’s surroundings (The Ghost Road, p. 174). In The Ghost Road, Barker turns to the trenches that have been silently lying beneath the surface of her 76 examination of the Home Front. The last novel in the series, The Ghost Road, ends on the Sombre-Oise canal, where Wilfred Owen met his end a week before the end of the war. Billy Prior, shadowing Owen, leads his men to their death : the angry young man of Regeneration has changed into a leader over the three novels, dying as he watches Owen die, ironically feeling his own life ebb away. For Barker, the last days of the war were the most poignant and prolonged, when men were ‘sacrificed to the sub clauses and the small print of the Peace Treaty’. {The Ghost Road, p. 249) Barker expresses her utter disturbance on the waste of human life. “Barker’s most persistent character is dispatched by a single bullet and his death is juxtaposed with the long and painful death of a fellow officer, Hallet, in a London hospital under Dr. Rivers’s care.” (Sharon Montieth; Pat Barker, 2002 Northcote, Devon, UK, p. 60) The effect on memory and consciousness of the war is so great as to induce a re-imagination of the experience of time and space. The landscape of Barker’s trilogy, set around Craiglockhart and London, is pervaded with the haunting imagery of the trenches. Her characters are constantly visualizing and hearing the effects of trench warfare in the surrounding.

Barker’s allusions in the opening chapter to Lewis Carroli’s Alice books, both of which blur the distinction between dream and reality, underscore the significance of dreams in the novel. Only through Dr. Rivers’s dreams of Njiru and his Melanesian experience, Dr. Rivers is able to work through his increasingly conflicted feelings about the war and his efforts to support it. Through his dreams, Dr. Rivers is able to recognize in his own idealized British culture what his surrogate son, Billy Prior, already knows that “behind every alter is blood, torture, death”. {The Ghost Road, p. 176) • • 77 • •

Barker invokes the Abraham and Isaas story of sacrifice to foreground Dr. Rivers’s emerging consciousness of his complicity in the slaughter of World War I. In the final scene between Dr. Rivers and Prior, after Dr. Rivers has reluctantly certified that Prior is fit to go back to the western front, Dr. Rivers detaches himself from the emotion of the moment to ask Prior if he serves as a test case to assess whether Dr. Rivers’s therapy can withstand the stress endured by soldiers re-entering the war zone. Prior agrees, saying that he will send Dr. Rivers “the half-time score”. (The Ghost Road, p. 102) As Dr. Rivers watches Prior leave, he remembers that in Melanesia when a bastard boy is born a leading man on the island adopts him. He is loved and cared for and when he reaches adolescence he is bestowed the honour of leading in the sacrificial pig.

In one of the overt parallels between Melanesian and British societies provided in the novel, Dr. Rivers associates this Melanesian memory with the following account from his youth :

“In one of his father’s churches, St. Faith’s at Maidstone, the window to the left of the altar shows Abraham with the knife raised to slay his son, and below the human figures a ram caught in the thicket by his horns. The two events represented the difference between savagery and civilization, for in the second scenario the voice of God is about to forbid the sacrifice, and will be heeded. He had knelt at that altar rail for years, Sunday after Sunday, receiving the chalice from his father’s hands.” {The Ghost Road, p. 104) •• 78

On the eve of Prior’s return to the western front, Dr. Rivers remembers these two stories, setting them side by side so that within a Western perspective the savagery of the sacrifice of a bastard by his surrogate Melanesian father is actually overwhelmed by Dr. Rivers’s less physical but no less savage sacrifice of his surrogate sons - his patients, Prior being one of them. Dr. Rivers is the misguided surrogate father who sends patient after patient, son after son to slaughter. Dr. Rivers’s conscious juxtaposition of the Melanesian and British sacrifice stories indicate that he is beginning to understand that ‘he’ is the Father who holds the power to stop the killing. (Jennifer Shaddoc, Dreams of Melanesia : Masculinity and the Exorcism of War in Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, Modern Fiction Studies. 52.3, 2006, p. 663)

E. Attitude to Sex :

In all three volumes of trilogy, Barker’s attitude to sex is consistent. The trilogy explains the soldiers’ lonely life seeking for physical pleasure. It is the full description of warfare, and the people engaged in it are all males. The trilogy' rarely depicts any female character, for instance, Sarah Lumb, the only female figure entered in all three novels. The soldiers admitted in the Craiglockhart War Hospital and engaged in battlefield both deal much or less with the physical pleasure. Among them the major is Billy Prior, the prominent character in all three volumes, who is bisexual. In his childhood he was exploited by a church priest. Father Mackenzie, who tried to include young Billy in his guilt. Billy narrates how he was victimized sexually and that affected the entire life of Billy. The early age sex experience leads Prior into a lifelong •• «§ search for sexual control. To him, sex is the way to gain power and control over his partners. His view is visual in his sexual dealing with Birtwhistle, Manning and the French peasant boy. Prior generally links sex with power and control.

Billy is an extremely complicated character, full of conflicting drives and desires. On the one hand, he gets pleasure from sexually humiliating other men, and on the other hand, he has a passionate and caring sex life with his fiancee, Sarah. He at once feels compassion for his troops as they struggle not to panic when they have to put on their gas masks, but he also secretly wishes to engage in what he knows are inappropriate sexual relations with them.

The graphic sensuality and physicality in Manning and Prior’s encounter is also quite visible. This is compounded by class relations. Both men know that they are officers but Manning hesitates at this level for a sexual encounter, as if it is not something officers should do together. Sensing this, Prior plays up his working-class identity by exaggerating his accent and offering himself as “a sort of seminal spittoon”. (Peter Hitchcock, What is Prior? Working-class Masculinity in Pat Barker’s Trilogy, Gender's, Vol. 35, Paragraphs, 2002, p. 28) Birtwhistle regards the working-class as a WC. The Cambridge don in The Ghost Road is significant to state the status of working-class in contemporary English society.

Barker is well aware that the war conjures much more than Prior’s experiences, but her particular skill is in weaving elements of Prior’s identity into the structure of war relations as a whole. There is an element of danger in such narration because, by including some of the historically •• $0 • • specific paranoia of the period in her trilogy, the Regeneration trilogy risks trivializing the conditions of emergence - implying that, for instance, “bisexuality or homosexuality are of a piece with hysteria, and that they do not have a relevant history outside or before the moment of war”. (Genders, p. 28)

The representation of sexuality is complicated in Barker’s The Ghost Road. Prior’s engagement to Sarah seems like an exercise in appropriateness, as if, according to the codes of class control in his community, it was expected that a person like him would marry a person like Sarah. It is a wonder whether Barker might appreciate too warmly the psychoanalytic situation of the early twentieth century which held that homosexuality should be cured. Clearly she is intrigued by the incidence and treatment of war neurosis precisely because it provides a deeper questioning about the strictures of sexuality that attend the structures of war. In The Ghost Road, Barker faces an aesthetic and political challenge. She knows that Prior must die. It is a part of the texture of the trilogy’s anti-war statement that he is regenerated only to be decimated.

It is important to note that the ghosts, unsettled shades of memory are not outside the machinery of therapeutic treatment. In the third volume, The Ghost Road, Barker sets up a series of parallels in Prior’s and Dr. Rivers’s lives in which the juxtaposition of Prior’s letters with Dr. Rivers’s experiences in Melanesia underlines the important part in memory. In the novel, Dr. Rivers reveals his own experiences of trauma. It is because of his stammer and his inability to visualize memories. Dr. Rivers’s eventual self-consciousness of such trauma is not an endorsement of psychoanalysis but a set of questions about the relationship of traumas to social rituals and the capacity to remember •• 81 •• them in a concrete and autocritical way. (Genders, p. 28) In The Ghost Road, Owen says, “You say we kill the Beast. I say we fight because men lost their bearings in the night.” (The Ghost Road, p. 144) At the end of the trilogy, Prior dies not because he is a rogue male, a working-class officer who has lost his bearings in the night and become amoral to the point of bisexuality and promiscuity. He dies as a part of an ethical statement about what war denies our species’ capacity to be.

F. Psycho-Analysis:

The novel The Ghost Road shifts between Prior’s account of his fateful return to the war in France, and Dr. Rivers’s own psychological crisis, as he struggles with his own demons and ghosts. Prior’s diary in this novel takes us directly, for the first time in the trilogy, to the familiar iconic terrain of the First World War representations - the trench, no-man’s land, and the futile charge ‘over the top’. In the novel, Barker turns to Dr. Rivers’s accounts of his experiences as an anthropologist in Melanesia to engage a cross-cultural dimensions to the meanings of war.

Like Freud, Dr. Rivers seems certain that the ghosts who haunt his patients are not ‘real’, but he is nevertheless compelled to acknowledge that his patients are haunted. (John Brannigan, Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy : History and the Hauntological Imagination, Contemporary British Fiction, eds. Lane, Mengham and Tew, P, Polity 4, Cambridge, 2000, p. 15) In Regeneration, Sassoon and Bums see corpses. So too, in The Ghost Road, Wansbeck is visited in hospital by the ghost of the German prisoner he murdered, who becomes, more and more decomposed with every visit. • • 82 • •

“...... he’d started to suffer from hypnagogic hallucinations in which he would wake suddenly to find the dead German standing by his bed. Always, accompanying the visual hallucination, would be the reek of decomposition. After a few weeks the olfactory hallucination began to occur...... ” {The Ghost Road, p. 26)

Dr. Rivers solves the mysterious appearance of a psychic double, or a troublesome ghost with skilful rational examination. Prior turns out not to have a monstrous alter-ego, after all, just a rather mischievous coping mechanism. Prior is cured of his split personality and, in The Ghost Road, he is sufficiently stable to return to the front line, where, with tragic but inevitable irony, he joins the ranks of the dead in one last senseless assault. Dr. Rivers, in the same novel, is forced to confront his own ghosts. He can explain the ghosts of his patients away, but his own ghosts return to haunt him. In Regeneration, in order to soften Sassoon’s anxieties about confessing of seeing apparitions, Dr. Rivers confesses to his own encounter with ghosts on an anthropological mission in the Melanesian islands. At a wake, at which the mourners await the sound of the spirits coming in canoes to collect the soul of the dead, Dr. Rivers does not hear the paddles which he has been told he might hear, but instead a sudden gust of whistling sounds. In The Ghost Road, Dr. Rivers becomes obsessed by this scene, and the events surrounding it, and the novel concludes with Dr. Rivers being visited in hospital by the ‘not in any way ghostly’ apparition of Njiru, the witch doctor in Melanesia. {The Ghost Road, p. 276) Dr. Rivers must distinguish between the irrational visions and healthy realities of his patients constantly and unequivocally. Yet his own experiences of the hauntological in Melanesia .. 83 •• defy his attempts at rational explanation, and serve to disturb the stability of his distinctions between appearance and reality, illness and sanity, superstition and reason. If he deals with the effects of his patients’ haunted memories routinely, Dr. Rivers cannot finally dismiss the reality of ghosts either.

The nightmares, the stammerings, the mutism and paralysis, are all registering protest against Abraham’s bargain. In the climatic final scenes of The Ghost Road, the rosy-pink dawn-light which passes over the dead in French fields is the same light which begins to flow slowly through the tall windows of Dr. Rivers’s ward, appearing perhaps as a new stained-glass icon of sacrifice. But Dr. Rivers’s ward still echoes the garbled dying shouts of Hallet, “Shotvarfet. Shotvarfet”, murmured also from the ‘damaged brains and dropping mouths’ of either patients, and translated by Dr. Rivers as ‘It’s not worth it’. {The Ghost Road, p. 274)

Dr. Rivers is sufficiently self-conscious to realize that he has his own psychological problems and repressed memories, but that, he might be the victim of what Prior suggests was a monstrous rape or beating when he was five. The realization that his own lack of visual memory may conceal as dark a depressed past as he has encountered in his patients triggers a crisis of authority in Dr. Rivers and in the final novel of the trilogy. He is immersed in his own anamnestic efforts to trace the source of his ghosts. Dr. Rivers, in one sense, himself becomes a patient in The Ghost Road, as haunted by specters. Here, his own divisions are especially manifest, since his rational self - what he calls the ‘epicritic’ mind - must analyze and exorcise the demons of his, emotional self - what he calls the ‘protopathic’. (Contemporary British Fiction, p. 20) This division between the epicritic and protopathic occupies much of •• 84 ••

Dr. Rivers’s thinking throughout the trilogy, but it becomes especially significant in the final volume, in which it appears to take the form of a split personality. Dr. Rivers in The Ghost Road, then, is both the capable analyst, who unravels his patients’ anxieties and repressions and the haunted, frightened patient, vulnerable to his own nightmares and hallucinations.

The trilogy closes in The Ghost Road with Dr. Rivers encountering the ghost of a witch-doctor, Njiru, he knows in Melanesia. The recurrent figures of haunting in the trilogy serve to underline the potency of history experienced as traumatic event. Haunting signifies the repetition of time, the refusal of the past to stay in its place. This is what, in many respects, Dr. Rivers must confront to each of his patients - an excess of memory, of history, the disturbing break out of the past into the present. The excess of memory and history experienced by Dr. Rivers’s patients is also the basic temporal condition of the twentieth century. Here, Barker traces the contemporary concerns with recovered memory, hidden subjectivities, forgotten stories - the exclusions and elisions of history - to the ‘Great War’. The effect on memory and consciousness of the war is so great as to induce a re-imagination of the experience of time and space.

By the second year of the Great War, there grew up in Britain a soldier’s literature obsessed with the divided between available language and actual experience. Countless letters and poems and diaries condemned their own habits of eloquence as a betrayal of truth. In The Ghost Road, Lieutenant Billy Prior sits listening to the sounds of pens scratching and pages turning. In his own diary, Prior tells jokingly why these men write : “I think it’s a way of claiming immunity. First person narrators can’t die.” (The Ghost Road, p. 115) • • 85 • •

Basically, the memory is the technique used in The Regeneration Trilogy. In both, Regeneration, and The Eye in the Door, the major narrative concern is memory and remembering, and there is no exception in The Ghost Road. Unlike earlier two volumes, in The Ghost Road, memory and remembering have much place. Dr. Rivers, after ten years, recalls his trip to Melanesia and explains his experiences at length.

Barker has used a different kind of narrative technique in this novel. Half of the novel contains the third person narration and the remaining part is the first person narration. Billy Prior, during his fourth trip to France battlefield, writes diaries. In his diaries, he explains all the details of the battlefield and his own war experiences in those days.

While Barker is carefully true to both the military and personal aspects of her history, she is never constrained by her sources. “With earlier Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road is too imaginatively free-ranging and immediate to seem quite historical novel, too concerned with moral and sexual battles to seem quite war novel to striking as hybrids of fact and possibility, easy humour and passionate social argument to be classified as anything but the masterwork to date of a singular and ever-evolving novelist, who has consistently made up her own rules.”

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The Ghost Road is a marvelous novel, not least for its tough, unself important prose which nevertheless flexes effortlessly to include the narrative’s many moods and voices. In the novel, facts and figures are kept at the minimum, necessary to remind us that homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment. Through the streetwise eyes of Billy Prior, .. 86 •• the author presents a surprisingly unsentimental view of war. The sensationalist possibilities for violence are not over-exploited, yet there are harrowing moments.