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The Ghost Road 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.
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