The Ghost Road.

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road is the third book in a trilogy, but the first I’ve read since it won the Booker Prize and I wasn’t even aware it was the third book in a series until I picked it up to read it. I was expecting something bleak, even dreadful, given the description on the back of the book – it’s set during World War I (humanity’s deadliest), and involves two men, one a psychiatrist evaluating soldiers who’ve returned from the front, one a soldier who has returned and wants, against all logic, to go back. It’s surprisingly brisk, even dryly funny, even though the book doesn’t shy away from war’s horrors and the denouement is just as grim as you’d expect; it compares quite favorably to Evelyn Waugh’s war trilogy, written several decades earlier and from a very different point of view.

Rivers is the psychiatrist in question, based very much on a real doctor of that name, while Billy Prior is the soldier, surrounded in war by real historical figures, and himself based on Barker’s own readings of historical documents of soldiers’ experiences at the front. Rivers is presented regularly with the absurdity of war and its effects on the men who fought it, including hysterical conditions that we’d recognize today as post-traumatic stress disorder but that were dismissed at the time as a sort of dubious madness. He treats Prior as one of his patients, and is more frank with this particular soldier due to some shared experiences, owning up to the pressure form above to clear as many soldiers as he can to return to active duty.

Prior is strangely eager to get back to the fight, even though he’s long lost any faith in the reasons for the war – I imagine this is one of the great separators between those who fought for the allies in World War I and those who did the same in World War II – and knows that the more tours of duty he does, the more likely he is to die there. He’s engaged to be married, finding out just before his return that his fiancée might be pregnant, but is hoping to be absolved of that responsibility one way or another, because he, like Rivers, is gay.

Ghost Road doesn’t set out, at least, to be a novel of gay men in a war of masculinity literally gone toxic – wars are always begun by men, and World War I seems especially to one of the more pointless of all wars, a battle of egos that cost millions of young men their lives. Instead, it seems that Barker creates a parallel between the alienation of men fighting someone else’s war and the isolation gay (or bisexual) men would have felt in a time where homosexuality was criminalized in much of the world, including the UK where the novel is set. The sexual encounters described in the book are matter-of-fact, furtive trysts that are entirely devoid of emotion, let alone any sense of intimacy – fitting for a war that seemed to reduce men to their barest selves, sentient beings powered by rage or controlled by their survival instincts.

Rivers is the stronger character, even though Prior gets to fight and thus has a good bit more to do on the page. Rivers, however, gets to observe and interpret for the reader, and the reader in turn sees more of the turmoil inside of him, especially as he knows the futility of his work – that he’ll be sending men back to the war who have no business returning to the battlefield. His interactions with patients also provide the bulk of the book’s humor, without which it would be the tenebrous slog I feared it would be. At the same time, Barker’s characterization even of these two men falls more on the technical side than the emotional; the descriptions of their internal monologues even tend towards the precise, perhaps lacking some of the depth of feeling you’d expect of characters facing the effects of wartime trauma and the guilt involved with surviving or believing you should go back.

For those of you who’ve read this far, I wonder if it would surprise you to learn that Pat Barker is Patricia Barker – that a novel about two gay men in World War I, a novel with no female characters of any substance whatsoever, was written entirely by a woman. It certainly surprised me, not in the sense that I thought a woman incapable of doing so, but that I thought a woman might be less interested in telling a men’s story in a world of men’s stories. There’s apparently some reason behind this – that, early in her career, Barker was tired of praise that was always tempered by commentary that her books were about or for women – but it’s still fascinating to me that she made this choice, and then executed it so well.

Next up: about 2/3 of the way through Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, which is just $1.99 on the Kindle right now.