I approached The Ghost Road assuming it was a novel about the First World War, and indeed it is commonly billed that way, but I can’t help but feel that the descriptor is inapt, or at least incomplete. Certainly the Great War features prominently, both in the action presented and in the minds of the novel’s two protagonists, who see the conflagration through very different lenses. But at its heart, The Ghost Road feels more like a book about an era than an event, a sensation reinforced by the book’s regular jaunts outside of war-torn France and Belgium to other locales entirely.
The story’s two protagonists are Billy Prior, a working-class officer who feels driven to return to the field of battle despite mutiple medical deferrals, and William Rivers, a real-life psychoanalyst and ethnographer. Barker peppers her novel with a mixture of fictional and real characters, a method of verisimilitude evidently carried over from the earlier books in the series (The Ghost Road is the final book of a trilogy, the first two of whcih I have not read). Approaching the book without any real foreknowledge, I didn’t realize this fact right away, and was suprised in retrospect that some of the characters she’d mentioend were real people (it didn’t dawn on me until the afterword that Prior’s comrade Owen was actually the poet WIlfred Owen, though in my defence I don’t think she ever calls him by his full name).
The book’s prose is elegant and ornate, with plenty of strong images. It was also surprising in its sexual frankness, which again I’m sure would have been less unexpected if I’d read the first two books, or known more of Pat Barker’s book. Barker’s depiction of a bisexual man in that time and place was interesting, though the lewdness seemed layered on a bit thick at times. However, many war novels underplay the average soldier’s preoccupation with sex, so in a sense Barker’s frankness wa refreshing.
Though Prior’s trajectory brings him to Franc,e a good chunk of his narrative oocurs while back in England, giving a glimpse of World War 1 in a place where the fighting was not actively ranging, but the violence instead filtered in through bittersweet homecomings of crippled boys or letters with black bordered envelopes. We also venture further afield during Rivers’ regular recollections of his time in the Solomon Islands. The experience of the isalanders under British hegemony, and their relatioship with death. provides interesting counterpoint to the events of the war.
All told, I enjoyed the book, and will likely go back and read the earlier installments in the trilogy. Really, I probably hsould have done this first, but the Ghost ROad was the only one I had in my collection. Oh well.