Number Two

Posted by Sari

Actually, I had written this quite some time ago, but wanted to wait for a bit for reasons to do with uni entrance examinations. But here goes: my favourite book(s) number two:

Which is Pat Baker’s Regenration –trilogy, a series of books about shell-shocked British officers during the First World War. It is an inspired series which weaves together history, metaphor and fiction better than any other book I know, and does it in so many ways.

At the center of the trilogy is the real and fascinating figure of doctor W.H.R. Rivers, an MD, psychologist and anthropologist who during the war was assigned to treat officers with war neuroses. Among his real patients was lieutenant Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and decorated solider who in 1917 became so disgusted at war that he chucked his medals in the Mersey and wrote a declaration to be read in the House of Commons denouncing the continuation of the war. He was shipped off to Scotland to be treated by Rivers in order to avoid a scandal. Regenration, the first novel in the series depicts the debates about the justification of the war between Rivers and Sassoon, the friendship between Sassoon and fellow inmate Wilfred Owen and Rivers’ efforts to break through to patients really suffering from what today would be termed PTSD.

The next book, “The Eye in the Door” continues to trace the friendship between Rivers and Sassoon and the consequences of that friendship to Rivers’ world-view, but it centers more on a fictive patient of Rivers, Billy Prior who is a “temporary gentleman”, a working-class solider who has risen through ranks to be an officer. Besides being the liminal character capable (and eager) to transgress all boundaries, Prior presents in this part of the trilogy a new dilemma for a warring nation. As Rivers has to make sense of the world were he is curing patients so that they can be sent off to the front to be killed, Prior has to come to terms with his guilt regarding the inhumane way the state (and he himself as a representative of that coercive war-time regime) treats conscientious objectors, and to lesser extent others who do not wholeheartedly buy into the great nationalistic project.

The last part, Booker winning “Ghost Road” is in a strange way the most lyrical of the three and alternates between depictions of Owen and Prior back in France, Rivers in London and Rivers’ memories of his anthropological trips to pacific island headhunters whose culture is in crisis because westerners have banned head-hunting and thus destroyed the cultural equilibrium of the islands.

There are number of reasons why this trilogy is maybe my favourite work of fiction in the world. Firstly, it is the only historical novel I have ever read that has prompted me to read more about the subject-matter and that has not destroyed one bit of the effectiveness of the novel. Rivers’ own writings, his biography, Sassoon’s actual autobiography, his fictionalised autobiography, and biographies, Owen’s biography, Showalter’s “Female Malady”, Fussell, other works on FWW PTSD… I can situate all that in the novel and not cringe. That is not to say that Baker’s novel tells the truth about the war - the revisionist WW1 historians have severly criticized the fusselian take on the war experience – but it can and does tell a truth.

The second, and even more important reason why I love the books is the masterly way in which Baker uses the web of connections between the real persons and events as very powerful metaphors. For example,  stammering was one of the most common symptoms of war neuroses in officers. Rivers stammered. So did rev. Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll), a friend to Rivers’ father. Rivers father, also a clergyman, was also a speech-therapist. These are historical facts, but the way Baker interconnects them through Rivers and makes the power-relations of utterances one of the central themes in the book is nothing short of uncanny. Another example: before the war Rivers worked with his friend Dr. Henry Head in an experiment where they traced the regeneration of nervous system. They severed Head’s radial nerve, then sutured it and during the period of five years Rivers tested Head’s hand by pricking it with needles to see how and how the nerves regenerated. They named the two stages of nerve generation the protopathic, where the stimuli are percieved as painful and poorly localised  and epicritic, where responses to stimuli are gardeable and localisation can be percieved. In the book this experiment and its results act as metaphors for the process of trying to deal with the war trauma from the unlocalised suffocating pain of  the trauma to the gradable, localised pain achieved by therapy. For Rivers the experiment functions also as an allegorical reminder of the pain he caused/causes while dealing with his patients.

My third reason for admiring Barker’s trilogy can actually be seen as one of the central themes of the novels, the justification of war and violence. It carries through all three volumes, beginning with the discussions between Rivers and Sassoon where they in a way convince each other that the other is right, and ending in Ghost Road where the debate is lifeted out of this particular conflict by interspersing the text with passages of Rivers anthropological studies in the South Seas. On one hand there is a sensless slaughter in Europe bitterly described by Owen in Abraham and Isaac, on the other there is the Pacific head-hunter culture which through Rivers eyes looks like a dying idyll, because traditional outlet for tribal violence has been shut down western missionary culture. Neither Rivers or through him Barker find easy answers to the perpetual dilemma of the violence of humanity, but the trilogy, unlike many other fictive and historical works does at least face that question head on.

And if you googled yourself here because Regeneration is the entrance exam book for English Philology this year in Helsinki University, congrats. It is a great book to take apart and put together again.

Comments

[Anna]

Ootteko huomanneet, että postaukseen ei ole vähään aikaan tullut tuota "posted by" kohtaa?

Nyt pitää arvailla, kummalla teistä on asioita liittyen yliopiston pääsykokeisiin?

Have you noticed that the "posted by" function isn't there anymore?

now I just have to guess which one of you has something to do with uni entrance exams.

[Sari]

Ups, korjasin asian :-)

[Mekku]

I have picked as my second life-changing book one that fits Sari’s general themes of endurance, trauma and comradeship (and one which got me into winter hiking): Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s *The Worst Journey in the World*. The book, an account of Captain Scott’s 1911-1913 expedition to the Antarctic, is an absolute classic among travel books not only because it tells the famous story of Scott and ‘I-may-be-some-time’ Oates, but also because it is written in a style that is unadorned yet shatteringly moving. Describing his own five-week man-hauling journey through the Antarctic winter in order to obtain some Emperor penguin’s eggs for research Cherry writes: ‘Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.’

Cherry-Garrad, a near-sighted son of a landed English gentleman, had to talk his way into being accepted as the second youngest member of Scott’s expedition, and even then was only taken onboard as an ‘assistant zoologist’ because the expedition doctor Bill Wilson was a family friend. Despite all this, Cherry turned out to be one of the hardest-working and most popular members of the entire expedition, clocking in more sledging miles than anyone else, with the exceptions of Scott, Wilson and Birdie Bowers, who all perished on their way back from the pole. Despite his pluck, he was to spend most of his life battling crushing periods of depression, blaming himself for the deaths of his friends on the ice. Acting according to Scott’s own pre-laid plan, he had dog-driven extra rations to a depot laid along the route to the pole and waited there for some days for the return of the polar party. When his dog-food ran out, he returned to the expedition hut. However, only a few days later the last survivors of Scott’s party came to a final halt just eleven miles from where Cherry had been waiting for them.

Written during his convalescence after being invalided home from Belgium in the First World War, *The Worst Journey in the World* is Cherry’s outlet for the feelings of guilt felt by so many of his contemporaries; the desperate need to understand why they, and not their comrades, survived. Ironically, for Cherry the experiences and comradeship offered by the war paled against what he had already lived through: ‘Talk of ex-soldiers’, he once wrote, ‘give me ex-antarcticists, unsoured and with their ideals intact: they could sweep the world.’

What makes Cherry’s account of the expedition so compelling is the combination of idealism and self-doubt that comes through in his writing. He reveals his willingness to go to any lenghts to know and understand life in all of its complexity, yet shows absolute despair at the callous and violent purposes to which that knowledge can be put. He portrays the life of the explorers as an almost impossibly harmonious domestic existence in the middle of a fantasically hostile environment (‘We did not forget the Please and Thank You, which mean so much in such circumstances […]. I’ll swear there was still a grace about us when we staggered in [to the hut]. And we kept our tempers – even with God’.), yet at the same time he is openly critical about the (still at that time) revered figure of Captain Scott himself. In Cherry’s eyes, Scott’s failings were as a man, rather than as an organiser of expeditions, and he would never agree with later detractors who have portrayed the entire expedition as an amateurish shambles. (Some authoritative contemporary experts have agreed with Cherry – see for example Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s excellent Captain Scott [2003]). Rather, Scott’s fault was in a way similar to Cherry’s own: that he was too sensitive to everything around him to lead with confidence. ‘The man with the nerves gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible time in doing them’. Despite the faults, however, Cherry’s final judgement of his former leader is a balanced one: Scott’s achievements as an explorer were not his greatest triumph. ‘Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love’.

As for his own reasons for voluntarily placing himself in the quietly lethal environment of Antarctica, they come across crystal-clear in the book. He is, first of all, of the school of thought that believes people reveal their true character under pressure, and wanted to test himself to see whether he could, perhaps, start trusting in his own worth. What he wrote about his friend T. E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’) was equally true of himself: ‘The fact that in the eyes of the world Lawrence lived the bravest of lives did not help him prove to himself that he was no coward.’ Secondly, he was by nature not attracted to the adrenalin rushes of dangerous speed, but more to the quiet perseverance and simplicity of polar plodding. A man who occupies his own mind as intensely as Cherry clearly did, will find a state of mental clarity and focus during the long, slow physical work of manhauling across endless, white landscapes. Thirdly, he was much attracted to the idea of unknown becoming known. Though his own formal education was in Classics and Modern History, he was fascinated by the discoveries his natural scientist colleagues were making about the movement of ice, the weather patterns of Antarctica, and its various life forms. ‘Exploration,’ he writes, ‘is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion’.

And if I may be forgiven a little rant of my own here (no to mention a ridiculously bold comparison), what Cherry says about the purposes of such exploration should be compulsory reading for Treasury officials and University administrators today:
‘Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say, “What is the use?” For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. Ans so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.’

So, all in all a book which first of all, revealed for me a whole new genre of polar traver books which has become a passion, and secondly, it made me want to go and plod through fields of snow - which can be so much more satisfying than dashing.