Pat Barker - The Ghost Road

In The Ghost Road, Prior, returning to France in 1918, seems an 'uncharitable bastard' as he puts it, at least in the brutal male and female sexual liaisons he packs in before he is due back at the front. Indeed, given his sexual ambiguity, there is much play with the words 'front' and 'back'

The story revolves around the army psychologist William Rivers, who pioneered the treatment of shell shock, and some of his patients, who include such real-life figures as poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as the fictional Lieutenant Billy Prior, a bisexual whose life as an officer is complicated by his working-class origins. The book is part of Barker's war trilogy - Regeneration (1991) charted Owen's friend Siegfried Sassoon's recuperation at Craiglockhart, while The Eye in the Door (1993) compared Sassoon's experience with that of Prior,
The present book can be read without reference to the others. The book addresses issues such as the politics of class, war and sex, and the struggle to maintain humanity in the face of meaningless slaughter. In The Ghost Road, the war is nearing its end, which renders the continuing horrors of trench warfare ever more futile. When Billy Prior returns to France for the fourth time in September of 1918, after Rivers's treatment, it's like coming home. He does so against everyone's advice, but enjoys a strange idyllic interlude in a ruined village, rescues a horribly wounded fellow officer and when he watches the sun rise slowly after the Battle of Joncourt, he realizes why he couldn't have stayed back the bitter irony of that last push in 1918 when so many died so needlessly, the stupidest massacre of all. Meanwhile Rivers takes on new nightmare cases and begins to remember his anthropological researches in Melanesia years before, when he strove to understand the rituals of a people whose greatest pleasure, head-hunting, had been abolished by a British colonial administration. The contrast between the primitives' approach to death and the pointless killing by supposedly more civilized people is only hinted at.
I enjoyed reading this book, its hard hitting and near the knuckle, its telling it as it was.