Regeneration by Pat Barker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Agony in the Garden 1917

Historical fiction is the antithesis of murder mystery. We already know who done it, how it was done, and why. The only possible plot involves the psychological drama which lies behind the action, not the motive but the motivating forces which establish the dramatic tension that leads to a motive.

So from the start the reader knows the outcome of Regeneration: Siegfried Sassoon goes back on the line. He needn’t have gone back to the front; he was already a decorated hero who had been assigned a post in a training command. How and why he manages to put himself there is the substance of Barker’s story.

The story has a dynamic, a flow of forces which has an uncertain result until the end comes. It starts in medias res at the point that Sassoon has already committed himself to a Christ-like course of action. Or rather to a Christ-like aspiration since he has been thwarted by his friend Robert Graves, an anti-Judas, from presenting himself before a courts martial of fellow officers, the equivalent of the prefecture of Pontius Pilate.

Sassoon’s emotional state is at this point profoundly confused. As a platoon leader he has an intense loyalty to the men he commands, which is amplified by an equally intense need for the camaraderie that he finds with them at the front. However he also has an overwhelming revulsion for the horrors he and these men have experienced. And that revulsion is then associated through a sort of psychological transference with anyone who has not experienced those horrors yet remains enthusiastic for the war effort.

So Sassoon hates more or less everyone except his fellow soldiers - senior officers, non-combatant soldiers, opinionated civilians of all ages and professions, and the civilization of which they are parts. It is this hatred which has driven him to throw his Military Cross into the Mersey and to write and publish his Declaration condemning the war - much in the spirit of Christ’s righteous anger at the merchants of the Temple. Sassoon recognizes that both actions are futile. But, even more to the point, they prevent him from exercising the fraternal love he has for his fellows. If he succeeds in being publicly judged, he will be permanently separated from them.

The process of ‘regeneration’ is therefore one of clarifying the criterion for correct action in what is an intolerable situation. This is Sassoon’s agony in the garden. Each gospel account of Christ’s contemplation of the motivation for his own self-sacrifice provides sparse and different details. Barker’s account could well be the missing content of these gospel stories. The essential issue of both the gospels and Barker’s fiction is not what to do but why to do it.



It is through his poetry and the poetry of his friend Wilfred Owen that Sassoon finds the proper criterion for action. Both elements - the writing which objectifies the situation, and the relationship with Owen and others which corrects and amends the creative object - are necessary for the discernment of what constitutes Reason in a patently unreasonable world. Fortunately, unlike Christ’s friends, Sassoon’s didn’t sleep through his efforts.

I am captive to the thought that Barker’s title refers not merely to Sassoon’s struggle but also is a Joycean double entendre for the agony of an entire generation.

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