| Pat Barker |
|||||||||
 |
WWI
Trilogy .
|
||||||||
| Biography |
|
||||||||
| It
is the spring of 1918, and Britain is faced with the possibility of defeat by Germany. A
belaguered government and a vengeful public target two group as scapegoats: pacifists and
homosexuals. Many are jailed, others lead dangerous double lives, the "the eye in the
door" becomes a symbol of the paranoia that threatens to destroy the very fabric of
British society. |
 |
||||||||
 |
Winner
of Great Britain's highest literary award, the Booker Prize, The Ghost Road is the
culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of
the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In
France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the
making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience,
treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of
these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both corageous and
sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight
a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in
memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture
of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form
connections that cast new light on his--and our--understanding of war. |
||||||||
Copyright 1999 -- Busse Center Library -- Mount Mercy College |
|||||||||
