The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker
The heartbreaking final book in Barker’s WWI trilogy.
Prior returns to the front by his own choice, where he joins Wilfred Owen, while Rivers continues treating mentally and physically brutalized soldiers at home. Meanwhile, Rivers remembers his time spent doing anthropological research on a Melanesian island, where the British ban on head-hunting had destroyed the local way of life. That part of the book steers neatly between the Scylla of Look At Those Wacky Primitives and the Charybdis of They Are Simpler Yet Wiser Than Us; the similarities and differences between their ways and the British ones, and between Rivers and a Melanesian healer, are complex, not easily summarized, and lead to the novel’s powerful conclusion.
The “eye” motif of the last book is replaced with a “head” motif in this one. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it plays out with wrenching elegance. The heads and skulls on the island are sometimes the product of violence, sometimes attached to captives who may live out their natural lifespans in comfort (so long as their head isn’t needed), and sometimes represent a deep respect for the process of life and death: the stacks of skulls are the link to their pasts and ancestors and families, the essential element of their culture without which it may not survive, and the product of the deepseated human urge to kill. Rivers repeatedly deals with horrific head injuries occurred in a war that makes pointless all his efforts to heal and to understand, the war without which he would never have done his best work.
Everything we are, everything which makes us special and unique, is in a ball of grey-pink gelatin protected by a helmet of flesh and bone: a prize, a lover’s face, a surgical problem, a link to the holy, an object of horror, the source of poetry.
The Ghost Road (William Abrahams)
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/966989.html. Comment here or there.
Prior returns to the front by his own choice, where he joins Wilfred Owen, while Rivers continues treating mentally and physically brutalized soldiers at home. Meanwhile, Rivers remembers his time spent doing anthropological research on a Melanesian island, where the British ban on head-hunting had destroyed the local way of life. That part of the book steers neatly between the Scylla of Look At Those Wacky Primitives and the Charybdis of They Are Simpler Yet Wiser Than Us; the similarities and differences between their ways and the British ones, and between Rivers and a Melanesian healer, are complex, not easily summarized, and lead to the novel’s powerful conclusion.
The “eye” motif of the last book is replaced with a “head” motif in this one. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it plays out with wrenching elegance. The heads and skulls on the island are sometimes the product of violence, sometimes attached to captives who may live out their natural lifespans in comfort (so long as their head isn’t needed), and sometimes represent a deep respect for the process of life and death: the stacks of skulls are the link to their pasts and ancestors and families, the essential element of their culture without which it may not survive, and the product of the deepseated human urge to kill. Rivers repeatedly deals with horrific head injuries occurred in a war that makes pointless all his efforts to heal and to understand, the war without which he would never have done his best work.
Everything we are, everything which makes us special and unique, is in a ball of grey-pink gelatin protected by a helmet of flesh and bone: a prize, a lover’s face, a surgical problem, a link to the holy, an object of horror, the source of poetry.
The Ghost Road (William Abrahams)
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/966989.html. Comment here or there.