I was invited to join a book group a few months ago. It's a lovely bunch of local people who enjoy a chat about things literary and a cuppa. This time we are due to discuss Pat Barker's Regeneration, a fictional reconstruction of life in a mental institution for soldiers during the Great War. The novel is based upon a real life hospital in Edinburgh that was home, for a period of time, to war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Very interesting so far, with the institutional lunacy paralleling the wider madness abroad, namely, the war itself. Barker draws you into the cloistered sanitorium, with its damaged young men, its harried staff, its absurd logic.
A war to end all wars it was not. Sadly.
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