The Ghost Road
by Pat Barker
Summary
The last months of 1918. Billy Prior, a working class officer with a scar where his accent used to be, is passed fit and sent back to France once more, in the company of a fellow officer named Wilfred Owen. Neither of them believes in the war any more and both go anyway. In London, the anthropologist and army psychiatrist William Rivers lies ill with influenza and drifts back through his prewar fieldwork in Melanesia, among a people forbidden by the British to practise headhunting and quietly dying of the loss.
Barker runs those two strands against each other without ever pointing at the parallel. One culture has been stopped from killing and is withering. Another is killing on a scale nobody can absorb and calls it duty. Rivers's job is to repair young men so they can be sent back.
The prose is spare and unliterary, the dialogue is exceptionally good, and the sex and violence are handled with the same flatness, which is what makes them land.
This is the third book of the Regeneration trilogy, after Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, and while it can be read alone you will get far more from it in sequence. The last twenty pages, cutting between a canal crossing in France and a hospital ward in London, are among the finest endings in modern English fiction.
Be ready for the content: the trilogy deals with psychiatric treatment, class humiliation and the mechanics of trench death, and Barker never uses the war as scenery. Good for readers who know the poetry of Owen and Sassoon and want the prose that surrounds it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize in 1995 and closed the Regeneration trilogy, which Pat Barker had begun in 1991.
The result was unusually uncontroversial, widely reported as the right book winning at the right moment, and it is often cited as the rare case of a prize going to the final volume of a sequence on the strength of the whole.
Barker had been known until then as a writer of contemporary working class fiction about women, and the trilogy's reception involved a certain amount of surprise that she had turned to the First World War and to men. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon are historical figures treated with care, and the books have since become standard reading on the war, sitting alongside the poetry rather than beneath it. Barker was made a CBE in 2000 and a Dame in 2025.