An update on an earlier bit in this thread. After a recommendation from
@Scepticalscribe, I was to get some of Pat Barker's Regeneration Triology novels off the travelling library bus here, but amazingly abnormal weather had precluded that arrangement. So I decided to "go postal" and ordered a hard copy in excellent condition that shipped from the UK. Conveniently it has arrived just a few days after my mailbox finally stuck its head back up out of the snowbanks. So I embark on reading Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road in that order beginning tonight.
Meanwhile I have made good on an idle threat to take a break and look into some of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries. I downloaded a few samples from iTunes, of course got hooked and so now a few of those will be what's on the travelling library bus for me on its April rounds, barring another snowstorm. Let the librarians wonder at my switchup from World War I novels to the adventures of a fictitious and politically incorrect black detective and World War II vet from Los Angeles.
😀
Fantastic - and I love the hardback version; this is a book that I have given as a gift so often that I keep having to re-order it for myself.
As you know, I think the entire trilogy is brilliant: Intelligent, articulate, aware, subtle, insightful - a stunning interrogation of a society at war, examining stuff such as social class, gender, culture, society - and especially that murky place where where social class and gender intersect - women, gay men, masculinity, shell-shock - what we would call nowadays PTSD - sexual repression, culture, the role of poetry in war, how you express dissent in war mobilised societies, among many other things, - it is wonderful. And knowing. And knowledgeable.
In my former incarnation as an academic, male colleagues - above all, those who specialised in the First World War - mentioned her work with reverence, tinged with an unarticulated surprise; of course, she got the facts right, but - much more telling - she got the
tone right, they observed in awed - and almost envious - whispers. A tone - mostly male - that is rendered with an absolutely flawless fidelity in terms of class, gender and language.
(What was funny was what was unspoken: These males were mostly Oxbridge educated experts - Pat Barker was a working class woman from Durham with a left wing sensibility whose first oeuvre away from writing about the constrained and often suffocating lives of working class women - works for which she was respected, if not popular - was to write about shell shocked young officers in the First World War - and do it brilliantly).
In interviews, - given subsequently - Pat Barker has admitted immersing herself in writings, - diaries, letters - interviews - from that time with a view to getting the tone absolutely right. Her research is impeccable and her conclusions powerful.
@LizKat - I really hope you enjoy these books: Do let me know how you find them.
