I loved Regeneration because I loved Billy Prior, a fictional character. In fact, it wasn’t the ‘real’ history in the novel, which centres on the protest against the war made by poet Siegfried Sassoon and his subsequent ‘treatment’ at Craiglockhart War Hospital, by the eminent neurologist-cum-anthropologist-cum-psychologist W. When I was 16 I was not a historian, no matter what my history teacher tried to tell her charges, and Regeneration got under my skin not because I was given to musing on the boundaries between history and fiction, but because it was a good read. This is because, much as I hate to admit it, historians aren’t actually all that important to understanding the success of Barker’s novel.

The singular status of Regeneration provides one way into understanding the relationship between history, historical fiction, and historians.īut not right away. Even if we limit the field to recent historical fiction concerned with the First World War, Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1993), published contemporaneously with the Regeneration trilogy, has not caught on among historians to anything like the same extent, despite achieving significant critical and popular success. Imagine, for example, that for the past 20 years every historian of the reign of Charles II had felt duty-bound to comment on Rose Tremain’s Restoration (1989), as fine an example of historical fiction as Regeneration: it seems unlikely. (1) I’ll return to the possible reasons for historians’ obsession with Regeneration at the end of the review, but for now it should just be noted that it is really quite remarkable.

All major histories of shell shock published since the mid 1990s have made reference (favourable, critical, or simply thoughtful) to Barker’s novel. There may not be many historians who would attribute this degree of influence to Regeneration, but it is nevertheless treated with great seriousness in histories of war trauma. It would be doing more than one of my university lecturers, as well as Richard Curtis and Ben Elton, a disservice to say that I ended up working on shell shock just because I liked Regeneration – but my career would almost certainly have developed along different lines had I not read the book. I was 16 or 17 when I first read Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and 26 when I completed my PhD on shell shock in First World War Britain.

The regeneration trilogy by pat barker