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I am not giving this book one star because I find the subject matter troubling or because I'm not used to required reading.

I am giving this book one star because it is overrated, self-serving junk. Pat Barker has plucked from history characters that were perfectly capable of speaking for themselves (we know this because most of them were writers) and forced into them her own flat, inexperienced voice. It seems as though, for many people, the book's politics make up for its nonexistent plot, endless pages of armchair psychology, and woefully thin characters.

For me, it doesn't Regeneration fails on every level. It fails to connect the reader with the horrors of war. It fails to present convincing portraits of the historic figures it borrows. It fails to provide insight into the psychology of returning soldiers. It fails to present any sort of meaningful, cogent philosophical statement aside from "War Sucks".

As a matter of fact, the only thing it has succeeded at is convincing me that the judges for the Booker Prize select its winners by lottery, without actually having read more than a few paragraphs of each title.

The book begins promisingly enough, with a letter written by Siegfried Sassoon denouncing the war, the introduction of Dr. Rivers, and Siegfried's arrival at the hospital. The beginning has you believe, for a few brief pages, that the book will be a deep, carefully executed statement about protest during war time and the underhanded ways in which such protest was silenced. However, the novel quickly dissolves into a turgid pseudo-psychological mess.

Pat Barker is not a psychologist. She has no experience working with veterans and knows absolutely nothing about post-war psychology beyond what she's culled from other books on the subject. Consequently, her characters are sketches; their afflictions are heavily repeated generalizations. The reader is presented with a roll call of "things that are bad that could happen to soldiers" without being given the opportunity to connect or sympathize with any of the patients. This approach has an almost desensitizing effect, which, I believe, is the exact opposite of what Barker attempted to accomplish with this novel.

Regeneration is entirely strung together on these flat psychological portraits and fleeting hints of poetically described gore. The writing is incredibly obvious throughout. If the reader thinks for a moment that a character's actions or thoughts might be a bit confusing or complex, he or she need not worry. Barker spells everything out in great detail. Multiple times. This over explanatory writing style can't even be called a lack of subtlety; it so closely resembles being repeatedly knocked over the head by a bag full of trite, Freudian pop psychology.

In fact, just in case the overall theme of the book would have been a mystery to the reader if it'd just contained the original, historical characters, Barker has invented a character whose sheer purpose is to trumpet her voice throughout the novel. Billy Prior's only purpose is to serve as a foil to the two, supposed main characters of the novel. Until he becomes the absolute focus of the entire book. Sassoon's protest is, for all intents and purposes, completely forgotten for more than half the book when the focus shifts to Prior's making witty statements about the war and observations about psychology, which the other main character, Dr. Rivers, is always incredibly impressed by. Often for pages.

I find it ironic that Siegfried Sassoon the, again, supposed protagonist despises civilians because of their ignorance and because of the callous way that they allow the war to continue. Pat Barker is ultimately as ignorant as any civilian in this book and proves this with her bludgeon-like attempts at characterization.

The love interest for Billy Prior, Sarah, seems more like Barker's slim justification for writing the novel than an actual character. A bad attempt at connecting the civilian experience with the overseas one. There is a particularly annoying sequence where this character is lost in a hospital, runs into amputees, and finds the whole mess senseless, thereby coming to the same philosophical conclusion about the war as Prior, etc. As though getting lost in a hospital is equivalent to getting lost in the trenches. As though Barker's researching Sassoon's war experience is equivalent to Sassoon's having lived through it.

This book is, ultimately, a sorry excuse for literature. People would be much better served reading the actual poetry of Siegfried Sassoon than reading Barker's shoddy attempt at explaining his psyche.