I think it would be fair to say that my experience of reading Booker prize winning novels has so far been patchy, to say the least, certainly recently having focussed on some of the earlier winners. Along the way there have been some incredible novels, but also a fair share of stinkers. I am delighted to say that The Ghost Road was very much in the first category. It was outstanding – original, touching, and very well written.

The Ghost Road is the third novel in the Regeneration trilogy. I found this out after buying the novel, which put me in a bit of a quandary – do I read the previous two novels or just push ahead with this one on its own? In the end I decided to read this novel first – which I now regret. If it had been a stinker then I could just tick it off the Booker list and move on, but it was such a well-written book that I really think I ought to read the first two in the trilogy. But of course that’s a daft way to read any series of books! So I just have to live with my decision.

Ghost Road follows the continuing adventures of Billie Prior, who in the earlier books had served in the trenches in World War One and been hospitalised suffering from shell-shock. This novel sees his recovery and return to the front. It opens with a scene in which Prior leers at women sun-bathing on the beach (a reference to the Nausicaa chapter in Ulysses?). He is keen to return to France despite being offered the opportunity to serve out the rest of the war in a desk job in the Ministry of Munitions, while at the same time accepting fatalistically that his chances of being killed are high. Prior is a sexually adventurous and ambivalent young man – Barker recounts his numerous encounters graphically without ever being salacious.

The battle scenes in the last days of the Great War are reserved for the final chapters of the book and arrive with huge impact. A futile war becomes even more pointless as the armistice is just days away; readers will be aware of that ticking clock and the imminent death of Prior’s fellow officer, Wilfred Owen. These powerful scenes are hard to read but incredibly well written.

The other main thread of the novel interwoven with the story of Prior’s return to France is told by his former doctor, Rivers. While continuing to care for his patients as the Spanish flu begins to take grip, Rivers recalls his time on an anthropological expedition to the Solomon Islands to study the local culture. This section is based on the work of the real-life character of Dr Rivers. Throughout the novel Barker draws on factual accounts and experiences, but integrates them seamlessly into the narrative to the extent that it is impossible to tell which is fiction and which fact, nor that it really matters. This is one of those novels that sends the reader down a series of internet rabbit-holes as passing references to the executor of Oscar Wilde’s estate for example, or the gay sub-culture of the Edwardian era appear in the narrative. The Solomon islanders culture, dying out due to the imposition of European ‘law and order’, is focused on the capturing of prisoners from local tribes and beheading them. This death cult is implicitly contrasted with the industrialisation of death on the Somme and Passchendaele, and seems almost civilised by comparison.

The First World War is very familiar ground for novelists, but Barker has used this setting with a highly original approach to create a powerful novel. I caught some echoes of Catch 22 in the descriptions of the struggles to capture an insignificant piece of land days before the Armistice. I could have done with more Prior and less Rivers in the overall balance of the novel – I found Billie the more interesting character – a working class officer recovering from shell-shock with an out of control libido and friends with some of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, what’s not to like?

This is a brave and interesting novel and a worthy winner of the 1995 Booker, a self-conscious and stunningly successful attempt to break away from the northern, working class, feminist stereotypes Barker previously found herself constrained by. The novel addresses the profound contradiction of the heart of the Great War – that it was at once terrible and, for some, exciting and worthwhile or rewarding. Barker explained in an interview:

“I think the whole British psyche is suffering from the contradiction you see in Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, where the war is both terrible and never to be repeated and at the same time experiences derived from it are given enormous value”.

Prior thinks he is mad to have come back to France, but would equally have been mad not to. The novel’s ending is hard to read after all that has come before, as the attempt to cross the canal is beaten back:

“Prior was about to start across the water with ammunition when he was himself hit, though it didn’t feel like a bullet, more like a blow from something big and hard, a truncheon or a cricket bat, only it knocked him off his feet and he fell, one arm trailing over the canal.

He tried to turn to crawl back beyond the drainage ditches, knowing it was only a matter of time before he was hit again, but the gas was thick here and he couldn’t reach his mask. Banal, simple, repetitive thoughts ran round and round his mind. Balls up. Bloody mad. Oh Christ. There was no pain, more a spreading numbness that left his brain clear. He saw Kirk die. He saw Owen die, his body lifted off the ground by bullets, describing a slow arc in the air as it fell. It seemed to take forever to fall, and Prior’s consciousness fluttered down with it. He gazed at his reflection in the water, which broke and reformed and broke again as bullets hit the surface, and then, gradually, as the numbness spread, he ceased to see it.”

Is this not wonderful, under-stated writing?