Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration is the first book in a trilogy of historical novels set during World War I. Actual events and people from history constitute the story's subject with Barker imagining hypothetical sequences using real patients interned at Craiglockhart Hospital, Scotland.
"Good Morning, good-morning!" the General said,
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
-- from "The General" (1917) by Siegfried Sassoon
Real-life poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) served as an infantry officer during the first World War. A good soldier but rigid pacifist, his written anti-war declaration inadvertently earned him a "shell-shocked" diagnosis by a sympathetic Dr. W.H. Rivers. The end result was Sassoon's admittance to a mental hospital (an alternative to court-martial) alongside other patients suffering severe mind and nerve damage. The novel begins with Sassoon trying to justify his idealism and Rivers employing various modes of treatment to rehabilitate his other highly traumatized patients. Among the ailing is Lieutenant Prior, a man made mute by combat, Captain Burns, who's been unable to eat after a corpse exploded over him, and Wilfred Owen, another (real-life) poet and contemporary of Sassoon's.
A "war" novel, Regeneration is more of a behind the scenes viewpoint. Nonetheless, Barker still relies heavily on factual events to tell the story, re-imagining situations and characters at a personal level. Even with Sassoon and Rivers at the forefront, the narrative jumps around in a more or less scattered fashion, emphasizing minor characters (some fictional, some real) with as much weight as the two protagonists. It's this enhanced intimacy which, despite the real vs. not-real contrast, ultimately illuminates the book's intentions: the re-creation of a wartime atmosphere through emotions rather than action.
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