Pat Barker's Novel The Ghost Road
Book Three in Barker's Critically Acclaimed Trilogy
The first part to the trilogy was the critically acclaimed Regeneration and the second part was The Eye in the Door.
With The Ghost Road Barker cleverly combines the life of the fictional character Billy Prior a shell-shocked army officer with the real life first world war psychoanalyst William Rivers.
First Person Narrators Can't Die Therefore Billy Prior Can't Die
Examples of Barker's aesthetic integrity can be seen throughout the novel. One example of this is the ironic way in which Barker makes the reader make predictions about Prior's death. Chapter seven of the novel begins in a first person narrative, diary form. At the end of the chapter Prior’s diary entry reads; ‘first –person narrators can’t die, so long as we keep telling the story of our lives we’re safe'.
Priors life in the trenches is written in the diary form but at the end Barker chooses to change the narrative to third person, and in this section we read about how Prior died. By playing with the narrative in this way Barker parallels the beliefs of the soldiers that as long as they keep writing in first person they will not die. As soon as Prior’s diary is stopped he dies.
Graphic Details of Sexual Encounters Symbolizes The Nature of War
The detail in which the sexual encounters are described seem to graphically symbolize the nature of war. After Pryor and Sarah have sex Pryor looks down at her and sees, ‘spunk, beaten stiff as egg-white, streaked their hair, flecks of foam on a horse’s muzzle, spume blown back from the breaking wave’. This detailed description creates an image similar to that of an aftermath of a bomb explosion.
Later Prior notices that the condom slipped off and stayed inside Sarah, Prior then hooks it out and stares at it. Then the scene goes on to read; ‘He flung the rubber into the fire, a million or so Billies and Sarah's perishing in a gasp of flame.’
By not calling it sperm and by using the description ‘Millions of Billies and Sarah's perishing in a gasp of flame’ Barker personifies the sperm and evokes an image of the millions of civilians and soldiers being sacrificed in the name of war. Just as the sacrifice of the millions of soldiers to maintain a way of living is a small price to pay, destroying the sperm is a small price to pay for Prior and Sarah to carry on living as respectable individuals.
Madness, Homosexuality and Masculinity
With this novel Barker tackles the themes that appear throughout the trilogy. Madness, homosexuality and masculinity are all major themes of the novel. In The Ghost Road Barker uses these themes to question the hero status of soldiers Prior goes back to the war, even though he suffers from asthma and severe memory lapses. At first this quality would suggest that he is a patriot.
However the way in which Barker presents the story shows his reasons for going back to the war are not because he is a patriot, it’s because he is confused, he is unsure about what else to do with his life. He is shown as struggling with the meaning of his existence and he is confused with his sexual orientation. He is only engaged to Sarah because that’s what is expected of him by society.
The Ghost Road by Pat Baker is published in the UK in paperback by Penguin Books (1996), ISBN 10: 0-140-23628-7
1995 Booker Prize Winner
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