THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120708
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
THE GHOST ROAD
PAT BARKER
Dutton. 278 pp. $21.95.
Too often artists receive awards for the wrong works. The Pulitzer Prize went to Willa Cather for One of Ours instead of My Antonia, for example, and to Ernest Hemingway for The Old Man and the Sea instead of The Sun Also Rises. Heck, even John Wayne won his only Oscar for ``True Grit'' instead of ``The Searchers.''
As Wayne's case pointedly demonstrates, awards are political things, political in terms both of politics per se and politics within the particular art or craft. And as not only Wayne's case demonstrates, but Cather's, Hemingway's and dozens of others, awards are a way of catching up. Better late than never, and sorry we were so mean or stupid before.
It is not much different in Britain, except in a greater degree of pettiness and viciousness of literary politics, where Pat Barker's The Ghost Road has been awarded the Booker Prize, that country's most prestigious literary award. I don't know what politics, if any, might surround Barker's writing career, but I do know that the award should have gone to one of her earlier novels, The Century's Daughter or Union Street (Americanized into the film Stanley and Iris, about working-class women in the north of England).
Still, prizes have their uses, the chief one being that they sometimes can boost sales, a welcome effect for typically undercompensated literary novelists.
In this instance, the award of the Booker has inspired Barker's American publisher, Dutton, to rush The Ghost Road into print now rather than wait until its scheduled publication date of next August.
The Ghost Road is the third in a trilogy of novels about World War I, having been preceded by Regeneration (which almost won the Booker) and The Eye in the Door (which won a lesser prize). Though these novels may represent a greater imaginative creation because of the unfamiliar subject matter, to me they are not as rich and deeply felt as the working-class novels that spring from Barker's own background.
The Ghost Road, like Regeneration, is for the most part set far back of the front lines, primarily in the Scottish mental hospital, Craiglockhart, where officers suffering from ``shell shock'' are patched together to be sent back to the trenches of France again. Also like Regeneration, it is populated by both fictional figures, principally Billy Prior, a bisexual lieutenant of working-class origins, and real-life ones, such as the poet-soldiers Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. (Adhering to British usage, Barker refers to them by last name only.)
The novel moves even further from the front lines, all the way to Melanesia, in the Pacific, where another of the real-life figures, Dr. William Rivers, went 10 years before. Rivers, the psychologist who treats Billy and the others, remembers the anthropological research he did in Melanesia among tribes that once were head-hunters until that practice was outlawed by colonial administrators.
This allows Barker to make some nicely understated comparisons between two war-obsessed societies. Who's crazier? The knee-jerk response these days is to say the ``civilized'' Western society, but don't bet on it. Each in its way, Europe and Melanesia, worships the dead. Each finds its own rationale for killing.
You get a sense that Rivers dealing with the Melanesians is in a position or state similar to that of Billy facing the prospect of combat for the fourth time. Or maybe Rivers' position vis-a-vis the Melanesians is the same as his position vis-a-vis Billy and his other wounded patients. Can you make anyone well if you don't know why - or even if - he's ill?
``Head-hunting had to be banned,'' Rivers thinks, ``yet the effects of banning it were everywhere apparent in the listlessness and lethargy of people's lives. Head-hunting was what they lived for . . . This was a people perishing from the absence of war.''
Britons and Europeans, on the other hand, are a people perishing from the horrific, immediate presence of war. And Billy, Owen and Sassoon are dying to get back into it. ``We're all mad here,'' Billy the shell-shocked patient tells himself early on. Later, back in France, he thinks, ``What an utter bloody fool I would have been not to come back.'
Little wonder they all, Europeans and Melanesians alike, see ghosts. Only their reasons for seeing them differ. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, former book editor for The Milwaukee Journal, is a
free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis. by CNB