Pat Barker · 1991 · exile

Pat Barker's 1991 novel, from her own grandfather's experience. Siegfried Sassoon publishes a declaration against the war and is sent to a psychiatric hospital in Edinburgh rather than court-martialled - and the doctor treating him has to decide what curing a man for the trenches actually means.

1. 1
   The Western Front

   Where the patients come from and where most are going back. Barker keeps the trenches off the page and lets them arrive in stammers, mutism, and dreams described to a doctor at eleven at night.

2. 2
   Craiglockhart

   The war hospital outside Edinburgh, now part of Napier University. Sassoon arrives in July 1917 with his declaration in the papers, meets W. H. R. Rivers, and a nervous young officer called Wilfred Owen knocks on his door.

3. 3
   The National Hospital

   Rivers goes to Queen Square and watches Lewis Yealland cure a mute private with electric current to the throat, telling him he will not leave the room until he speaks - and comes away with his convictions shaken.

4. 4
   Craiglockhart

   He goes back to the talking cure, and to a board that has to declare Sassoon either mad or fit - and Sassoon, who has not changed his opinion of the war at all, asks to be sent back because of the men.

5. 5
   Scarborough

   Home duty on the Yorkshire coast while the decision runs its course, and Owen leaving with the poems Sassoon has gone through line by line - the friendship of a few weeks that produced most of what we have of him.

6. 6
   The Western Front

   Sassoon returns to France and is shot in the head by one of his own men and survives; Owen returns and is killed a week before the Armistice - and Rivers, in London, is left holding the arithmetic of his own success.