Regeneration by Pat Barker

One of the most common words used to describe a response to a novel is also one of the most untrustworthy: sympathy. When readers speak of sympathising with a character, they seem to be testifying to the credibility of a novel. Where a reader cannot sympathise, the novelist seems to have failed. Yet Regeneration deliberately makes us uncertain of our sympathies.

Pat Barker shifts the point of view of her third-person narration throughout the novel. We are allowed to know the thoughts of several characters. Some of them are historical – William Rivers, the doctor treating shell-shock victims during the first world war; Siegfried Sassoon, the poet, who was one of his patients – and some invented: Billy Prior, another traumatised soldier, and Sarah Lumb, the munitions worker whom he is courting. The shifts of viewpoint seem calculated as much to undermine our sympathies as to invite them.

Sassoon is not shell-shocked: his friend Robert Graves has used his influence to save Sassoon from punishment for his exhibition of anti-war sentiments. He has written a public declaration against the war, and while on leave has thrown the Military Cross he had been awarded into the River Mersey. The novel includes several of Sassoon's poems, which recoil from the horror and futility of the war and savage those who prosecute it. Yet he is not a convenient focus for any reader's anti-war feelings. He is determined to return to the front, and to have Rivers tell him that he is "pleased" at this decision.

Sassoon may seem to Rivers to wish to be killed, but we know that he will survive the war; Wilfred Owen, another patient at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh who befriends Sassoon, may be safely confined to the hospital at the end of the novel, but we know that he will be killed a week before the end of the war. Prior's fate becomes a special concern of the novel because it is uncertain. He is an outsider, being an officer from a working-class background, but our knowledge of his thoughts is often alienating.

When he encounters Rivers, he becomes a mocking antagonist. As he pursues the half-willing Sarah, he seems to have as much contempt as affection for any woman who is, like her, sexually available.

Barker's technique fits her material. This novel about the first world war is set entirely in Britain. In the hospital, a "living museum of tics and twitches" as Sassoon thinks of it, we know about the horrors of the western front by the patients' symptoms.

Shell-shock being, Rivers believes, a kind of withdrawal from a reality too terrible to contemplate, its victims are involved in a "hopeless attempt to forget". Short, horrible stories sometimes attach themselves to traumatised patients, but none of its victims is able to talk about what has unhinged them. We are given some of Prior's and Sassoon's fragmentary memories, but the novel largely imitates the appalled soldiers' habits of repression.

When Rivers visits Burns, another victim, in Suffolk, he observes all the symptoms of trauma, but he is able to tell his friend almost nothing about his experiences. When the novel does take us inside Burns's mind, it is to register his suffering without pulling it into consciousness. The novel follows him as he leaves the hospital grounds and travels into the countryside. He ends up under a tree, from which some local farmer has hung the corpses of dead pests: moles and magpies and a fox. Burns strips naked and removes the animals, placing them in a circle around him. "This was the right place. This was where he wanted to be." We are seeing events from his point of view, yet are left to explain as best we can his strange death-ritual and the satisfaction that it gives him.

Owen agrees with Sassoon that it is mad not to write about war when it's … "such an experience", says Sassoon completing the thought. "They looked at each other and burst out laughing" – as if the one benefit of war were to give them material poetica. Rivers's sympathies are limited by his own lack of this experience.

Sitting in on one of the "boards" at which supposed experts interview shell-shock victims and decide whether they are fit for a return to combat, Rivers is filled with "the most enormous compassion" for the soldier. "Poor little blighter, he thought. Poor all of them." Yet this is made to sound like the ignorant reflex of a decent man. "Poor all of them": just the response that we, as readers, might now easily feel. Barker's achievement is to make us sense the inadequacy of this sympathy.