The Ghost Road
Series: The Regeneration Trilogy, Book 3
By: Pat Barker / Narrated By: Peter Firth
Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
Slow-going at first but, my GOD how it ends!!!
After being somewhat underwhelmed by the second book, The Eye in the Door, I knew I had to dive in and dive in quick to this final book in the trilogy or else I’d NEVER get around to listening to it. And at first I thought I was in for more of what that second book was: Angst-ridden sex and a slow-mo going over of each and every wound that Dr. Rivers and Billy Prior EVER suffered, as in: Going waaaaaaaay back to the indignities that occurred when they were but little boys.
Don’t get me wrong, this book DEFinitely is that, but there’s a whole heckuva lot more going on here. First, let’s start with the book’s style, which is rather off-putting. Author Pat Barker does a lot of “head hopping” in this one, a LOT of interweaving of different timelines so that you never truly know where you are in her world, and near the end there’s the use of first person as Prior is writing letters, or writing in a journal, or something. This kinda gives the book the feel of a machine gun going off: rat a tat tat, rat a tat tat, like you’re taking bullets quickly and surely in the gut. Because, you see, Barker’s writing is STILL as raw, as scathing as anything you’ll ever find on man’s inhumanity to man.
Rivers ponders, lengthily, over his time on a South Pacific island, befriended by the priest/healer Nijiru who teaches River how differently life, death, grief, all of it, can be. One doesn’t see how this fits into the book, but as you listen, you come to understand how Rivers is uniquely suited to being on the outside looking into very, very foreign entities: All the broken young men, shattered by their experiences, not knowing how to be human any longer, not knowing how to feel sorrow, guilt, and where shame has them so by the throat that you see it’s unbearable for them to live, unbearable for them to breathe. Rivers can offer solace, he can offer them answers, give them options because nothing truly will shock him. He’s seen a little boy holding vigil over caches of severed human skulls, don’t you know.
And as always we have Prior engaging in his sexual class warfare, suffering, suffering, suffering, with brutal orgasm as his sole release. He’s emotionally cut off from people, and he fiercely understands that he’ll feel alive only when he’s amongst fellow soldiers again, watching as friends become only so much dismembered meat and flying gore.
I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve listened to hundreds upon HUNDREDS of audiobooks, and I can honestly say that Peter Firth’s narration is some of the best ever. Barker’s spare prose slices and dices you to bits and pieces, but it’s Firth’s understated delivery, the odd emphasis here and there, the quiet bite to the words that’ll keep you awake, caring about the thoughts of the person whose head you’ve jumped into.
And once you listen to his handling of the end of this book, this trilogy, you tell me if he didn’t make the ending absolutely DEVastating. Prior is back on the Western Front just days away from the end of the war, but still he and the men must go on, certain death one way, certain death the other. Rivers is back in the hospital, a witness as a grossly maimed young man, brains pulsing out of his ear, struggles to make his reality known. All is quiet, all, whether in battle or wounded in bed, wait and listen, in perfect sympathy as hell begins to swell. A forward charge, a slurred phrase, back and forth, back and forth between two fields where death is occurring on a grand scale. Firth barely raises his voice, but his words flow with such power, such love and sorrow and death and release and then sorrow once again, and once you’ve finished it, heard it all, have wiped away a tear or two, you’ll realize that you’ve just listened to unutterable tragedy.
Unutterable, except that Parker had the words for it.
Unutterable, except that Firth voiced it so well.
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