SOURCE: "Back to the Front," in The Spectator, Vol. 275, No. 8725, September 30, 1995, pp. 44-5.

In the following review, Joll remarks on Barker's treatment of shell shock and war in The Ghost Road.

The Ghost Road is the final volume of Pat Barker's trilogy about the first world war. It continues the story of a group of shell-shocked soldiers, some real (notably Siegfried Sassoon) and some fictional, who were lucky enough to be treated by the empathetic and dedicated neurologist William Rivers. Barker uses this framework to write about the lives of men who, for a time at least, were too ill to go on fighting, but while back in England felt guilty and at odds with all those who hadn't been in the trenches and, more importantly, were not going there in the future.

Shell shock or war neurasthenia, now termed 'post traumatic stress syndrome' was then often viewed...