Rating: 
Summary: Quite brilliant, but not personally moving
Review: Barker's novel is a most impressive anti-war novel, wonderfully written and meticulously accurate in its characters' psychoanalysis. I occasionally had some trouble enagaing with the story, but that is most likely a result of my personal preferences (and non-preferences). I lean more toward plot driven tales, but this should delight anyone who prefer character driven fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Haunting
Review: Despite being a long-time reader of several WWI poets (Owen, Brooke, Sassoon, etc.), I only got around to reading this book last summer (2004). I found it an excellent interpretation of the times and people. I think that the issues raised in the work are timeless, as apt today as yesterday. Moreover, (risking some sense of gender neutrality) the book is hauntingly in tune with "maleness," coming, as it were, from a female author. In other words, this is a perceptive work, underrated despite any of the stars I might give it. This is a book of interest to the casual reader and the scholar alike.
Rating:
Summary: Riveting, compelling
Review: Having just finished Paul Fussell's "cultural essay" on WWI called "The Great War and Modern Memory", I found myself compelled to read this fictionalized account of one of the main figures in Fussell's book, Siegfried Sassoon.The historical background helped me enjoy this book tremendously, but it shouldn't take anyone long to be drawn into this compelling story about a doctor who is trying to "help" shell-shock victims recover so they can be sent back to the front. The characters are rich, the dialog is sharp, and the plot is riveting. Even the pacing, which I was afraid would drag at times, was excellent. Interestingly, the Sassoon story is only a thread that goes through the book; Barker populates the book with several touching stories and characters, some who become more important to the reader than Sassoon. I dare you to read this book and not come away with a deeper compassion and sympathy for the soldiers of WWI.
Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly moving book
Review: Having just finished reading "Birdsong" I felt compelled to read more about a period of time that is moving out of living memory. I think "Regeneration" is a superb book that is well written, well researched and moving. I think books like this are so important because we should not be allowed to forget what the people of that time went through and we should not be allowed to trivialise what the First World War did to human beings and how it broke the seemingly Golden Age that had developed throughout Victorian and Edwardian England. I think the novel helps to honour the memory of the people who gave their lives in the war over something they did not understand or comprehend. The book is not just about war as it goes far deeper in helping to explain humanity, gender, class and truth. "Regeneration" is a disturbing and thought provoking book which people should read firstly because it is a good book and secondly becuase it will ensure that you do not forget what the people of the time and especially the soliders went through. They were caught up in a war of industrial proportions and were caught up in a war that they did not understand and we should forever hold them in high regard and in our memories. Afterall, in one month in 1917 there were 104,000 casualties in the war. Sacrifice like that deserves and should be remembered. From a literary point of view, this book is superbly crafted and is an original work of fiction with a good story. It is energetic and highly readable and I recommend it to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly human experience
Review: Having read the entire trilogy fairly recently, I find it hard to distinguish between the first book alone and the complete work. However, Regeneration itself does stick out by being the most well-researched and well-informed of the three. I presume that many people have heard about Sassoon's 1917 public objection to the way the war was being waged, which caused him to be put under the supervision of Dr. Rivers - but I had not before reading this novel. The incident was so fascinating that I have since read further about Sassoon, Rivers and the war experience for those who suffered from neurasthenia - all of which reading has confirmed what I initially suspected, that Barker's novel, as well as being exceptionally well-written, insightful and moving, is also extremely true to events and situations. For the benefit of the "novel"-reading world, a fictional "hero" is added, whose life continues in tandem with Wilfred Owen's into the next two books; yet even he, Billy Prior, is more a composition deriving from real soldiers' experiences than the imagination. Not to say that Barker does not apply her creativity to the full - in her descriptive style, and in stringing together of the various lives she is describing. She has insight into character which is both moving and important - it reminds us that beyond the cliches of tragedy lay a very human, normal and mostly dull war, whose effects were nevertheless all-encompassing and disruptive.
Rating:
Summary: Changes Your Worldview
Review: I actually have to review the trilogy as the three books are of a whole. These books deeply moved me and caused me to question and wonder about quite a lot of various things. After reading this book, I delved further into Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and, eventually World War One. As the "great" war did not concern America until towards the end of that terrible conflict, it is not as thoroughly discussed as World War II. It was an awful, senseless war. No war can ever really be justified, though there are always those who come up with some reason or another. Violence is never an answer. However, there is no excuse for World War I other than avarice. And so many died. Yes....this trilogy made me think and review and re-review my thoughts and feelings on a lot of things. Amazing!
Rating:
Summary: World War I and the Inner Man
Review: I have just finished "Regeneration" found the experience shattering. While Pat Barker misses some of the aspects/issues involved in masculinity or "being a man," her insights on the ambiguities and ambivalences are sensitive and valuable. Her understanding of the demands and effects of combat contribute to the themes and plot of this novel. The First World War was the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century [not my phrase]. Pat Barker has tried to explore some of reasons why the previous sentence is true. Class differences and conflicts, the emerging important roles of women in society, the rise of psychological therapy, the incredible ambiguities regarding wartime male relationships and homosexuality are all part of her narrative and the world within the book covers. In no way can these matters be handled broadly or in depth in a tale of 250+ pages but that she can weave them all in with superb writing is testament to an excellent novelist.
Rating: 
Summary: Lack of appreciation
Review: I read Birdsong and was stunned. WW1 came alive for me and the sheer scope of the tragedy. I couldn't wait for Pat Barker's book - WHAT A LET DOWN! I have given 2 stars because it is reasonably written, but she brings none of Faulks intrinsic understanding of the male condition under such circumstances. All in all she lacks an appreciation of what was happening at a human level. Good try, but not well done; and the trilogy won a booker?
Rating: 
Summary: Not My Cup of Tea. Maybe It's Yours.
Review: I wanted to like this book. I can't say that I didn't try. But after the first hundred pages or so, I still could not get interested in the book. The basis for the novel is promising:
REGENERATION is the story of the English poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and his time spent in an insane asylum during World War I. Sassoon was committed for making a declaration that the war was "being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". His objection to the war was not based on religious or pacifist reasons but because the war had come to a point of being pointless to continue. I kept on waiting for the book to take me somewhere. It did not. The novel plods on and on and on with no apparant plot other than Sassoon being in a war hospital for mental patients. There's no suspense, no real storyline, just people being and doing and saying. The book concerns the case histories of various men in the mental hospital. However, each of these characters are based on the real stories told in Sassoon's poetry. So, I suppose that the reason that I had difficulty distinguishing between characters was that their viewpoints were all based on the original viewpoints of the same man: Sassoon. There was only one small storyline in the novel that seemed to be come alive to me -- a small love story of sorts. However, the love story ended abruptly as if the author got bored with it. This book was recommended to our book club by someone who said that this book had changed her life. So, obviously, some people have truly loved this book. The author even made it into a trilogy. But this bookworm won't be continuing the series . . . even if one of the books in the trilogy did win a Booker award.
Rating:
Summary: Not My Cup of Tea. Maybe It's Yours.
Review: I wanted to like this book. I can't say that I didn't try. But after the first hundred pages or so, I still could not get interested in the book. The basis for the novel is promising:
REGENERATION is the story of the English poet, Siegfried Sassoon, and his time spent in an insane asylum during World War I. Sassoon was committed for making a declaration that the war was "being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it". His objection to the war was not based on religious or pacifist reasons but because the war had come to a point of being pointless to continue. I kept on waiting for the book to take me somewhere. It did not. The novel plods on and on and on with no apparant plot other than Sassoon being in a war hospital for mental patients. There's no suspense, no real storyline, just people being and doing and saying. The book concerns the case histories of various men in the mental hospital. However, each of these characters are based on the real stories told in Sassoon's poetry. So, I suppose that the reason that I had difficulty distinguishing between characters was that their viewpoints were all based on the original viewpoints of the same man: Sassoon. There was only one small storyline in the novel that seemed to be come alive to me -- a small love story of sorts. However, the love story ended abruptly as if the author got bored with it. This book was recommended to our book club by someone who said that this book had changed her life. So, obviously, some people have truly loved this book. The author even made it into a trilogy. But this bookworm won't be continuing the series . . . even if one of the books in the trilogy did win a Booker award.
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