Although Barker's breakthrough was confirmed by her deserved win of the 1995 Booker Prize for The Ghost Road, the final part of her wartime trilogy, critics had recognised a marked artistic progression from her previous four books as early as Regeneration (1991), the opening novel. Arguably the strongest of the trio, Regeneration is based on the relationship between the army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers and the tormented poet of conscience, Siegfried Sassoon. It is a haunting, detached yet compassionate narrative in which Barker sets the tone of austere sensitivity which she sustains throughout. The first book also introduces the fictional character of Billy Prior, an astonishing portrayal of bitterness and vulnerability. By the second part, The Eye in the Door (1993), Prior has emerged as the central figure, a soldier returned to an indifferent homeland. Barker bravely explodes the myth of a patriotic England at war, and instead evokes an atmosphere of fear, betrayal and class prejudice. These are brave, intelligent, brutal novels. Barker did not draw on memoirs written years later with hindsight, but instead based her books on diaries kept at the time. Much of the trilogy's power comes from its immediacy, its honesty and utter lack of sentimentality. Aside from revealing a new maturity as a writer, Barker exposes the futility and hypocrisy of war, while also making a valuable contribution to the often uneven British literature of the first World War, which somehow has never produced an equivalent of Remarque's All Quiet on The Western Front.
By Eileen Battersby