The Ghost Road

The Ghost Road (1995) is the third novel in a trilogy of books by Pat Barker that deals with shell-shocked soldiers in the aftermath of World War I. It was preceded by Regeneration (1991) and The Eye in the Door (1993). Though the three books share characters and settings, they are primarily linked by theme and a desire to explore the historical developments in medicine and psychoanalysis in the years following the First World War
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The title refers to the way survivors view the dead during the war. Dead soldiers and civilians are said to walk a “ghost road,” moving in the opposite direction of the living, who must continue to advance forward. As the events of the novel lead up to the conclusion of the war, the title also comes to represent the choice each character has to make: whether to go forward and continue to fight or return to the comforts of the past.

The fictional character Billy Prior, a working-class British army officer who is being treated for what would today be recognized as PTSD, and the real-life psychiatrist William Rivers, who helped pioneer the treatment of shell-shocked soldiers, narrate alternating chapters.

Prior begins the novel in Craiglockheart Military Hospital where he is receiving treatment. When he hears the news that the war is nearing its end, he is eager to rejoin the fighting as part of the “final push” into France. Prior believes this massive military campaign will guarantee a British victory and also justify the massive loss of life that has taken place over the past four years.



Though Rivers, Prior’s psychiatrist, advises against his rejoining the fighting, Prior is able to obtain physical and psychiatric clearance to rejoin the war effort. In addition, Charles Manning, a retired army officer with whom Prior is involved in a sexual relationship, manages to secure Prior a desk job so he will not have to go back to the battlefield, but Prior turns it down.

Before returning to frontlines, he takes a weekend to visit his fiancée, Sarah Lumb. They have a furtive sexual encounter, during which Prior’s condom breaks, and he becomes concerned that Sarah will get pregnant. Later, when he finds out that she is not, he finds himself disappointed and melancholy.

The soldiers who deploy with Prior are a mixture of seasoned veterans like him and very young new recruits who are still of high school age. During his deployment, Prior witnesses many scenes of dead and horribly wounded soldiers, and is dismayed to find that he is largely immune to the sight. The soldiers march dutifully from town to town, while it gradually becomes clear that there is little chance that they will ever win the war. Finally, at the end of Prior’s narrative, he and his men are pressured into confronting a German squadron in a suicide mission, during which Prior is killed.



Prior’s chapters of the novel are intercut with chapters from the point of view of Rivers who remains behind in England. Rivers spent the early part of his career as an anthropologist studying the native people of the Solomon Islands, where he befriended a local healer named Nijiru who showed him the sacred Place of the Skulls on the island.

While taking care of his patients, as well as looking after his invalid sister, Rivers begins to notice striking similarities between the culture of the Solomon Islanders and the British. He applies the lessons Nijiru taught him about using medicine to treat the mind and spirit as well as the body to his work as a psychiatrist.

Despite his best efforts, Rivers begins to feel that he has failed his patients and cannot really do much to help them recover from the horrors of war. His sense of failure paralyzes him, ensuring that he is not able to complete his life’s dream of writing an anthropological text on the Solomon Islands and what he learned there.



While primarily a novel about war and recovery, The Ghost Road is also deeply indebted to the tenants of Freudian psychology. Both Rivers and Prior have events in their past that have shaped them into the people that they are, and both try to repress their true nature and fight wars within themselves that are as real and threatening as the war between nations that rages outside of them.

This duality of internal and external conflict is echoed by the state of the Solomon Islands. Though the people who live on the island do not participate in the World War, they are constantly under threat to give up their way of life. Just as Prior and Rivers must fight to retain their sense of self, the Solomons must constantly fight for their own existence against external powers.