*shakes head* Because there couldn’t have been homosexuals in the army, could there? And there was probably no point in arguing with your correspondent because if that’s his ‘head in the sand’ viewpoint – against a wealth of evidence to the contrary, not least Siegfried Sassoon himself – you’d never shift him.

Charlie

Barker had some nerve, eh?

Hear hear. I’m in awe of Pat Barler’s ability to say so much in a few simple words. And yes, all those emotions coveyed without ever giving the feeling that the reader was being manipulated.

Charlie

I’m entirely in agreement with all you say. Discovering this trilogy had been one of the ‘reading events’ of the past year, for me.

And I’d made the huge assumption that people would know about Owen (he’s standard syllabus English and/or History for people over here and so is a fairly well known figure). His poems are, in a word, stunning.

Many thanks

Charlie

As Charlie mentioned in the review, one of the characters is a young poet named Wilfred Owen. Since some of you might not know of Owen, I’d like to comment that Wilfred was a real soldier, killed in battle at the age of 25, one week before the war ended. I recommend that if you read Barker’s books, or anything about WWI (or any war, for that matter) that you read Owen’s war poems.

It’s chilling to realize that they were written by someone who was living the horrors of war at the time he was writing and that he lost his life during the experience he was writing about. One of the most unforgettable describes a mustard gas attack. But they are all unforgettable.

Barker’s books have won awards, justly deserved.