To say that one had been born in a shell-hole is to say something absurdly self-dramatizing. Even by my standards, Prior thought wryly. Yet if you asked anybody who’d fought in France whether he thought he was the same person he’d been before the war, the person his family still remembered, the overwhelming majority – no, not even that, all of them, all of them would say no.
Bind to i Regeneration-trilogien er kanskje enda bedre enn det første. (Wow!) Denne gangen er det Billy Prior som fyller mesteparten av boka, og han er verdt det, i all sin makeløse kompleksitet, full av motstridende lojaliteter og tilhørigheter, trassig og lidenskapelig og langt fra sympatisk bestandig. Særlig er klassefølelsen hans fantastisk beskrevet, gapet mellom ham og overklasseoffiserene.
One of the ways in which he felt different from his brother officers, one of the many, was that their England was a pastoral place: fields, streams, wooded valleys, medieval churches surrounded by ancient elms. They couldn’t grasp that for him, and for the vast majority of the men, the Front, with its mechanization, its reduction of the individual to a cog in a machine, its blasted landscape, was not a contrast with the life they’d known at home, in Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or the Welsh pit villages, but a nightmarish culmination.
Prior havner i en umulig posisjon som spalter ham, men alle i denne boka er spaltet: den homofile familiemannen Manning, Sassoon: blodtørstig kommandant og brennende antikrigspoet, og til og med Rivers, som er skriftefar for alle tre og igjen binder historien sammen: frilynt feltarbeider og tilknappet akademiker. («Perhaps, contrary to what was usually supposed, duality was the stable state; the attempt at integration, dangerous.») Og boka er nydelig strukturert rundt spaltingen.
Det er ikke snakk om å lese noe annet før jeg har lest siste bind.
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