RESULTS

Stephen embarks on a book about the images of war, based on his late friend Ben Frobisher's photographs. He is having recurring nightmares of his time in Sarajevo, threatening his peace of mind. This is a novel about the atrocity of war and how two men struggle to come to terms with it.

This is the third novel in Pat Barker's trilogy about a group of shell-shocked soldiers in World War I who are treated by Dr William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital. The protagonists include historical characters like Dr Rivers, an eminent psychiatrist and anthropologist, and the poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as fictional creations, like Lieutenant Billy Prior, a working-class man elevated to the position of British officer. As The Ghost Road begins, Prior has been cured of shell shock and is preparing to return to the front in France. Rivers takes care of his patients and his invalid sister, amid memories of his experience ten years earlier on an anthropological expedition to Melanesia. He befriended Nijiru, the local priest-healer who took Rivers on his rounds to see sick villagers and also to the island's sacred Place of the Skulls. Rivers entertains very un-British thoughts about the morality of these headhunting people, and about the power of symbolic healing. As these thoughts intrude upon his consciousness, Rivers is himself in the process of curing, by suggestion, a soldier with hysterical paralysis. Meanwhile, Billy Prior returns to the front. It is the autumn of 1918 and the last inhuman spasms of the war are in progress. In a futile battle that takes place a few days before the Armistice, Billy and his friend Wilfred Owen are killed.

Management Teaching use: This text might be viewed from two different perspectives. The first would be to view the central character Rivers as though he represents an organisation. It is interesting to see, through the flashbacks that Barker employs, how current activities are of necessity contextualised within a historic framework. This might be useful as a springboard to discuss whether organisations are limited by what has gone before and how change might be instituted in the light of it. From a human resource management perspective the text also shows how managers operate under appalling conditions, in this case the trenches of World War I. Clearly there is considerable scope here for expanding on how managers can work when both they and their staff are under such extreme pressure.

The story of First World War soldiers sent to an asylum to recover from emotional troubles. In Craiglockhart war hospital, Doctor William Rivers attempts to restore the mental health of officers. When poet Siegfried Sassoon publishes his declaration of protest against the war, the authorities decide to have him declared mentally defective and send him to Craiglockhart, where he meets fellow poet Wilfred Owen.