The Ghost Road

Rivers's 1908 fieldwork on Eddystone Island supplies the novel's real argument: the Melanesian islanders he studied had organized their entire culture around headhunting, and when British colonial administrators banned the practice, they didn't liberate the islanders so much as gut them — deprived of the ritual structure that gave their lives meaning, the population begins simply dying out, a kind of collective despair with no other name for it. Barker's parallel to the war is exact rather than merely suggestive: Rivers's own profession, psychiatric medicine deployed to patch soldiers up and certify them fit to return to the front, is no less a culture organized around ritualized killing than the one he studied as a detached scientific observer. The 'primitive' society he pities and the 'civilized' one that employs him turn out to be the same machine wearing different justifications.

Billy Prior, recovered enough to be passed fit, carries the novel's other central image: a notebook he keeps compulsively, framed from early on as an object that will outlive him, found among a dead man's effects rather than read by its author. Writing becomes, for Prior, both a way of asserting a self the war keeps trying to erase and a rehearsal for his own posthumousness — the diary form itself is a small death sentence he's narrating in advance, its final entries getting shorter and more clipped as the front approaches.

Barker draws directly on the real W. H. R. Rivers's own ethnographic career — he had genuinely done fieldwork among Melanesian headhunting cultures decades before treating shell-shocked officers — and uses the historical record almost as found material. The novel's Rivers relives these memories involuntarily, in fragments, precisely because they won't stay safely categorized as anthropology; the more time he spends returning damaged men to a war organized around slaughter, the less he can pretend his professional distance from the islanders' 'savagery' means anything.