Pat Barker's award-winning 'Regeneration' trilogy was inspired by the fact that a number of the celebrated poets of the Great War had spent time being treated in the same hospital for shell-shocked officers. Her stories of ill men being made fit to die again have a necessarily ironic, but limited, narrative trajectory, but the books offset this through the precise economy of their prose and their complete lack of sentimentality. In his film of 'Regeneration', Gillies McKinnon has been broadly faithful to the spirit of the novels, but has softened them slightly - the setting is now not Edinburgh, but a beautiful Scottish country house, and the soldiers are assigned a dignity and innocence not wholly convincing. The result is a little bland compared to the original, a tale of good men, whereas the books are simply a tale of men and all the stronger for it.
Review of Behind the Lines
