![]() The main characters in the Regeneration trilogy are all men, but one of the things I loved most about it was its constant attention to sexual politics and the radical shifts that this period saw in wider society. ![]() It was interesting coming to this one after recently reading Thomas Keneally's The Daughters of Mars, a book in which the two central characters are female and yet where there was frustratingly little examination of how the First World War affected men and women and their social and sexual interactions. Writers of subsequent generations cannot write what they know, and they need to do something else – bring some higher assessment of how people, and society, reacted to this cataclysm overall.ĭoing this badly, or not even bothering, is what has frustrated me about other modern novels set around 1914–18. ![]() ![]() The novelists who wrote immediately after the war (or even during it) – Barbusse, Remarque, Manning, even Hemingway – were concerned mostly with getting down the facts: recording the realities of modern warfare before they allowed themselves to forget, before the details became incredible. ![]()
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