Goodbye to All That

The best first person narrative of service in the First World War.

A wonderful memoir of Graves' life up until the age of 30. While mostly celebrated as a first hand account of WWI it does include his childhood and school experiences prior and his family and career life after. While my initial purpose in reading this book was because it's a WWI memoir I'm glad to have read the before and after as it provides context for what he went through, and many like him. Having read the Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker I felt that I was familiar with the WWI psyche, and the two books, one a memoir the other fiction, one written relatively soon after the event the other some 80+ years after were similar in feel - a testament to Barker's talent. However one thing I didn't quite realise in Barker's novels was how incredibly young these men were. I had put Sassoon and Graves as being in their mid to late twenties and even then being mature beyond their years - they were actually only 18 when they joined up in 1914 and would have been about 20/21 years old at the incident Barker's novel picks up. Incredible. The memoir is quite modern in language to read and conversational in tone so I think anyone could read it if they wanted however it is a memoir so it doesn't read as quickly as a plot driven novel designed to entertain.