In the Modern Trenches of Male Despair : FICTION : THE GHOST ROAD,<i> By Pat Barker (Dutton: $21.95; 278 pp.)</i>

The acclaim Pat Barker has received after being awarded this year’s Booker Prize for fiction in Great Britain has bordered more on fascination with the author herself than engagement with her work. Because “The Ghost Road” captures so vividly the male world of war, as well as the brutish sexuality that accompanies it, critics and readers have done handstands over Barker’s ability, as a woman, to imagine her way into the back alley of masculinity.

Such fascination is, of course, a double-edged sword. While it’s true that Barker’s knack for rendering the gritty underside of male consciousness is remarkable, the celebration of it also can be seen as moot praise. Why, in fact, shouldn’t a woman be able to write convincingly of men? Is “Ghost Road” a superb novel, or is it simply literary cross-dressing at its best? To answer, one has to look at Barker’s handling of character, for that is her strength.

Billy Prior, the novel’s protagonist, is a working-class, noncommissioned officer who wants to return to the front in the final months of World War I after having suffered shell shock, trench fever and a wound. Thus, from the start, the novel’s plot seems a foregone conclusion. Prior will clearly die, as will the poet Wilfred Owen, who makes a cameo appearance as Prior’s fellow officer seeking clearance for the carnage. Both receive it, Prior noting that “We’re all mad here” as he passes Owen outside the medical officer’s examining room.

From here, “The Ghost Road” follows Prior on his way to France. Beginning in Scarborough on England’s northeast coast, he passes through London, crosses the English Channel and has a brief respite in Amiens. There, in an abandoned house, he and Owen and the other officers find “a fragile civilization, a fellowship on the brink of disaster” as they rest and contemplate their shared fate. Within days, however, will come the battle of Joncourt, followed by more of war’s nightmare landscape: “Dead horses, unburied men, stench of corruption,” all of which Prior records in his journal despite his feeling that “There are no words for what I felt.”

Prior’s journey to the front leads to no revelation, but rather consists of the observations he makes along the way. “Observations,” in fact, is too polite a word, for Prior’s conscious thought more often than not involves note-taking while in full rut. Crude, shameless and on the make for anything that moves, Prior is sexual hunger incarnate. Molested by priests as a child, he’s as quick to bed down with a fellow officer as he is with a whore, Barker detailing sessions with each with cold indifference.

Such sordidness, however, is not merely for effect. Instead, it’s central to the real class battle at the heart of “The Ghost Road,” with Prior representing the rugged desire of the working class to know life on real terms versus the willingness of the educated to only debate those terms. Prior comes face to face with one of the latter when, earlier in London, he visits William Rivers, the psychologist who had treated Prior and Owen for shell shock.

Rivers, like Owen, is a real historical figure, an anthropologist who 10 years before the war visited Eddystone Island in Melanesia to study native customs and beliefs. Working now in the ward of a military hospital where each bed, each hour confronts him with another casualty of the war, Rivers concludes that, for this generation, “the task of making meaningful connections was quite unusually difficult. A good deal of innocence had been lost in recent years. Not all of it on battlefields.”

In essence, it is the same conclusion as Prior’s, namely that “We’re all mad here,” though its more elevated tone points to the gulf between the educated and the working class. Guilt-ridden over healing his patients only to send them back to the war, Rivers wonders “whether an ideal becomes invalid because the people who hold it are betrayed.” “If holding it makes them into naive idiots, yes,” responds Prior, though he will be the one to die and Rivers will stay in England, thinking about his days among the Melanesians while sorting out “the difference between savagery and civilization.”

Despite the tension between these characters, the intertwined threads of Rivers’ memories and Prior’s observations pose real challenges to the novel. Rivers goes on at too great a length about the past for us to be compelled by him in the present, and sometimes Prior’s philosophical tone in the journals seems canned. As he notes that “us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we’re gone, they’ll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them’ll take your hand off,” one expects a division of new historicists to parachute into no-man’s-land at any moment.

In fact, Barker is more interested in writing a contemporary novel about a historical era rather than a historical novel in the classic sense. To this degree, she succeeds, though the distance between the novel’s sentiments and the era that it depicts may account for the strange chilliness to the book as a whole. Even Owen’s famous dictum that “The poetry is in the pity” wouldn’t seem to stand a chance in comparison to the way that “The Ghost Road” captures neither the poetry nor the pity but only the crude bluntness with which war mangles all who come in touch with it.

Clearly, Barker’s intent will hold no truck with a desire for vision or ideals, and it carries through on this with a vengeance. Well-woven, late-20th-century novel of bleakness that it is, and gifted as Pat Barker may be in setting her reader down in the trenches of male despair, nonetheless there’s something pitiful in that.