The Eye in the Door

Series: The Regeneration Trilogy, Book 2

By: Pat Barker / Narrated By: Peter Firth

Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins

Regeneration was about men; The Eye in the Door is about people… And that’s never a good thing…

I must say that I was mildly disappointed with The Eye in the Door, especially after recently listening to Regeneration and judging that work to be brilliant.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s no way Pat Barker can write a dud of a book, her writing style is still as visceral and as raw and spare as always, fraught with scathing insight, but that she moved away from characters and into an indictment of society, while necessary, wound up being somewhat unutterably dull. I kept waiting for something to happen but this, Book 2 in the trilogy, seems only to be the must-have book, the mandatory tie-in between Books 1 and 3. It puts the Eye squarely on what society on the Homefront was up to whilst men were getting slaughtered in the trenches.

Billy Prior is back, out of the mental institution and working as an intelligent agent/officer. He’s trying to work the case of a woman convicted of threatening and attempting to kill Lloyd George, but Billy has his doubts. Along the way he discovers the Eye in the Door that looks in on the woman in her cell, and that pretty much sums up the whole book: Society is looking at everything in a harsh, brutal, and unforgiving way—who they think you are, what they see you do, who denounces you? All are under scrutiny, and all are found wanting.

The questions of WWI’s morality is still questioned in this book, and poet Siegfried Sassoon makes a bit appearance after being wounded in the head (Dr. Rivers, enraged, thinks Siegfried has a death wish now), and he speaks of the dilemma that soldiers and leaders felt: The war will mean death to them, but how on earth can they avoid it if they wish to stand by their fellow soldiers? This comes up even for Prior as he navigates being away from the Front, suffering fugue states and even multiple personalities, all the while feeling that life in battle is more authentic, has greater value if lived in battle amongst friends. Away from Britain’s hyper morality, its fixation on class even as there was great societal change going on.

Mostly, this book is about wounds that haunt and inspire distress and poor choices. It’s a sexually graphic book and even though Prior is bi-sexual, he does indeed have the whole class inferiority complex-rage that makes him want to make men suffer at his hands during sex. There’s little tenderness to be had, even Dr. Rivers, who wants the best for his patients and who decries some of the harsh methods used to treat suffering soldiers, has his own crippling wound from his childhood, and that’s about where I wanted to cry: Okay, gotcha, enough, can we move on, please? Get to a story or something? Cuz, I mean, nobody was actually doing ANYthing except feeling rage, except licking wounds, except having angry sex. I just wanted to know how the men I grew to love in Regeneration were doing, for cripes sake.

Well, it turns out:

Not well, not well at all.

But Barker is such an amazing writer, and narrator Peter Firth is AWEsome here yet again, and is narrating the third and final book, I feel I’m gonna HAVE to chuff this experience off and move onto The Ghost Road where I hear they go back to the Front. I’m kinda looking forward to that and so will listen to it, like, immediately.

It’s just that I know if I don’t do it now? After this book? Uhm, I just may never get around to doing it at all…

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