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I think this novel stands quite well alone in addition to serving as an important second part in the series of three starting with Booker Prize winner "Regeneration". I read it out of sequence (as the last one), and that doesn't seem to matter for comprehension. Each focuses on a different set of characters in the circle of patients of psychiatrist William Rivers, a real man who treated soldiers damaged by their combat experiences in World War 1. The other volumes focus on the recovery of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, prominent gay poets who fought valiantly but wrote verse which stands among the great anti-war literature. This one concentrates on a complex fictional character Billy Prior, treated for what we would today call post-traumatic stress.
Billy's tendency toward manipulation and violence, scary memory gaps, and bisexuality makes him hard to identify with, yet Rivers' compassion and flexible approach to treatment helped move me toward empathy. The theme of Rivers' moral struggles of treating people so they can return to being cannon fodder is less a theme for this tale than the pathologies in society brought out by the war. Billy's work in domestic intelligence puts him in a moral quagmire through alliance with forces that scapegoated pacifists and homosexuals and imputed their collusion with socialist union workers in munitions factories.
The transformations of class discrimination during the social upheavals wrought by the war is another fascinating theme brought out well in the novel. This was brought out by having Billy try to save a childhood friend, a shopkeeper woman falsely convicted of plotting to kill the Prime Minister. The "eye in the door" of the title refers both to horror of being watched in one's cell or room in an asylum, as well as to being spied upon in daily life due to being perceived as a threat to the war effort.
Billy's tendency toward manipulation and violence, scary memory gaps, and bisexuality makes him hard to identify with, yet Rivers' compassion and flexible approach to treatment helped move me toward empathy. The theme of Rivers' moral struggles of treating people so they can return to being cannon fodder is less a theme for this tale than the pathologies in society brought out by the war. Billy's work in domestic intelligence puts him in a moral quagmire through alliance with forces that scapegoated pacifists and homosexuals and imputed their collusion with socialist union workers in munitions factories.
The transformations of class discrimination during the social upheavals wrought by the war is another fascinating theme brought out well in the novel. This was brought out by having Billy try to save a childhood friend, a shopkeeper woman falsely convicted of plotting to kill the Prime Minister. The "eye in the door" of the title refers both to horror of being watched in one's cell or room in an asylum, as well as to being spied upon in daily life due to being perceived as a threat to the war effort.
