The 2nd book in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy takes place in 1918 London. The main protagonist in this novel, Billy Prior, is a young officer who, when we met him in the first book, Regeneration, was suffering from shell shock. Here, Billy is trying to put the pieces of his life together and is working for the Ministry of Munitions. That Billy is leading a double life is amply clear from the first chapter of the book; after having been turned down for sex by his date—a girl who has put out for him once before—he proceeds to follow a man to his home for a romp in the sack which is described in great detail, clearly reminding us that this is a contemporary historical novel. Billy has no qualms about his bisexuality, but what he does have a problem with is the increasing frequency with which he experiences loss of time which he can't account for, and although Dr. Rivers (a main protagonists in the first book) tries to convince him that he doesn't necessarily turn into a Mr. Hyde when he loses track of his actions, Billy fears the worst.

There were plenty of interesting themes in this novel, though I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I did the first one, which instantly became one of my all-time favourites. Billy isn't necessarily a sympathetic character, though his plight is interesting to witness, and one wonders if and how he'll find his way out of it all. I look forward to reading the last book in the trilogy to see how Barker has tied all the loose ends together, or if indeed she has... —February 2011

I have to admit,I haven't read the first bit in this trilogy, and wonder if sometimes when I was a little lost in this book by random character suddenly showing up, it might have helped if I did.
It was an engaging and well written book. Billy Prior, one of the main characters was a bit of a mystery, sometimes do likeable, other times, so clearly not.
Other characters we've around his story mainly, though at times they felt slightly fractured and I wondered if we had moved onto something else!
Overall I enjoyed the book, and that's all I ask.

The middle book in Pat Barker's First World War trilogy is perhaps the weakest of the three, but still very good.
This book is concerned with men who did not fight in the war instead of the effects of the war on those who did. It is still well thought out and written, but does not have the power of the other two.

This has been one of my favorite books since I read it a decade or so ago (the whole 'Regeneration' trilogy, but especially this middle book) and I'm glad to say it holds up really well. It's hard to think of another writer who combines meticulous historical research with psychological insight with deep characterization as well as this.

Also, not for nothing, Billy Prior -- it's almost hilarious to realize how perfectly he epitomizes the kind of fictional character I've gotten to like over the years (bisexual, working class but with aspirations, and divided loyalties that he has to compartmentalize to a point that is literally pathological).

I think it fell apart a bit with the Big Reveal at the end. Is that really how  dissociative identity disorder  works?

3.5 stars
An interesting and unique take on Britain during WW1. I continued to find Rivers, Prior and Sasson's stories engaging. The insights into the discrimination and scapegoating of gay people during the war were especially interesting and relevant. Slightly less emotionally hard hitting than Regeneration.

The sequel (and second in the trilogy) to Barker’s amazing ‘Regeneration’. I only discovered these books recently, and was blown away by the standard of writing and treatment of the issues in Regeneration… The Eye in the Door follows through on this; I get the impression that Eye is based slightly less on biographical fact, though is none-the-less important for that. The theme of homosexuality is addressed more directly in this book, concentrating on River’s patients in England who are dealing with both natural homosexuality and war-induced blurring of sexuality in a time when the citizenry’s reaction to the bonding of soldiers was to crack down ferociously on ‘inappropriate and degrading’ behaviour at home. Threaded through this theme, we follow Prior, whose dual personality threatens to implode under the strain of investigating his childhood friends for harbouring deserters, ‘conchies’ and ‘cowards’.

There are so many issues of war woven through Barker’s stories that coming out of each book is rather like emerging from the trenches; or at least from River’s consultation room, where one’s psyche is stripped to the ground. The characters are not real simply because the existed, but because Barker effortlessly breathes complicated, harrowing life into them, leaving the impressively dedicated Rivers to deconstruct neuroses so real and life-sized that they daunt the reader even as we begin to understand the impact of the first world war upon the men who fought it.

Slow for me to get into. Middle of the book on was brilliant.

To commit or not to commit that is the question?
Is it worth reading all of a trilogy when you've finished the first book (Regeneration) and feel that it works quite satisfactorily as a stand alone novel, thank you very much. Is it worth ploughing on with the other two books to get a sense of the ending, a feeling of completeness, a conclusion to it all?

If we're talking about this trilogy then I say yes. I am a commitmentaphobe but I took the plunge and with The Eye in the Door in one hand and The Ghost Road in the other I said, "I do" and took the plunge, spending a week with them.

The Eye in the Door slightly more wide ranging in its historical wanderings than Regeneration which was a bit bed bound, staying mainly within the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Eye takes a closer look at the political and historical background to the period of World War I, specifically, what was happening on home turf. Adding colour to the political landscape are individuals such as Churchill, Bertrand Russell and also Noel Pemberton Billing, well known homophobe, media mogul and conspiracy theorist. You might think it would be easy to dismiss this man and his campaign against homosexual men in British public life as a right-wing crankery but rather unfortunately he was also an MP so people tended to listen to him and take him seriously.

It is fair to say that despite the single minded focus on the war, Britain was fighting a war on its own home front too. A confused war against its own working classes, against shop stewards, strikers, pacifists and those whose sexual orientation, it was alleged, would make them weak and likely targets in bribery and espionage by the Germans. It was said that loose lips sink ships during World War II. World War I was the war that feared it would be torpedoed by loose zips.

The majority of the story focuses on Billy Prior, now liberated from Craiglockhart and trying to resume a normal life in one of the many ministries which sprung up, Big Brother style, between 1914 and 1918. Prior character is simultaneously a manifold ensemble of things that the Brits are professing to admire and loath. He is a soldier, honourably relieved from service at the front and given home service duties, he has seen action and fought for his country but despite being an officer he is from a working class background, is friends with activists and socialists and is also bi-sexual, enjoying relationships with munitions worker girlfriend, Sarah Lund (no not the lady off of The killing), as well as fellow Craiglockhart survivor, Charles Manning. Billy is not the typical everyman and he has multiple issues however he is the conduit through which we are permitted a look at tumultuous World War I England. He is our Eye in the Door.

This was in all honesty my least favourite segment of the trilogy, but it's a useful bridge between Regeneration and The Ghost Road if you're going to read all three.

The second in this extraordinary trilogy about WWI. It occurs primarily in Great Britain during the time they thought Germany might be winning the war. Paranoia abounds about spies and antiwar demonstrators and homosexuals are targeted in particular. If you read this trilogy, it's best to read one right after the other as they depend heavily upon each other.

In the 2nd book of the Regeneration trilogy, one re-encounters Prior, whom Barker describes as being "neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red herring." It struck me that this is the tone of the trilogy so far -- there is nothing that I can really feel -- nothing that really moves me -- because there is nothing to grasp solidly. It's not badly written; it's not that the story isn't worth knowing -- but, but ... I feel as fractured as the soldiers Barker writes about: I can't hold onto anything with any sense of satisfaction.

The process of regeneration continues: we re-encounter the same characters from the previous novel who are in various stages of recovery from their wounds, both physical and psychological. A few new characters emerge to complicate the lives of the already-wounded. Torn, and war-torn, the soldiers walk through a somnambulist's nightmare, repeated in various stages of intensity and atrocity. Some heal, some get worse. Some completely forget why they're there in the first place; others, like Prior, self-induce a fugue state to absolve himself of his sins, both past and future. (He eventually betrays his best friend from childhood, which is telegraphed to the reader very early on. Go figure!) There is not much to like about Prior, in fact, and this last action puts paid to that fact.

The characters are somewhat stagnant. To be fair, I wouldn't expect a vaudeville act from the walking wounded, but since they are purportedly in a state of "regeneration" I would expect more fluidity of psychological awareness and growth. Instead, Prior lives the same life, over and over again; as does Sassoon, as does Rivers, as they all do in fact. Lives are revealed in dribs and drabs, and episodes from the past, as far back as childhood, are repeated to the reader's distraction. The characters continue to make the same stupid mistakes; they continue to make the same ridiculous choices. Wherein lies the regeneration begins to escape me at this point.

I am not convinced that soldiers led lives like these: the story dances a very close verisimilitude to the real dance of war, but is passionless and abstruse to my eyes.

Where Barker surprises me, and thrills me, in the end, is the almost-extraneous history of Beattie Roper. I was riveted and I wanted 1000 pages more of Beattie's life. (Given that this novel was to have featured Beattie/Alice Wheeldon, I was disappointed to get so little of her story. Like Owen in Regeneration, Beattie makes an almost-cameo-appearance, yet she is the one who carries the novel.) It struck me in reading these lines, that Barker knew far more about women's psyches than she did about men's: it would have been Barker's crowning glory if she had written about war time women, rather than the soldiers she paints so nebulously.

The second book of the WW1 trilogy mainly focuses on Billy Prior, who had been a patient at Craiglockhart in the first book and is now working in intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions in London. He is still seeing Dr Rivers, now also in London, on a voluntary basis, as he still has psychological issues from his time in the trenches. In particular he suffers from being in a fugue state, which means he has periods which he cannot subsequently remember, but in which he still functions- a bit like Jekyll and Hyde.

The book carries on from the first in looking at the internal conflict of being a soldier killing people and the ‘normal’ person who does so, and how this conflict presents itself in mental illness. It also looks at conscientious objectors and their treatment.

It’s a very powerful piece of writing.