Humane and compassionate

As the appalling bloodshed continues unabated on the Western Front the authorities are worried that they are facing the real possibility of mutinous troops and a civilian work force no longer prepared to work for subsistence wages. With no end in sight and the enemy in the ascendent the search for scapegoats begins and so a degree of paranoia and hysteria affects the Home Front, as reports from the Front show Allied troops in full retreat. 'Skivers, shirkers, conches and pacifists' were blamed for the downturn in national fortunes.

Pat Barker sets time and place so well in all her novels, and nowhere better than in this wonderfully evocative story of the Great War in which she identifies so many different nuances and gradations within the ranks of her working class subjects as they come to terms with physical deprivation and mental suffering. Her characters are frightened and bewildered, and the story has great verve and integrity, as her depiction of both the industrial north and central London, now subject to air raids, has great authenticity forming the backdrop for the novel.

"The Eye in the Door" is set in early 1918 when General Ludendorff's Offensive made great impact on the Western Front and Allied Forces were everywhere in retreat, and as defeat seemed to loom, as French military morale broke and Russia made her separate peace with Germany, more and more people in Britain were ready to believe that there was a fifth column penetrating the very heart of the nation. A confederacy of evil and degenerate men, taking their orders from Berlin, and through their clandestine activities dedicated to the downfall of Britain by subversion of the military, the Cabinet, the Civil Service and the City, and achieving their insurgency through spiritualists, whores and homosexuals.

After the Somme there was a grudging acceptance that the mental exhaustion of the rank and file soldiers was not simply 'malingering' or evidence of lack of courage or lack of moral fibre but a psychological breakdown and this could become an epidemic. The suffering of front line soldiers was revealed through the new science of psychoanalysis, and in 1916 after his pioneering work Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps was appointed consultant psychologist to the British armies in France with a staff of assistants at Le Touquet, Rouen, Etaples and Boulogne. These forward dressing stations were located deliberately within sound of the guns, as the High Command insisted the condition was treatable, in order that the men could be returned to their regiments as soon as possible. Officers afflicted by the same mental disorders and experiencing the same shell shock were classified differently. They were victims of 'neurasthenic disorders' and psychological trauma and were entitled to a more sympathetic healing regime through psychoanalysis led by pioneering doctors like William Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh.

Page 22 needs a little explanation. Billy Prior receives an anonymous note through the door with an invitation (in the form of a newspaper cutting) to go to a private showing of 'The Cult of the Clitoris"In 1916 a British MP, Noel Pemberton Billing, claimed that he knew the names of 47,000 sexual perverts who held positions of authority in Britain and as a co founder of Vigilente Society, he wished to promote greater purity in public life. Ernest Sackville Turner, the author of 'Dear Old Blighty' (1980) has pointed out: "One of the great delusions of the war was that there existed an Unseen (or Hidden, or Invisible) Hand, a pro-German influence which perennially strove to paralyse the nation's will and to set its most heroic efforts at naught"

The authorities' paranoia was revealed in a McCarthy-like 'witch hunt' for those particularly "of the homogenic persuasion," who were obviously responsible, and so two damaged soldiers, from very different social backgrounds, Charles Manning and Billy Prior, both suffering post traumatic stress disorder are pursued by the authorities whilst trying to perform their patriotic duty.

Fantástico

Horribly beautiful - and I mean horribly; this book rips your guts out and arrays them on the table while you watch. It's really devastating, with vividly realistic characters whose emotional plights don't always make them likeable but do always make them sympathetic. I may not remember the plot of this novel forever (I'm notoriously bad at that), but I will remember how it made me feel, and how it changed the way I think about people, about psychology and about the nuances of war.

Also, the prose is an absolute delight, the kind of effortlessly masterful writing whose rhythm completely overtakes you. An example, from page 4 (before I'd grown too engrossed in the tale to specifically mark beautiful sentences): "They set off across the grass, their shadows stretching ahead of them, black, attenuated figures that reached the trees before they were anywhere near." Simple and evocative, a wonderfully vivid and original image without going purple.

Basically, if you don't mind your fiction dark, and more about character interaction than exciting plot twists, this is the perfect book.

Great; just as good as Regeneration. This one was more about consistency and coping with parts of ourselves (or our societies) that we feel estranged from.

Barker is someone who has a keen sense of psychology. Each of the characters in this book is someone with a distinct and complicated personality; none more so than Billy Prior. I have to say that Prior’s not a particularly likeable character. He’s intensely resentful about the snobbery of the upper classes, yet at the same time he’s eager to be one of them. His willingness to manipulate people borders on the sociopathic, and his closest friends are the ones he most bitterly fights with.

He’s not wrong about the snobbery. Class distinctions are everywhere and are very clearly drawn. When keeping up appearances is all that matters any mistake can doom a man. The class issues even apply to gay sex. One of his lovers can’t get it up unless his partner comes from an inferior class. Which sounds true and bizarrely uncomfortable at the same time. Oh, Prior’s gay now. Or rather bisexual (sleeps with anything that moves). Perhaps I missed that in the incredible homoeroticism between Rivers, Sassoon, and Owen in the last book, but it seems odd and a little worrying to me that all the people who broke down are gay. I don’t think it’s meant to imply anything of the sort, but it could be used to suggest that gays don’t belong in the military because they’re too sensitive.

Like the last book psychology is at the very center. This time Prior’s suffering from dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder). He finds that he has blackouts during which a part of him takes over and does what he wants. This is terrifying to Prior who sees this as a Jekyll and Hyde situation, even though Rivers assures him otherwise. In the end it’s not and aligns with the psychological behavior associated with the disorder, although I found the whole resolution of the mess confusing and annoying. Maybe I just don’t understand Prior. He’s got sadistic tendencies to be sure, but his revelation at the end was something else. Let me put it like this – I was horrified and I had expected him to be as well. He was after all expecting to have acted like a monster. Instead, he recognizes it as something he might do. That was… concerning. Like I said, I suspect I don’t really get Prior. Hard to engage with a book when you feel that way.

This also brings me to the villains of this book – the upper-class militarists who see opposition as treason and anyone who’s different or wants to challenge the upper class dominance of all power as vile anarchists against whom any action, no matter how dishonorable, is justified and even necessary. The eye in the wall of the title refers to their constant spying on everyone and everything. And this part of the plot was tied up in Prior’s unpleasant ending as well. I fundamentally dislike everything about this and found it hard to sympathize.

As with the last book this one is very unfocused. I found that more distracting here, where she’s created an entirely fictional main plot and isn’t restrained by reality. What is the point of Rivers’ story here? He’s in London true, but he doesn’t have much to do with Prior and his late scene with Sassoon comes rather out of the blue. Most of his time is spent reminiscing about his days with Lewis Carol, who went to his father for his speech impediment. I don’t really know what this brought to the plot.

I have a hard time explaining what these books are saying or what they’re about. They seem to me to be very hard books to judge. Possibly, they’re also easier books to appreciate than truly enjoy. As a result I find I have mixed feelings. Since they are blessedly short I will finish the series, but it looks like it may be more of a hassle than I would like. And yet I find them absorbing while reading them. A very confusing experience.

The book shifts in style and even POV. It changes the feel of the book from the first. Few stories deal with the traumas of war and in 1918 men, real men, just got over it. This text dips deeply into the physiological trauma along with his and this is the part of not sure of his sexual escapades of both men and women. He mentions that the time in the trenches lead to actions not condoned by normal society. Many activities in the trenches were a product of war. So I was never quite sure if his attentions toward men were from the war or if he was born a homosexual. He wasn’t ashamed as he said. Sometime his issues make fore difficult reading but the subject matter is troubling

This is book two in the award winning Regeneration Trilogy. The series is a historical novel about World War One. Book one took place at Craiglockhart Hospital with Dr. Rivers and Siegfried Sassoon as the key characters; both these men were real, Dr. Rivers was a famous physiatrist who treated mental problems caused by the war and Sassoon was a famous poet of WWI.

This book features Dr. Rivers and the fictional character Billy Prior. Prior is an officer from the working class which made him feel he never fit in with the other officers. I found the information about the state of art of mental health knowledge and treatment interesting. Dr. Rivers discovers that Billy has ‘fugue states’ and has Multiple Personality Disorder or what they now call dissociative Identity Disorder. In the book Barker goes into more detail of the changing class structure taking place in England with World War One. Sassoon is featured briefly in the story along with a discussion of some of his poems.

The book is well written and well researched. I enjoyed the skill of the narrator reading the dialogue of the working class with phrases such as ‘barmy buggers’ and ‘a bit of bread and scrape.’ I remember my great grandmother using these same phrases. I am looking forward to book three in the trilogy. I read this as an audiobook downloaded from Audible. Peter Firth does an excellent job narrating the book.

Man, woman can write a novel! Why am I just finding out about her? Can’t wait to finish the series.

After reading the 2nd volume, I'm thinking that the war wounds were so profound that they must exist as scars even in our generation.

4.5

Unlike the first one, this book requires a lot more historical context to even follow the basic plot. The characters were very well-written, but I found myself disengaged.