The eye in the door Book

Sometimes, mostly, I forget books that I give up on and don't finish, this is one of the few that I can remember with certainty that I got too annoyed with to complete.

The main character, Billy Prior, is an Everyman. For some bizarre personal reason of my own I did not expect that this would be interpreted literally. So Prior is an officer of working class origin, ship-worker father - domestic service mother, bisexual, in a relationship with a munitions worker, suffers shell-shock, was a boy prostitute, picks up brother officers for casual sex, lived on the same street as the woman who tried (not very well) to assassinate Lloyd-George...

Any one of those would have made for an interesting character in a WWI setting. When all of these are present in the same character I put the book aside. Any one of those elements might have been enough to show me that Prior is a liminal character, all of them though was too much for me.

The old woman, and former neighbour, in prison for an attempted assassination of Lloyd George and that Prior was sent into question her, apparently randomly rather than because it was known that he was conversant in the topolects of the North-east of England, was the straw which broke the camel's back of plausibility in this story to my mind.

I'm happy to admit that this is a failing on my side, a grim wish that the realistic should be realistic and the symbolic symbolic, but there you go, we all have our short comings. I enjoyed Regeneration though already there I preferred Barker's version of the historical characters to her fictional Billy Prior.