Reviews for The eye in the door

The average rating for The eye in the door based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-29 00:00:00 John Conrad The second book in the trilogy; just as good and it helps a great deal to have read the first. As previously Barker does an excellent job of weaving fact and fiction together. We have moved on to early 1918 and the war is still in the balance. One of the fictional characters from Regeneration, Billy Prior, is also central to this novel. Dr Rivers is now in London (as is Prior) and we are plunged into a society struggling with the consequences of war and some of the hysteria that goes with it. Barker focuses on the maelstrom of opinion, debate and misinformation that comes with a society at war. She uses Prior, unfit to return to France, working for military intelligence and having affairs with men and women to take us round what is happening. Barker describes the lives of those opposing the war, pacifists and those sheltering deserters and those contemplating more drastic measures. There is also a window on one of the more bizarre incidents which took place in Britain, which would be entirely unbelievable, if it wasn't true. The varied attitudes towards because of the strains of wartime have been well documented. However one particular sensational libel case stands out. Noel Pemberton Billing (aviator and would be MP) was convinced that homosexuality was infiltrating society and damaging the war effort. He was convinced the Germans had a list of 47 000 prominent homosexuals who they could blackmail. He teamed up with Harold Spencer who was working for the secret services. They were convinced the Germans were trying to "propagate evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia". Even Margot Asquith was publicly attacked. However they particularly disliked Robbie Ross and old friend and supporter of Wilde. He had organised a production of Wilde's Salome with Maud Allen in the lead role. Billing published an article called The Cult of the Clitoris which accused Allen of being a lesbian. She sued Billing and lost. The strain told on Ross and he died before the end of the war. Barker weaves all of this into the novel very effectively via Prior and a new character Manning and builds the feeling of paranoia very effectively. Again the descriptions of the nightmares, the effects of "shell-shock" and its varying treatment are very effective and one remains in no doubt about the horrors of war. Sassoon features again, fighting his demons with the help of Rivers; but it is Prior who takes centre stage. He is a complex character and Barker analyses his bisexuality and the effects trauma has on his psyche. It's excellent stuff and well worth the effort of seeking out.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-06-23 00:00:00 Jess Lunsford 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.