The Eye in the Door

The Eye in the Door is a novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1993, and forming the second part of the Regeneration trilogy.

The Eye in the Door is set in London, beginning in mid-April, 1918, and continues the interwoven stories of Dr William Rivers, Billy Prior, and Siegfried Sassoon begun in Regeneration. It ends some time before the conclusion of the First World War later the same year. The third part of the trilogy, The Ghost Road, continues the story.

The first and eponymous part of the Regeneration trilogy finishes somewhat inconclusively, with Sassoon being cleared to return to active service on the Western Front. Several questions remain unanswered. What happens to Sassoon? How does Rivers resolve his personal conflicts over the contradictory goals of war and medicine? What resolution lies in store for the couple Billy Prior and Sarah Lumb? The Eye in the Door goes a long way to answering these questions, and raises still more.

Whereas Regeneration is an anomalous, but not unique, mixture of fact and fiction, The Eye in the Door acknowledges real events, including the campaign against homosexuals male and female being waged that year by right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing, but remains consistently within the realm of fiction. This grants Barker more freedom to explore her characters and their actions, the descriptions of which might be considered slanderous if attributed to real people. A major theme of the book, Prior's intense and indiscriminate bisexuality, is effectively contrasted with Rivers's tepid asexuality and Sassoon's pure homosexuality. Greater fictional scope also permits a deeper and more fascinating treatment of the complex psychological, political, and professional life of the charismatic and enigmatic central character, Billy Prior. This makes the book more purposeful and formally coherent than its predecessor. While a fight is waged for 'freedom', injustice and prejudice continue to flourish throughout England. The emergent conflicts shared by the main characters - some of which are artfully developed from incidental and easily overlooked minor aspects of the first book - make for intrigue that is only partially developed in this book. This sense of incompleteness, of the author holding something back, seems to presuppose a third volume in the series, perhaps calling into question the integral wholeness of this book as a stand-alone work.

Real people who appear in the Regeneration trilogy

• Winston Churchill
• Charles Dodgson
• Robert Graves
• Henry Head
• Edward Marsh
• Wilfred Owen
• William Rivers
• Robert Baldwin Ross
• Bertrand Russell
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Harold Sherwood Spencer
• Lewis Yealland