The Eye in the Door - (Regeneration Trilogy) by Pat Barker (Paperback)

About the Book

It is the spring of 1918, and Britain is faced with the possibility of defeat by Germany. A beleaguered government and a vengeful public target two groups as scapegoats: pacifists and homosexuals. Many are jailed, others lead dangerous double lives, the "the eye in the door" becomes a symbol of the paranoia that threatens to destroy the very fabric of British society.

Book Synopsis

In this haunting second installment of the Regeneration Trilogy, a World War I officer grapples with the complex realities of PTSD, identity, sexuality, and society's perceptions of mental illness.

It is the spring of 1918, and Britain is faced with the possibility of defeat by Germany. A beleaguered government and a vengeful public target two groups as scapegoats: pacifists and homosexuals. Many are jailed, others lead dangerous double lives, the "the eye in the door" becomes a symbol of the paranoia that threatens to destroy the very fabric of British society.

Central to this novel are such compelling, richly imagined characters as the brilliant and compassionate Dr. William Rivers; his most famous patient, the poet Siegfried Sassoon; and Lieutenant Billy Prior, who plays a central role as a domestic intelligence agent. With compelling, realistic dialogue and a keen eye for the social issues that have gone overlooked in mainstream media, The Eye in the Door is a triumph that equals Regeneration and the third novel in the trilogy, the 1995 Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road, establishing Pat Barker's place in the very forefront of contemporary novelists.

Review Quotes

"An impressive work, illuminating with compassion and insight the toll the war exacted from Britain's combatants and their world... Perhaps the book's greatest achievement is the lucid sense it provides of that maddening and heartbreaking species of absurdity one character calls 'a certain kind of Englishness.'"--The New York Times

"Quietly powerful... As haunting as its predecessor, this moving antiwar novel is also a cautionary tale about the price of cultural conformity."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"There seems to be absolutely no skepticism about this process in Barker's fictional make-up--and this perhaps is what gives her work its undeniable integrity... By highlighting the war's persecuted sexual and political dissenters, The Eye In the Door, like all of Barker's work, shows her commitment to the process of reclaiming silenced voices."--The Guardian

About the Author

Pat Barker is the author of sixteen novels, beginning with her working-class masterpiece Union Street in 1982. Her Regeneration Trilogy novels, set in the First World War, were awarded the Booker Prize and praised as some of the greatest historical novels in British literature. Her latest novels are The Silence of the Girls, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Gordon Burn Prize in the UK and won the Independent Bookshop Award in 2019, and The Women of Troy. She was made a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2000. She lives in Durham, England.