The Eye in the Door

by Pat Barker Book 2 in the Regeneration Trilogy series.

First published 1993

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4.0(11,662)

London in 1918 is dominated by military anxiety, surveillance and the search for internal enemies. Billy Prior works for intelligence at the Ministry of Munitions, investigating pacifists and conscientious objectors whose politics and working-class world overlap with his own past. His assignment brings him to Beattie Roper, a fictional counterpart of anti-war activist Alice Wheeldon, imprisoned after an alleged plot to poison Prime Minister David Lloyd George. As Prior’s official duties conflict with loyalty, sexuality and memory, his personality begins to fragment.

W. H. R. Rivers treats Prior and other officers while the public campaign led by Noel Pemberton Billing turns homosexuality and dissent into evidence of German conspiracy. Maud Allan’s libel action against Billing supplies the novel’s historical backdrop, linking private fear to a wider culture of moral panic. The second volume shifts the trilogy from Craiglockhart to the British home front and examines how wartime institutions classify people as loyal or dangerous, sane or ill, masculine or deviant.

Historical Periods

Defence of the Realm Act and Wartime Surveillance1914–1918 CE Shell Shock and Military Psychiatry in World War I1914–1918 CE

Genres

Court & Political Fiction Espionage War Fiction

Historical people

William Halse Rivers Rivers1864–1922 Siegfried Sassoon1886–1967 Alice Wheeldon1866–1919 Noel Pemberton Billing1881–1948 Maud Allan1873–1956 David Lloyd George1863–1945