The Eye in the Door

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.