The Eye in the Door, by Pat Barker
A sequel to Regeneration, the historical novel about shellshocked WWI soldiers being treated at a psychiatric hospital.
This was harder for me to get into at first than Regeneration, because the early section concentrates on Billy Prior, the bisexual soldier with class issues, now reassigned to domestic intelligence due to asthma. Prior is interesting but chilly, hard to like. He’s maintaining a girlfriend and having discreet encounters with men on the side; he’s working for an agency devoted to persecuting and jailing pacifists, deserters, and gay and lesbian people, when he’s bisexual himself and has pacifist friends. The first section, which is about Prior’s inner conflicts as embodied in various figures from his low-class past who are now unjustly jailed or on the run from the war he’s trying to return to, is well-done but, for me, more intellectually than emotionally engaging.
To my relief, the novel then returns to Rivers, the psychiatrist, who is once again treating both Prior and Siegfried Sassoon, who has been sent back to England after being wounded again. It’s amazing from there out - suspenseful, and satisfying on every level. All the therapy scenes, and the way that people’s psychological secrets were unraveled, were beautifully done - clever but not reductionist.
There were a number of plot surprises, which I will put under a cut.
I was not expecting Prior to have another personality. I’m not sure how realistically that was handled, but artistically, it was great: dramatic without being cheesy.
I was surprised that Rivers didn’t lead Prior to see the connection between his boyhood lessons that masturbation leads to death, and his shame at his war-related nightmares being wet dreams. Prior thinks it means he’s turned on by violence and death, and he doesn’t seem to pick up on the alternate interpretation, that he was taught to link ejaculation with death.
I was fascinated by Rivers’ traumatic blockage of visual memory, and by the scene - almost a duel - in which he and Prior trade interpretations of its cause. I hope that comes up again in the last book.
I highly recommend this novel. All else aside, it’s one of the best uses of a repeated motif - the eye - I’ve ever encountered. Warning for horrific wartime violence, and the aftermath of that violence.
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/966628.html. Comment here or there.
This was harder for me to get into at first than Regeneration, because the early section concentrates on Billy Prior, the bisexual soldier with class issues, now reassigned to domestic intelligence due to asthma. Prior is interesting but chilly, hard to like. He’s maintaining a girlfriend and having discreet encounters with men on the side; he’s working for an agency devoted to persecuting and jailing pacifists, deserters, and gay and lesbian people, when he’s bisexual himself and has pacifist friends. The first section, which is about Prior’s inner conflicts as embodied in various figures from his low-class past who are now unjustly jailed or on the run from the war he’s trying to return to, is well-done but, for me, more intellectually than emotionally engaging.
To my relief, the novel then returns to Rivers, the psychiatrist, who is once again treating both Prior and Siegfried Sassoon, who has been sent back to England after being wounded again. It’s amazing from there out - suspenseful, and satisfying on every level. All the therapy scenes, and the way that people’s psychological secrets were unraveled, were beautifully done - clever but not reductionist.
There were a number of plot surprises, which I will put under a cut.
I was not expecting Prior to have another personality. I’m not sure how realistically that was handled, but artistically, it was great: dramatic without being cheesy.
I was surprised that Rivers didn’t lead Prior to see the connection between his boyhood lessons that masturbation leads to death, and his shame at his war-related nightmares being wet dreams. Prior thinks it means he’s turned on by violence and death, and he doesn’t seem to pick up on the alternate interpretation, that he was taught to link ejaculation with death.
I was fascinated by Rivers’ traumatic blockage of visual memory, and by the scene - almost a duel - in which he and Prior trade interpretations of its cause. I hope that comes up again in the last book.
I highly recommend this novel. All else aside, it’s one of the best uses of a repeated motif - the eye - I’ve ever encountered. Warning for horrific wartime violence, and the aftermath of that violence.
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/966628.html. Comment here or there.