"Eye in the Door" by Pat Barker

An audio book. The eye in the door is the eye painted on prison doors around the spy-hole.

Males Prior and Manning have sex. They realise they both have the same therapist, Bridges. Prior is interviewing pacifists.

It's the Great War, London. At a trial reported in the papers, the German's Black book is mentioned. It has 37,000 names of blackmailable British people. Manning works for munitions. He's married with kids, and socialises with gays. Prior and he have one-off sex. Prior was born into the working class. He knows pacifists, socialists, strikers. He works for munitions too. His father used to hit his mother. His girlfriend Sarah sometimes visits. Prior has periods that he can't recall - 20 minutes to 3 hours. He tries to gather evidence to help acquit a pacifist women who's been stitched up by Spragg, who later wants revenge.

Manning and Prior both have the same therapist, Bridges, who had a childhood stutter, and who, after a presumed trauma at 5, could no longer recall visually. Rivers visits Sassoon, another of his patients. He can be an inspirational, heroic soldier, then a war poet in the course of a few hours, each persona affecting the other. Prior goes into fugue states - an alternative persona. The persona turns up to an appointment with Bridges saying he knows all about Prior. The persona has betrayed an old friend.

Modes of denial, class divisions (how sex dissolves them) and the effect of war on sex are themes. The language can be lush "A freshening breeze blowing across the Serpentine fumbled the roses ... Glutinous yellow sunlight slanting between the trees cast their shadows across the water."

Other reviews

• Jonathan Coe (we can see both the strengths and weaknesses of Barker's approach. While respecting the shrewdness of the insight, it's difficult to shake off the feeling that the issues here are simply being given a airing)
• Dinah Birch (It is a novel of formidable energy and integrity, and it confirms Barker’s status as one of the most rewarding writers to have emerged in recent years. )
• kirkusreviews (Barker ingeniously meshes Prior's private demons with his public sleuthing in a fast-moving narrative that dazzles with its profusion of memorable cameos and encounters. Regeneration was dominated by the all too real Craiglockhart hospital and therapeutic practice; this work is dominated by the wholly fictional, marvelously complex Prior and is more satisfying novelistically.)