"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.)

"Regeneration" by Pat Barker (Viking Press, 1991)

An audio book. Capt Robert Graves (the poet) is trying to prevent Siegfried Sassoon (the poet) being court marshalled by getting him committed as being shell-shocked. Sassoon goes to a mental hospital for evaluation by Dr Rivers. It's a difficult case - Sassoon's won the Military Cross and could return to Cambridge where a job's lined up for him. He's corresponded with Bertrand Russell and has had a declaration read in Parliament.

Rivers' research involved the study of how nerves regenerate after being severed. He (and some of his patients) know about Freud. He knows that his patients think it unmanly to show fear, or display tenderness towards other men. We learn about his and patients' dreams and nightmares. Much of the novel's from Rivers' PoV, though several of his patients have their turn. It's an open hospital, not far from Edinburgh.

Wilfred Owen visits Sassoon. He edits the hospital magazine ("The Hydra") and has bought 5 copies of Sassoon's poetry book, which he asks Sassoon to sign.

There are various forms of repression, all defeated by nightmares. Many characters are repressing fear or homosexuality, finding madness a preferable option. Some patients try to analyse Rivers. Prior, prone to mutism, tells Rivers that his lack of revelation about himself is tantamount to mutism. Prior tries to maintain a relationship with a girl in Edinburgh, but his severe bouts of asthma complicate matters.

Rivers thinks that some patients' behaviour is a sane reaction to terrible experiences, though he suppresses this in his reports. He's given 3 weeks off because of stress. Here's the end of Ch 9 from his PoV - "the war that had promised so much in the way of manly activity had actually delivered feminine passivity and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down. In bed he switched off the light and opened the curtains. Rain, silvery in the moonlight, streaked the glass, blurring the vista of tennis courts and trees, gathering at the lower edge of the pane into a long puddle that bulged and overflowed. Somebody on the floor below screamed. Rivers pulled the curtains to and settled down to sleep, wishing not for the first time that he was young enough for France.".

During his break he's offered a tempting job in London. He stays with relatives on a chicken farm, a section packed with symbolism - ("one hen, weaker than the rest, was being picked on by the others. Its chest was bare of feathers and raw where they'd pecked at it. 'I'll have to get that one out and wring its neck,' Charles said. 'Can't you just isolate her then put her back in?' 'No. Once they start they never stop.' They turned and walked back. Mctavish, the farm cat, battered tom, met them at the corner of the yard and preceded them across it. A noticeably morose cat, Mctavish, a defect of temperament Rivers attributed to his being perpetually surrounded by forbidden flesh. He was fond of Mctavish and slipped him titbits from his plate whenever he thought Bertha wasn't looking" ( Bertha's trying to fatten Rivers up). He visits an ex-patient in Alderborough (a section that doesn't really earning its keep). We learn that Rivers' dead father had been a speech therapist. One of his patients had been Dodgson, who'd gone with the Rivers family on a punting trip.

At his new job he witnesses shock treatment. He watches a patient recover the power of speech in one session, the superior doctor using threats bordering on torture and sadism. What will the consequences be? Ex-patients want to stay in touch with Rivers. He writes them letters and visits.

We learn that Rivers had a stutter and was seriously introverted as a young man. After trips to Pacific islands he'd vowed to turn over a new leaf. In fact, only his work at the hospital had gradually brought him out of himself. He thinks that Sassoon is one of the few patients who have influenced him - Rivers begins to think that the war is being unnecessarily prolonged. At the end of the book he writes a report that will send Sassoon back to war.

The concluding "author's notes" help us separate fact and fiction. Sassoon really did suggest the changes to Owen's poem that the novel recounts.

Other reviews

• Spark notes plot summary
• John Mullan