Eye spy an improvement (The Eye in the Door - Pat Barker)

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	The Eye in the Door - Pat Barker
Date:	20/07/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Focuses on more interesting characters

Disadvantages: Doesn't always successfully address the issues it raises

After the disappointment of Regeneration (see my earlier review), I was unsure whether to read The Eye in the Door - part two of Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy. Eventually, though, curiosity and my stubborn nature got the better of me and I started to read it.

To get the motivation to read it, I did a deal myself: I decided to give it 50 pages. If I wasn't enjoying it by then, I'd give it up as a bad job. I didn't need 50 pages; I probably got more enjoyment from the first 30 pages of this than I did from the whole of Regeneration.

The Eye in the Door follows the lives of a number of young men in London during World War One who, for a number of reasons, are not on active duty in France. It merges real events and characters with fictional ones, examining the psychological problems facing endured by wounded soldiers and conscientious objectors.

The significant improvement in The Eye in the Door is undoubtedly helped by the decision to move away from the dull, stultifying atmosphere of the mental hospital at Craiglockhart and re-locate the action in 1918 London. This enables to novel to pain a much broader picture and bring in a far wider range of perspectives on the war. One of the (many) problems with Regeneration was that it was so self-contained; you got no feeling of a wider community; no sense of how the war was affecting the rest of the country. Ultimately, this had a crippling effect on the pace of the narrative and led to a deeply dissatisfying experience. By setting the book in a London becoming increasingly discontent with the way the war is being conducted, that sense of perspective is there and events take on a new meaning. They seem more real and more relevant to the lives of the characters and this in turn generates more interest for the reader.

The Eye in the Door also benefits from focusing predominantly on Billy Prior - easily the most interesting character in Regeneration - and showing us how the war has affected his outlook and attitude. Ironically (since he is fictional), Prior always seemed the most real and genuine of the characters in Regeneration; the one readers were most likely to identify with. Contrast this with the dull drabness that infected the pages of Regeneration every time Dr W H Rivers or Siegfried Sassoon (real people) cropped up and you can immediately see why The Eye in the Door works better.

Prior allows Barker to take the plot in whatever direction she sees fit. She is no longer constrained by the facts of Rivers' or Sassoon's lives and can make Prior do or say whatever she needs him to be. As such, he becomes an interesting study of the way the mind reacts to the horrors of war and the coping mechanisms that thousands of soldiers had to develop to allow them to survive life in the trenches.

Yet, whilst it's a huge improvement, it's still a long way from being perfect. Unfortunately, the characters of Rivers and (to a lesser extent) Sassoon feature and once again, there is a noticeable slowing of pace when they re-enter the plot. There's just something about them that is stultifyingly dull and stuffy. They seem to suck the life out of the narrative every time they appear; leaving you hoping that their appearances will be brief.

There's a definite improvement in the readability of The Eye in the Door. I found Regeneration very hard going - partly because the plot was not engaging me, but also because Barker's normally readable style seemed to desert her. Her usually interesting, engaging, descriptive style seemed to give way to turgid prose which made it difficult to want to carry on reading. This has changed with The Eye in the Door and Barker has rediscovered her ability to weave a good tale. Whilst she still has a tendency to write in fairly lengthy chunks, for the most part you don't mind. Reading is no longer a chore but rather mostly becomes a pleasure once more.

The psychological elements of the plot work better too. When the patients were locked away in Craiglockhart, it was difficult to understand how their various fears and problems stopped them living a normal life. Since there was no context, I found myself getting frustrated with them and felt like telling them to pull themselves together. Here, the backdrop of "normal" society and "normal" behaviour provides some context which helps make it obvious how the experiences of front line soldiers have severely circumscribed their lives and had such a profound effect on their outlook.

Barker manages to merge the factual events with fiction more successfully in this book. In Regeneration, it was obvious which bits were real (the boring bits) and which bits weren't (the interesting bits). In The Eye in the Door, the integration is much stronger. Real events provide some sort of background and structure to the book, whilst fictional events are carefully and seamlessly woven into them to add greater interest and colour to the plot.

For an anti-war book, you still don't get the full sense of the horrors caused by World War One, of the terrible injuries and death toll. There are some references to this, but nowhere near enough. You sometimes end up with the mistaken impression that the war was relatively insignificant for those left at home and that for the most part, London society carried on pretty much as it always did. If you didn't know better, you might think the war was a minor inconvenience, not the life-changing (or even life-ending) experience it really was.

On one level, perhaps I'm being a little unfair, since the novel is not necessarily intended to be read as an anti-war book. Yet The Eye in the Door does raise these (though the use of conscientious objectors as characters), but never sufficiently addresses them.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that The Eye in the Door is the greatest book ever written. However, I did enjoy it far more than the first book in the trilogy and got enough out of it to persuade me to round things off and read the final book - The Ghost Road.

Basic Information
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The Eye in the Door
Pat Barker
Penguin, 2008
ISBN: 978-0141030944

© Copyright SWSt 2009

Summary: A big improvement on Regeneration