Review Eye In The Door

Eye In The Door, Pat Barker [ "Eye in the Door" by Pat Barker (Penguin 2008), first published by Viking Press in 1993. Second part to the Regeneration Trilogy that deals with the psychological impact of the First World War on British Officers, and its relation with the history of psychological treatments for "shell shock". ]

This is the second part of Pat Barker’s excellent Trilogy of First World War Novels, although each can be read as separate novels. The group read the first novel “Regeneration” two years ago (Tanya’s review ). The first novel was about various officers being cured by pioneering humane psychologist Dr Rivers. The officers included the still famous war poets Sassoon (not Vidal) and Owen, although I cannot tell you a single line. The part that I remember well is the differences in treatment for Shell Shock. Dr Rivers gives humane treatment to the Officer class, while the Private Soldier working class get electrocuted by the sinister Dr Yealland. I was motivated enough to look at the reality of Dr Yealland after reading the book and it is very interesting. He apparently worked by intimidation and guilt, coupled with painful electric shocks as a last resort. Unlike other medical officers who also used these techniques on soldiers, Dr Y made a point of lying about how successful he was in a book published after the war. Few soldiers were cured by Dr Y, and only a few were returned to “active service”.

Also memorable in “Regeneration” is that Siegfried Sassoon is forced to be treated as “mad”. In 1917 he published a statement questioning the political conduct of the war, and demanding in the name of the soldiers, that the government decide on the aims of the war and start to negotiate peace. The military hierarchy could not punish a successful experienced front line officer so he was declared mad and sent to Craiglockhart in Edinburgh and the care of Dr Rivers.

The “Eye in the Door” continues Dr River’s case book of treating shell shock, and expands into the problems of the people who bravely protested against the war. The title refers to the spy hole in the prison doors of the conscientious objectors. In prison slang this is known as the “Judas Hole”, honest I had to look it up. Without giving anything away, the central narrative is the betrayal of a conscientious objector.

Billy Prior a “temporary gentleman” is the focus of this novel. He exists between two worlds, the artisan Manchester working class roots of his gather, and the social climbing obsessions of his mother. Dr Rivers finds a seed in the conflicted childhood home that grows under the enormous pressure of the industrialised slaughterhouse of the trenches in the First World War, into a serious mental illness. It appears soldiers deal with war trauma by partitioning the experience into a semi-independent separate self.

The degree that this happens with Billy Prior seems fantastic. He finds angry notes in his coat pockets from his more omnipotent self, angry that his cigars have been thrown away. Is this really possible? No idea.

This novel sheds light on the world of First World War pacifists. Beatty Roper is very sympathetically drawn as a grassroots humanitarian, suffragette and socialist in working class Salford. Her pacifism stems from a desire to defend her community, even as it turns its popular jingoism against her. She moves from the claustrophobic boarder up shop in ironically named Hope Street, to the prison cell with the painted “eye in the door” that haunts Prior’s dreams.

There is wry humour in the description of the mechanics of the war economy and the hysterical nationalism that accompanied it. Billy Prior describes the Ministry of Munitions for whom he spies:

“The Ministry of Munitions was housed in the Hotel Metropole. The reception desk, now guarded by armed police, had once been manned by smooth-faced young men, trained not to 100k surprised when the sixth couple in succession turned out to be called Smith, or when prosperous-looking gentlemen, entertaining their curiously unprosperous-looking nephews, requested a double room. No such innocent frolics now, Prior thought, crossing the foyer. Goodness how the moral tone had declined.”

The eccentric right wing fanatic Pemberton Billing’s attempt to stir up the country with a John Buchan style fantasy about a German “Black Book” that was holding 47,000 of the British elite to ransom, is a darkly comic sub plot to the novel. Allegedly the Germans had the names of high ranking “sexual perverts” in which Billing included gay men and lesbians. The actress Maud Allan was forced to sue. At the trial the case was turned into a farce as the judge was accused of being in the book. Lord Alfred Douglas being true to form gave testimony in support of Billing.

Pat Barker sheds an interesting light on the home front during the First World War. The research appears convincing, although the Jekyll and Hyde nature of some cases of war neurosis seems exaggerated. The novel confirms the well-worn beliefs that we attach to the Great War from a new history of psychology perspective.

An exemption to this is the evolving psychological narrative strand in the novel, in which Dr Rivers tries to advice the military on how war neurosis can be avoided, short of the obvious. His experience with Sassoon’s mania and depressive episodes, is that the problem comes when the alternate personalities of warrior and human being meet. Sassoon is not the pacifist of legend, but a protester against the particular conduct of this particular war. A rational position that paradoxically does not lead to mental health.

Incidentally the strangest of First World War British society is more bizarre than a novelist would dare to invoke, found this when looking at Dr Y:

“Some authors even observed a decrease in admissions to mental hospitals and interpreted this as evidence for the invigorating powers of warfare. According to the 4th September 1915 ‘Lancet’: It is not the great tragedies of life that sap the forces of the brain and wreck the psychic organism. On the contrary, it is small worries, the deadly monotony of a narrow and circumscribed existence, the dull drab of a life without joy and barren of an achievement, the self-centred anaemic consciousness, it is these experiences that weaken and diminish personality and so leave it a prey to inherited predispositions or to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. “

[Shell shock Revisited: An Examination of the Case Records of the National Hospital in London. Stefanie Caroline Linden and Edgar Jones, October 2014]

When the world has gone mad, the premium of ordinary madness is diminished?