The Eye in the Door

The Eye in the Door
	First edition
Author	Pat Barker
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Regeneration Trilogy
Genre	War novel
Publisher	Viking Press
Publication date	1993
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Preceded by	Regeneration
Followed by	The Ghost Road

The Eye in the Door is a novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1993, and forming the second part of the Regeneration trilogy.

The Eye in the Door is set in London, beginning in mid-April 1918, and continues the interwoven stories of Dr William Rivers, Billy Prior, and Siegfried Sassoon begun in Regeneration. It ends some time before the conclusion of the First World War later the same year. The third part of the trilogy, The Ghost Road, continues the story.

Whereas Regeneration is an anomalous, but not unique, mixture of fact and fiction, The Eye in the Door acknowledges real events, including the campaign against homosexuals being waged that year by right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing, and the conviction of activist Alice Wheeldon for attempted assassination of Prime Minister David Lloyd George, here subsumed with the character named Beatrice Roper, but the whole remains consistently within the realm of fiction. This grants Barker more freedom to explore her characters and their actions, the descriptions of which might be considered libellous if attributed to real people. A major theme of the book, Prior's intense and indiscriminate bisexuality, is effectively contrasted with Rivers's tepid asexuality and Sassoon's pure homosexuality. Greater fictional scope also permits a deeper treatment of the psychological, political and professional life of the central character, Billy Prior.

Real people who appear in the Regeneration trilogy[edit]

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v t e The Guardian's Guardian Fiction Prize
1965–1970	Crumb Borne by Clive Barry (1965) The Dear Green Place by Archie Hind (1966) Winter Journey by Eva Figes (1967) A Song and a Dance by P. J. Kavanagh (1968) Poor Lazarus by Maurice Leitch (1969) When Did You Last See your Father? by Margaret Blount (1970)
1971–1980	The Big Chapel by Thomas Kilroy (1971) G by John Berger (1972) In the Country of the Skin by Peter Redgrove (1973) The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge (1974) Friends and Romans by Sylvia Clayton (1975) Falstaff by Robert Nye (1976) The Condition of Muzak by Michael Moorcock (1977) The Murderer by Roy Heath (1978) Night in Tunisia by Neil Jordan and The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera (1979) A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr (1980)
1981–1990	Kepler by John Banville (1981) Where I Used to Play on the Green by Glyn Hughes (1982) Waterland by Graham Swift (1983) Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard (1984) Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985) Continent by Jim Crace (1986) The Levels by Peter Benson (1987) Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann (1988) Rosehill: Portrait from a Midlands City by Carol Lake (1989) Shape-Shifter by Pauline Melville (1990)
1991–1998	The Devil's Own Work by Alan Judd (1991) Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (1992) The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker (1993) Debatable Land by Candia McWilliam (1994) Heart's Journey in Winter by James Buchan (1995) Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane (1996) Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (1997) Trumpet by Jackie Kay (1998)