Tag Archives: World War 1

The Eye in the Door by Pat Barker

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The Eye in the Door is the second book of The Regeneration Trilogy, and it was the winner of the 1993 Guardian Prize for Fiction. The action has moved from Scotland to England and the storyline centres around Billy Prior, who had been one of Dr. Rivers’s patients at Craiglockhart Hospital in Edinburgh. Billy is still suffering from black-outs which are happening more and more frequently and are lasting for longer. He has no idea what he is doing during his ‘lost’ hours.

It is now 1918 and Billy (or Prior as Dr. Rivers had addressed him) is now out of the hospital and is working for Intelligence. The work involves tracking down deserters so they can be convicted and jailed.

As it is set in 1918 I suppose that class has to come into it and Billy Prior is that very unusual thing – a working class officer. Dr. Rivers had called the rest of his officer patients by their first names.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Regeneration, I don’t know if it is just because the first book in the trilogy had a lot about Sassoon, Owen and war poetry in it, which I have always been interested in. Sassoon does crop up again towards the end of the book, having been shot in the head by his own NCO who had mistaken him for a German.

Certainly, Pat Barker has again incorporated real events such as Alice Wheeldon’s trial into the story, but a large amount of the book is about Billy Prior’s bisexuality and I don’t find that very interesting. So, it was illegal, but it wasn’t anything new.

Anyway, I’ll be reading the last part of the trilogy The Ghost Road soon.

Greenmantle by John Buchan

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Greenmantle is the sequel to The 39 Steps but there is much more to this book than the previous one. Set in 1915, Richard Hannay is recuperating at Furling country house in Hampshire after having been wounded at the Battle of Loos. He is expecting to be given command of his own battalion but when he gets a telegram from the Foreign Office, he ends up working undercover with others.

Sir Walter Bullivant has already lost his son on the same mission. When Harry Bullivant died he had 10 bullets in him but managed to say one word ‘Kasredin’ before he died. With just a few more clues Richard Hannay takes up the trail.

Going undercover as a South African Boer who hates the English, Hannay pretends to be on the side of the Germans, who are planning to stir up revolt amongst the Muslims. He is aided by three others, Peter Pienaar a South African, John S. Blenkiron an American and Sandy Arbuthnot a Scot.

First published in 1916, this book has a much more convoluted storyline than The 39 Steps. As you would expect from an adventure/spy novel which is almost 100 years old, it contains rampant racism, homophobia and sexism but this doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the story.

As you can imagine, Greenmantle was a huge bestseller during the First World War.

Given the state of the world today, nothing much seems to have changed in all that time, except we aren’t fighting Germans now.

The writer Allan Massie said ‘Maybe Greenmantle should be a set-book for our security services.’

It could only help – they need something.

An enjoyable adventure story.