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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: November 24, 2004 at 4:51 am by Eve Tushnet

2004-11-24T04:51:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

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HOME IS THE HUNTER: I recently finished re-reading Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, the first two books in Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy. (I remember the third book, The Ghost Road, as being pretty awful, thus have no immediate plans to re-read it. If someone out there would like to confirm or correct this impression, please drop me a line.) Here are some admittedly overpersonal and quite scattered thoughts about the two books.

Regeneration is mostly about the psychiatrist who “treats” the poet, decorated veteran, and war protester Siegfried Sassoon. His protest has been defined as illness, and his return to duty is the desired cure. The Eye in the Door shifts focus to a minor character from the first book: Billy Prior, also a patient of the same psychiatrist, who works for the Ministry of Munitions sniffing out and turning in people who hide deserting soldiers. Both books are really good, almost excellent. They don’t hesitate to be cruel, which I respect. I preferred the second book, partly because Prior’s aggression is preferable to Sassoon’s over-explicit proclamations, and partly for a reason to be discussed at the end of this post.

Both books are striking in that they’re anti-war novels that never visit the actual site of battle, and whose principal characters declare that they are not pacifists. Unless I’m forgetting something, neither Rivers (the psychiatrist) nor Sassoon ever consciously comes to believe that “nothing could be worth this.” (Prior doesn’t really think in those terms, anyway.) This made the books more powerful for me–the ethical shifts and ambivalences are entrapping, where I think a rigid ethical certainty might be too easy for the reader to reject. The books get a lot of their effects by having the characters explicitly deny those effects.

There are two main places where I thought the books were importantly deficient.

1. Politics, or the lack of politics. There’s no sense of why the war is happening, and no sense, even, that there should be some kind of non-pathological explanation. WWI happens, in these books, because old men want to kill young ones. First off, I want that to be presented rather than assumed. But also, I don’t rightly know how you stop mindless filicide; and there’s a strong stench of inevitability and an anti-political helplessness hanging over the books. (I wonder if the emphasis on humiliation contributes to this.)

Relatedly: These books have Enemies. Priests = always Bad with a capital B. Actual supporters of the war = always bad, probably sadistic. People with Unenlightened Views on homosexuality = always bad, probably cracked. Unless I’m forgetting something, there are no exceptions; and the latter two categories are related to two of the books’ key themes, so the absence of anything remotely resembling a non-caricatured other side is really striking.

Look, I know I react badly to the caricatured Bad People in part because I’m pretty darn sure that Barker and I disagree on a lot of things–political, moral, religious, prudential–and that if I were in one of her books either I or people I care deeply about would be among the Bad People. But whatever. This is the least important aspect of my problem (though, because people are self-centered, it’s probably not the aspect I feel least keenly).

I don’t believe in Bad People. I’m pretty sure that almost everyone suffers at some point from a crisis of conscience or of faith. I’m pretty sure that everyone has either reasons or a breaking point; and that if you write a character, you should be able to understand or forgive or imaginatively enter into one or the other of those two things. If you don’t, I think, you swerve into caricature and propaganda.

2. This second point is much smaller, and really only became noticeable in The Eye in the Door: The grimth is so unrelenting that even childhood is depicted as a series of oppressions, suppressed rages, and revenges. I understand that unity of tone could be considered a virtue (although I think Macbeth is much improved by the Porter; and, for that matter, think the Porter heightens the play’s horror rather than diluting it). But when you show me children, it is easier for me to believe the horrors if I also see them playing Knock Down Ginger, or conkers, or whatever. Depicting childhood (even an impoverished and screwed-up childhood) in the same palette used for trench warfare doesn’t work.

But. But. But. I was completely, thoroughly gripped by these books. Especially the second. It’s hard for me to be even vaguely objective about The Eye in the Door because it’s really about one of my all-consuming obsessions, divided loyalties. Complicity, bad conscience, “holding Yes and No together with one hand,” double-agentry and division within the self.

If those themes get to you the way they get to me, you absolutely should read these books.

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