the reader of books

Hm. So, I didn't like this one quite as much as Regeneration. Prior has started suffering from periods of black out, which he finds somewhat upsetting, and he meets with Dr. Rivers to determine the cause. In other news, Siegfried Sassoon pops in for a hot one for no other reason than to give Dr. Rivers the opportunity to have a dramatic moral crisis that remains unresolved.

There were many references to real current events - Prior's old neighbor, whom he is investigating, has been convicted of conspiracy to murder the prime minister and others (inspired by the real-life Poison Plot); she also has sheltered conscientious objectors, who are almost universally detested. There is an whole subplot dealing with Robert Ross staging a private performance of Oscar Wilde's play, Salome, and Maude Allan's libel suit against Pemberton Billing, and an ominous list of 47,000 British susceptible to blackmail by the Germans.