The Letter Bearer

December 7, 2015
In Allison’s poetic first novel, which breathes fresh life into World War II fiction, an English rider is blown off his motorcycle in the North African desert, his only possession a mailbag. Badly wounded, with no memory and no identification on his person, he is eventually found by a group of deserters—an officer, a driver, and a medic, all British, and a Canadian tanker and an Italian POW—who take him in and see to his wounds. When his memory fails to return, the rider goes through the mailbag and begins reading letters in the hopes that one of them will jog his memory. Once spotted, the deserters decide to move on and head for possible safety in the Akhdar Mountains. Along the way, they acquire an abandoned American tank and are forced to contend with German patrols, hostile local tribesmen, Italian stragglers, and their own internecine conflicts. Amid it all, the rider, not trusted by his fellow travelers, fights to regain his memory and set a course for himself. The narrative is filled with harrowing confrontations and memorable scenes illustrating the follies of war, all punctuated by heart-shattering letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home. This novel is ultimately a stunning combination of muscular action and penetrating self-examination.

Starred review from October 15, 2015
A mysterious man tries to find himself while traversing a hellish landscape of war. Amnesia is a tried-and-true trope, so much so that it risks being a cliche: everyone from Hitchcock to Ishiguro and Modiano has used it in recent--beg pardon--memory. The reader may despair, then, on being thrust into a scenario involving an amnesiac motorcycle messenger who, having apparently been left for dead, battered and banged up nearly as badly as Laszlo de Almasy of English Patient fame, now finds himself among a band of deserters picking their way around the great armies clashing in the North African desert. Throw in some of the rarified, apocalyptic language of Cormac McCarthy ("A sudarium wrought in the sanguine and phlegmatic humours"; "Perhaps in this ruined state he will live out the last of his time, inanimate, a pedlar of gazes"), mix in some of the good-versus-evil dualism of Moby-Dick, and you have all the possibilities of a derivative hash. Yet, daringly, debut novelist Allison makes the story all his own. His rider--for so, until the penultimate page, is the protagonist known--is a man in search of self-recognition, looking for clues in the bag of letters he carries, but he is also keenly observant of the conflicts among nations and within the part-piratical, part-saintly band of brothers he's fallen in with. Some are named, and some of their names will soon appear on grave markers; others are simply tagged, such as the "dying man" the rider converses with (about, among other things, dog breeds) in the austere landscape of the Sahara, which is as much a character here as any of the human players. Allison's tale has an almost hypnotic inevitability that unfolds as the rider shifts his viewpoint from unknown past to an unknowable future in which "I shall become everything expected of me." Elegantly and exactingly written. A touch ponderous at times but oddly--beg pardon--unforgettable.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.