The Harlequin, by Nina Allen - book review

An unlikeable character leads First World War nostalgia tale

A strange, compelling, and somewhat disturbing read, Nina Allen’s novella tells the story of Beaumont, a young man who returns from the First World War, where he’d been an ambulance driver, to a wintry London where he is plagued by evil memories. He moves back in with his sister in the old family house in Lambeth. He has a fiancée he doesn’t love, and soon acquires a mistress he doesn’t respect. He tracks down the girlfriend of a soldier who died in his ambulance, following the dying man’s last request, and feels strangely drawn to her.

Spread between these three women, none of whom knows of the others, Beaumont tries to make a new life for himself, but is swayed as much by caprice as by purpose. He cultivates literary ambitions; and some of the narrative is in the form of essays he writes recalling the war. The harlequin – both in the form of a sinister china figurine owned by the mistress, and in the character of Vladek, a mysterious stranger who saved Beaumont’s life in France and then turns up without explanation in England – runs throughout the story, a sort of emblem of the intertwining of good and evil.

There’s a haunting sense of a pattern, just out of reach, throughout the whole novel. Beaumont is not an entirely likeable character and becomes less so as the story progresses; yet he is always interesting, and the sense that he is a helpless plaything of fate, rather than an agent, prevents the reader judging him too harshly. The intensity of the descriptions and the strong sense of place reminded me of Iris Murdoch at times. Beautifully written, evocative of a spiritually desolate post-war England, it’s both unsettling and irresistibly readable. Only 120 pages, but it punches well above its weight.

Sandstone Press £7.99