The Letter Bearer: A Novel
The Letter Bearer tells a story reminiscent of The English Patient, about a World War Two motorcycle courier whose bike runs over a mine, leaving him blast-deafened, his memory gone and his eyesight, curiously, transformed so that he sees everything in shades of red. Taken up by a band of deserters, whose Medical Officer tells him he’s dying, the Rider treks through the western desert with this motley crew, trying to piece together his identity from the letters in his post bag.
The novel is insightful in its development of character and the interaction of the small group of fellow-travellers amongst whom the Rider finds himself. The weak and spiteful ex-Captain Brinkhurst and Lance-Corporal Swann (wittily named because, for all his vengefulness and brutality, he is our hero’s guide to maturity, just as Proust’s Swann is to his narrator) are acutely observed, although the Rider himself is, perforce, a vaguer character.
It is marred, however, in two contrasting ways – by the richness of its language and the thinness of the storyline. Lacking any sub-plots, it recounts nothing more than the men’s dreary and demoralising desert wanderings and becomes, not merely boring, but depressing in its narrow scope. While some of the descriptions of the desert landscape are powerful, and the technical detail about tanks is very impressive, the style conveys a general sense of a writer addicted to his thesaurus and also to present participles. This makes for a dense and somewhat wearing read, requiring a level of effort not really justified by the content.
The ending is both bleak and ironic. As it becomes increasingly clear that the Rider is not dying after all, the restoration of his memory makes him, and the reader, suspect that death might have been his best option.
