RANDOM HARVEST by James Hilton

Note: I am not a paid reviewer, and I have purchased this title to read for my personal enjoyment.

On the eve of World War 2, Charles Ranier, a somewhat reclusive Captain of English industry, strikes up a friendship with young Harrison, and takes him on as personal secretary. Harrison proves therapeutic, helping Ranier to reminisce and thereby fill in a memory gap from the time he was wounded by a shell blast in France during World War 1 until he recalled his pre-wound identity three years later. Mr. Hilton deals with shell-shock not in the sense of catatonic stares, but as a mystery that unravels in non-sequential flashbacks to the time period of Ranier’s memory gap. The story recovers Ranier’s memories with a Downton Abbey-esque flourish of portrayals of boorish rich, the family’s wise butler and stately mansion, later contrasted with Ranier’s amnesiac wanderings through the seedy side of low-brow theater life. An angel of mercy assists Ranier in evading recapture by the sanitarium as he experiences the drunken optimism of World War 1 Armistice Day, life in her bawdry, map-cap theater troupe, and indispensable aid from an eccentric parson. Ranier’s “dark days” of Bohemian wanderings are rendered with a deft tone as we are given a keen sense of his mental fragility and insecurities, while at the same time he exhibits a gentlemanly dignity that is very much at odds with his surroundings. In the end, Ranier’s mystery is solved with a memorable turn of events.