Harvey, in excavating a love triangle, explores the strange elasticity of time. Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio

The odds are powerfully stacked against Samantha Harvey’s third novel, “Dear Thief” (Atavist): sometimes you feel that the author has enjoyed building a trembling wall of them. Her novel takes the form of a long letter, written by a woman in middle age, to her childhood friend, and so most of the narration languishes in the corridor of the second-person singular. The friend (the “thief” of the book’s title) disappeared a decade and a half ago, and so the narrator does much reminiscing, with the danger that the novel drifts fairly often into the pressureless zones of retrospect. And the narrator’s lost friend was a “character,” a large personality remembered, with loathing and love, for her enigmatic singularity: so, most perilously, Harvey’s novel must work to convince us that this vague “you” of the narrator’s letter deserves her extravagant reputation and the time spent recalling her. The book is sometimes precious or whimsical, and can be frustratingly diaphanous. It has nerves of silk; it could probably do with more robustness, and a bit of comedy.

But “Dear Thief” is a beautiful, tentative success, a novel with no interest in conformity. Harvey’s book is propelled not by the usual structures of novel writing but by the quality of its author’s mind, by the luminousness of her prose, and by an ardent innocence of speculation that is rare in contemporary fiction. We follow Harvey’s narrator, as she pushes her way through her novel-size letter, because we can see that she has somewhere to go, and because we sense that she is trying to figure out exact answers to wide questions. It is a strange and exhilarating journey, unlike anything I have recently encountered.

You can get an idea of the novel’s rich peculiarity from its first sentence, which will strike some readers as fey or arch, but which its narrator (who remains nameless) offers quite matter-of-factly: “In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life.” The narrator replies to her old friend’s remembered question by telling us about the night her grandmother died, during the long, hot English summer of 1976, when the narrator was twenty-four. Within a paragraph or two, the reader senses an attentive purity in the narrator’s prose. She seems alert to everything: the “feathered breaths” of her grandmother, how her “exhales were smooth and liquid, which seems to me now the surest sign of a life’s exit—when the act of giving away air is easier than that of accepting it”; the way the dying woman’s skin has “flattened a tone—and I mean it this way, like a piece of music gone off-key.” The scene and the location are somewhat magical. The grandmother’s house is by the Thames, very east in the city, near the Isle of Dogs, and not far from the point at which the river, wide now, becomes the sea—“a thousand pale horses frothing at the bit.” To pass the time, the narrator wanders down to the river, where she finds a collection of bones on the shore; when she returns, she discovers, as she expected to, that her grandmother has died, and feels this end to be calm and right. She suffers no grief, because “life as I’d always known it shows itself now as only the negative space made by a much vaster reality.” She thinks of her grandmother, “fundamental and as still as a root,” and it seems senseless to say that she is dead, “just as senseless as it is to say I myself am alive.” In this respect, the narrator says, she has seen through the gauze of this life.

It’s a risky way to begin a novel, to throw us head first into death and sententiousness, metaphysics and nameless characters (the grandmother has no further role in the book). But Harvey’s novel proceeds in this spirit of continual lawlessness. The “gauze of this life” is just the kind of phrase, we learn, that the narrator’s friend would use—challenging, glamorously pretentious, annoying, at once acute and vague. The two women grew up together in the English countryside, in Shropshire. The narrator’s friend is named Nina, though she is here nicknamed Butterfly, because, one supposes, she is lovely, and comes and goes in apparently random flights.

Butterfly is one of those people whose role on earth is to be talked about. As the narrator gradually reveals, her strange friend stood out in the England of their nineteen-sixties childhood (“this mannered land that was too small for you”): a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who was brought to England as a baby; an androgynous beauty, with a strong nose and narrow hips; languorous, dangerous, self-absorbed, brilliant, mystical (she liked quoting from the Upanishads). When she was younger, Butterfly showed little interest in men, and would respond to their overtures with a placid “Thank you, no,” and the lighting of a cigarette. When they mocked her and called her a “dyke,” she would dumbfoundingly quote Lorca at them: “Poetry was your only response to anything they did or said and you used it as wastefully as somebody emptying a cartridge into grey sky. The poems would leave indents of silence, like hammer marks on metal.” She had an air of “magnificent poverty.” She “looked out of place almost anywhere substantial.” She was mercurial. One day, she might seem pale and plain, “and we leave you alone in the veil of smoke that makes you look like a sullen bride, bored at her own wedding table.” On another, she has painted her eyelids purple or orange, or is wearing a man’s purple trousers. For her twenty-first birthday, she was given a cream-colored shawl, and seems not to have taken it off for the next decade. When the narrator last saw her friend, in 1986, she was still wearing it, but it was dirty and torn in one place, so that the white of Butterfly’s shoulder came through, “like some fallen rampart,” betraying “a loss of dignity far greater than if you had stood naked in public.”

People who get talked about, who are remembered as “figures,” tend to be memorable either for some large achievement or for scandalously doing nothing very much—for just being. Butterfly falls into the second category, and Harvey, again setting herself a difficult task, skillfully captures the friend’s enraging passivity. Was she selfish? No, the narrator says; she might have been fundamentally selfless, “by which I mean somebody who lies low like a card in a pack, until the cards are dealt.” There are cards that are good news and cards that are bad news, but Butterfly was neither intrinsically good nor bad. “She is just offered up, and played or not.”

“Think of it as one less thing to worry about.” Facebook

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It is this terrible “neutrality” to which the narrator returns again and again, and which provides the novel’s catalyst. The narrator, who is around fifty and is writing this letter in 2001 and 2002, remembers a woman who could never quite be grasped—she would disappear and emerge years later, and give no coherent account of where she had been. She left England, or so it appears, in 1973, when she was twenty-one, and turned up at the narrator’s house nine years later, asking if she could stay for a month or two. The narrator was now living with a husband, Nicolas, and a young son, Teddy. (After a spell in London, they had moved back to the countryside that she grew up in.) They take Butterfly in, of course, and she stays for three years.

Butterfly’s failure to explain or apologize is characteristic. Less expected, perhaps, are the needle marks on her arm. Butterfly has become a committed, if discreetly functional, drug-taker. And something else happens during her three-year visit, something Harvey has been slyly preparing, with various hints, a vague sense of unease, and the slow revelation of the narrator’s possessive anger. Butterfly worms her way into her friend’s marriage and breaks it up. The passive-aggressive insinuation culminates in a scene in Spain, when the narrator catches her friend and her husband having sex, a rare moment of narrative conventionality in the book (which is not necessarily the weaker for it). Earlier, less conventionally, in a passage of subtle indirection, the narrator first realized what was afoot. Butterfly is walking with her friend; she is wearing Nicolas’s cast-off trousers, and the narrator is surprised by how well they fit her. Always ready with an opinion, Butterfly announces, in her airy and pretentious way, that religions have trinities because “a triangle is the holiest and most elegant of things; with two lines you can only create two lines, but with three you can create a shape. That is why three is a transformative number.” It is the moment when the narrator, always weirdly tolerant of her friend, first feels threatened and outmaneuvered: “You were going to work your way into my marriage and you were going to call its new three-way shape holy, and I, pinned like a snared bird to one corner of a triangle, would have to watch it happen.” (Harvey has said that her novel is indebted to Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” also about a love triangle, and also written as a letter to the person responsible for the marital destruction.)