The Allegations

Mark Lawson

Picador, £16.99

Review by Mark Smith

THERE’S horror at the heart of Mark Lawson’s novel The Allegations and it begins with the sound of a doorbell and police officers on the doorstep. Has there been an accident? A car crash? Has someone been killed? Not quite. The policeman is reciting an official sentence that he’s used many times before: “I am arresting you on suspicion of a sexual offence.”

A short while later, the man who’s been arrested, a wealthy TV historian called Ned Marriott, is in a police cell, which he notices is about the size of the downstairs loo in one of his homes. “Being imprisoned for the first time was like an initial sight of New York,” he observes, “a series of moments known from movies.” The stark toilet in the corner. The viewing panel. The steel door.

The horror of this unfamiliar situation is well realised, although Lawson’s book rests on a more sophisticated idea: what if, in this post-Savile world in which the police investigate “historic” sex crimes, one of those accused is himself a historian? Suddenly, a man schooled in sources and evidence has to look at the history of himself, however difficult that is. “The average man, woman, can’t fill in a questionnaire on who did what to whom on a random night when Margaret Thatcher was leader of the opposition,” says Marriott.

In the novel’s other main strand, the professor’s colleague, Tom Pimm, faces a similar problem although he has been accused of different offences: bullying and insubordination. Like Marriott, he realises that apparently benign moments in his life are suddenly open to interpretation, misinterpretation and accusation, although he believes he’s guilty of nothing more than the odd sarcastic comment. What’s more, he believes he and Marriott are victims of hysteria. “Some countries have typhoid,” says Pimm. “We have moral fever.”

The context of all of this is obvious. After the Savile affair, famous people have been investigated over allegations of sexual offences from the past. The accusations of bullying against Pimm also have a real precedent in Thomas Docherty, a professor at the University of Warwick who was suspended in 2014 after being accused, like Pimm, of sarcastic comments and “inappropriate sighing”.

There is also a precedent in Mark Lawson himself who stepped down from the Radio 4 programme Front Row two years ago after he was accused of bullying. At the time, Lawson said there were editorial arguments and nothing more, and in the afterword of his novel says he was a victim of institutional group-think and a surreal, sub-legal process. However, he also specifically says that The Allegations is not a roman a clef and that the narrative and characters are fictional.

That may be so, but it’s clear Lawson’s experiences have seeped into the novel and affected its atmosphere as well as its central warning that the pendulum has swung too far from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent”. Looking at recent events, that’s a perfectly fair point although as the novel progresses it’s hard to shake the concern that the story is told almost entirely from the accused’s point of view – Professor Marriott’s “victims”/accusers do appear but only briefly.

Perhaps this was Lawson’s intention: to keep us uncertain whether Pimm and Marriott are guilty, and perhaps their guilt or innocence is irrelevant anyway. What matters more is Lawson’s central contention that we have moved away from properly testing guilt or innocence and have ended up unquestioningly accepting accusations. In the words of Marriot, because Jimmy Savile dodged a bullet, the police are now shooting people at random.

Lawson presents this argument in a subtle and thoughtful novel, although he does end it with the terribly downbeat, but perfectly reasonable, suggestion that the situation is unlikely to change as long as the internet exists. The complexity and subtlety needed to properly assess an accusation of misbehaviour, he suggests, will always be drowned out by the simplicity and stupidity of Twitter. In the last chapter, for example, Professor Marriott tries to explain his case, but as he does so a succession of hashtags builds up on a screen behind him starting with #thisguyshistory and ending with one simple word, repeated over and over again: #history.