MAN IN THE DARK
Paul Auster, Faber and Faber, US$22.60
American writer Paul Auster, master of deliciously inventive, self-reflective meta-fiction, has returned with his 12th novel Man in the Dark. The story takes place in the mind of August Brill, an old man who is recovering from a car accident and is lying in bed one night, unable to sleep. Between his tosses and turns he looks back over his life, trying to push thoughts of his wife’s recent death from his memory.
To distract himself, and to pass the minutes that slip by slowly as the floorboards creak, Brill composes a story in his head. In doing so, the reader enters a second narrative, a story within a story that takes place alongside Brill’s memories of his past, which slowly piece together to form a full picture of who he is, and what has happened to him and his family.
Owen Brick is the hero in Brill’s parallel world, a present-day America in which the war with Iraq never took place and the Twin Towers were not destroyed. Instead, the US is in the depths of a violent civil war, into which Brick is thrust as an unwitting soldier. From the outset, we discover our man has been given an impossible mission – to assassinate the person responsible for the war. In other words, the author himself.
Auster never lets you forget that it is the author who is God, and it is he who can giveth and taketh away. The correlation between Brill and the real author, Auster, are unavoidable. “It seems important that my character gets to know me a bit, to learn what kind of man he is up against, and now he has dipped into some of the books I have recommended, we’ve finally started to establish a bond,” thinks Brill.
At the same time, as Brick struggles to make sense of his reality, Brill wrestles with the aches and pains in his battered old body and plunges deeper into his emotional abyss. What happened between him and his wife throughout all those years of marriage? And why was his granddaughter’s boyfriend horrifically murdered?
Expecting Auster to provide you with easy answers, or follow any of the conventional rules of storytelling, is a mistake. Suspending all your expectations is a good defence against this writer’s psychological manipulations. Sometimes, you will be rewarded, sometimes, what you desperately want to happen will not. Auster plays a cruel and fascinating game that forces you to think, and leaves you hungry for more.
Jenny Southan
