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Man in the Dark

Night thoughts in an unhappy home

Paul Auster
Faber, 180pp, £11.99,

John de Falbe

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Man in the Dark by Paul Auster

August Brill is a widower whose leg has been smashed by a car. He lies awake at night in the house he shares with his daughter, Miriam, and his granddaughter, Katya, in Vermont. Katya’s boyfriend, Titus, has been murdered, and Miriam ‘has slept alone for the past five years’. It is an unhappy, sleepless household, and Brill tells himself a story to manage the darkness until morning, when he will resume watching old movies with Katya.

The story is about a man called Brick, who goes to bed with his wife in New York ‘and when I wake up I’m lying in a hole in the middle of goddamned nowhere’. He is in military uniform. Another soldier helps him out, but even so it is very hard for him to work out what is happening. He is ‘stumbling around in the dark … hoping to find … some scrap of information that will help him understand a little more about the bewildering country he’s landed in’. It turns out he is in an America where the Twin Towers are still standing, which is not at war with Iraq, but is instead in the middle of an atrocious civil war with 13 million casualties so far. Worse still, he has been selected to go back to New York and kill the man who is mysteriously scripting the catastrophe — ‘everything that happens or is about to happen is in his head’. This heroic action, he is informed, will cost him his life, but he will be killed if he refuses to do it.

As Brill’s mind switches in the darkness between his Kafkaesque story to the real traumas that afflict his family, Auster deftly lays out permutations of the theme that dominates his work: how people deal with the intervention of seemingly random destructive events — as if this, more than anything, is what defines their humanity. There is a brisk jocularity to his prose which has the peculiar effect of making strange or surreal events seem plausible, while ordinary things seem oddly forced. The bizarre things that happen to Brick — whose name is the only solid thing about his world — are no more questionable than what happens to Gregor Samsa when he wakes up to find that he is a beetle. This makes the banality of Brill’s straightforward descriptions of watching videos with Katya disconcerting.