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.
Towards the end, the story settles on Brill and Katya rather than Brick, as the reader knew from the start that it must. Suddenly the real war in Iraq is invoked. This might be feeble or meretricious from a lesser author, but the parallel worlds of Auster’s conceit have by now suggested that whether America is at war with Iraq or itself, humans are primarily at war within themselves.
Deep inside himself [Brick] knows that he has been contaminated by his visit to the other world and that sooner or later everything will come to an end.
Yet even if this knowledge of a parallel world seems to unfit the ‘Man in the Dark’ for normal life, the stories that Brick, Brill and Katya tell themselves have an authority just by being thought, which will affect how they adapt themselves again to life. Brill says, ‘agonising as this mess can be, there’s poetry in it, too, as long as you can find the words to express it.’ But it is Auster’s assured handling of his images, as much as the economy of his language, that makes the redemption he offers persuasive.
Comments