Book of the Month - By Kathleen Thorne

Man in the Dark
By Paul Auster
Published by Faber and Faber
Price €14.99

The protagonist of this novel by Paul Auster is August Brill, a 60-year-old book reviewer who is living in his daughter's apartment while recovering from a car crash.

He has difficulty getting to sleep and so uses his imagination to invent a story that would help him relax and fall asleep.

This invented story creates a sort of alternative world where the US is embroiled in a civil war and where the characters there have never heard of 9/11 or the war in Iraq. A number of people decide to end the war by hijacking a man – Owen Brick – from the 'real world', to kill August Brill and thereby end the civil war which Brill's imagination has created.

August Brill's grand-daughter, Katya, is in the apartment with him. Her boyfriend, Titus, has been cruelly murdered in Iraq. They watch films – one of which is the tape of Titus's beheading by Iraqi guerillas. Katya's life has ground to a standstill because she believes that she is responsible for Titus's death. She broke off their relationship and believes that her action was the catalyst that sent Titus to Iraq.

This is a short book – 180 pages – but within its confines we are told many stories from the real world where imagination plays its part or could play a part.

In the end we are left wondering what is real and what is imagined -one thing is sure- imagination can have a profound effect on whatever reality we inhabit or have inhabited. The novel ends with a quote from a book-in-progress – "The weird world rolls on." Auster certainly creates a weird world in Man in the Dark. But the question remains, is it any more weird than the real world itself?