The Book of Illusions
Paul Auster Faber and Faber, 322pp, £16.99
ISBN 0571212131
God is dead, pronounced the French poet Gerard de Nerval in 1854, scooping Nietzsche by nearly 30 years, "Heaven is empty - /Weep, children, weep. You no longer have a father". Nerval's God is certainly absent from the outstanding new novel by Paul Auster, which subtly depicts an arbitrary, secular universe. But in The Book of Illusions, it is not children who mourn, but fathers, who grieve for their dead offspring.
When David Zimmer's wife and two young sons are killed in a freak plane crash, he is separated not only from his family, but also temporarily from his senses. Zimmer is an academic and he and his wife had always struggled for money. Now, standing amid the rubble of his life, he finds himself embodying an excruciating paradox: through insurance pay-outs and compensation, Zimmer is now financially secure for the rest of his life.
He resigns his academic post and, with no thought for how he might break his fall, topples willingly into a nihilistic abyss. Auster's prose - more ragged, less machined than before - describes how Zimmer is sucked into a vortex of alcoholism, loneliness and solipsistic rage. Unable to commit suicide and certain that he is poisoning himself with booze, he decides that he might, just, save himself if he can find something to occupy his free-falling mind.
On a whim, he elects to write a book about the debonair Hector Mann, a modestly successful silent movie star who disappeared suddenly in 1929, shortly after completing his 12th film. The book's appearance triggers a letter from someone purporting to be Hector's wife, saying that he is ailing but alive. Zimmer is drawn, reluctantly at first, into Hector's bizarre story, with its uncanny resemblances to his own.
With its enigmatic missives and seren-dipitous encounters, sudden deaths and unexpected legacies, the reader is back in familiar Auster territory. Perhaps more than any of his previous works, this novel is propelled along by synchronicity and chance. Random cataclysms tear through his characters' lives, showing us over and over that the membrane separating madness from sanity and life from death is gossamer-thin and can shred at any moment. We must all contend, Zimmer declares, with "the mutinous unpredictability of matter".
Despite enduring rigorously godless lives, Auster's characters are hungry for transcendence. As Zimmer puts it, "we all want to believe in impossible things". They are guilty and ashamed, and cling to the hope that they can be redeemed in their own hearts (and, by extension, in the eyes of a God who demonstrably does not exist) by hard, repetitive physical work combined with self-abnegation. The book makes clear that this longing for faith's tranquillising power is born of mortality - our own, and that of those whom we care about. Loss haunts much of Auster's work, but The Book of Illusions, more than anything he has written, forces its readers to stare at the sun.
True horror, Freud once remarked, comes not from the unknown, but from the familiar made strange: Auster is good at exposing the terrors latent in the everyday, even if he still struggles to convey human passion. There are many writers, too, more adept at delineating relationships between men and women.
After the disappointing Hand to Mouth and the disastrous Timbuktu, many of his admirers were left wondering not only if Auster had lost his touch, but whether the apparent quality of The New York Trilogy or The Music of Chance had been itself illusory. Perhaps these books were nothing more than a series of clever literary tricks.
The Book of Illusions buries any anxiety and then hurls the spade at the doubters. Auster has always tried to synthesise metaphysical playfulness with human seriousness, but never before has it been given such coherent exposition. This is, put simply, his best book.
Toby Mundy is publisher and managing director of Atlantic Books
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