Last night at 9pm I sat on my bed and opened the first page of Man In The Dark, I put it down nearly three hours and two cups of tea later. A quick enough read so I thought I’d throw a quick review together.

I’ve read quite a few of Paul Auster’s books by now, though not his last two books, Travels in the Sciptorium and the Brooklyn Follies. So by point of comparison I have in the past really enjoyed Moon Palace,  his New York Trilogy and the more recent Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions. Man in the Dark probably won’t be sitting quite so high in my estimation .

The principal character of the book, August Brill, is also our narrator. An insomniac, he spends his night trying to distract his mind from people and events in his past, including the recent death of his wife. To this end he contrives a story involving a parallel America where a second civil war rages, with a protagonist called Owen Brick. The entirety of the novel unfolds in the sleepless mind of August, on his back, literally in the dark.

Like other Auster stories the narrative of Brill’s invented story develops a reflexivity, here leading him back to his own story and his own thoughts. There is however nothing particularly playful or engaging about this reflexivity, unlike say the notebooks in Oracle Night. The story within the story seems weak I felt, the fact of it’s being Brill’s distraction from his own story, made it a distraction to my own reading of the book itself. When we know that the story is only a distraction we don’t expect it do deliver much. Unless, and it wouldn’t have been beyond an Auster story, Brick, Brill’s invention walked through the door of his bedroom.

It didn’t seem quite as “meta” as other narrative twists Auster has conjured up.  I think I might have been happier to read the story of Brill’s Brick, but Brick is a hollow character and the Russian doll story that Brill places him is discarded quite easily by Brill.

The story of Brill, alluded to during the book and avoided by him because it will keep him awake, becomes the central concern of the last third of the novel, principally in conversation with his granddaughter Katya, also sleepless after the loss of her ex-boyfriend in Iraq. For this last third I found myself counting down the page numbers a little. Brill’s story just isn’t that interesting: the ins and outs of his marriage, his daughter Miriam, his granddaughter and her sense of loss and guilt. It all just felt a bit bloodless and nothing struck me as “passionate and shocking” or celebratory of “ordinary joys” to quote the back cover blurb. The brief stories concerning war seem a little cheaply sketched and unconnected to Brill. I was annoyed to have tor read an entire description of the plot of Ozu’s film Tokyo Story, a film I haven’t seen but have intended to. I’ll watch that myself thank you very much.

The narrative, being played out in Brill’s head, is the most banal I’ve read in an Auster book yet. August Brill is a morose unengaging character, and his creation Brick, a magician thrown into a war is empty.

• My over all response: Meh..

• Read instead: The New York Trilogy

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