Identity. Name games. Mysterious letters. Distressed, desperate characters. A detective story, where no one is guilty but everyone is the victim of a crime. Life perhaps. We’ve entered familiar Auster territory.

But even though the last word in this novel is hope, if I was looking for a redemptive moment, the novel failed me or I failed the novel.

Three murders and two suicides, if we are to believe the narrator. If this is a book as the blurb claims, shows "the redemptive power of art and laughter" then I must be a sad git.

Grief hangs over this book like evil weather. Auster becomes so immersed in his world of lost silent movie comedies, that one cries out for colour. It is exhausting to read a novel without any colour The narrator is an academic, and analyses art, in this case silent movies, until it lies dead as any corpse. Worse still we are forced to analyse movies that don’t interest or entertain us. Reel by reel. Again and again he gives us shadow and movement. When we finally enter Hector Mann’s self made forested utopia in New Mexico there is "no moon" and the trees are "great hulks of shadow stirring in the wind."

And yet. And yet. Auster’s sheer enormous talent keeps us going. Its clear Auster is fascinated by ideas, the concepts of self and re-invention. Auster’s narrator David Zimmer is a broken (and still breaking) man. Auster reveals the peculiarly cruel process of grief - a kind of death without dying. Zimmer has lost everything that gave his life meaning. All he has left is writing. It’s no coincidence Zimmer is born in the same year (1947) as his creator Auster. Auster has said, “writing is no longer an act of free will for me, it’s a matter of survival.” Zimmer likewise turns to writing for survival. Even Zimmer’s tone of voice, the way he says thing, seems eerily close to the careful cadences of Auster’s voice.

Auster can’t help but toy with dates and fates. Zimmer loses his family in an aircraft crash at the age of 38; Hector Mann is 38 when he loses his only child. His son is stung by a bee. An airborne death. A senseless death. Children it would seem, in Auster’s ‘The Book Of Illusions’ have an incredibly high mortality rate. Zimmer and Mann are both suicidal and both cannot quite let go of living.

But it’s dangerous to walk through the looking glass of Auster’s imagination, and find fragmented images of the author everywhere. Instead of a novel we find a book of ideas. Nothing wrong in that but I don’t think this is Auster’s intention here. This is fiction after all, so the characters must stand alone; otherwise it’s not a book of illusions but a box of tricks.

Early in the novel Zimmer is forced to attend a party given by former colleagues, Auster gives us a searing picture of a man burning with grief. The ordinary world is trivial. Zimmer tries to cloud it out with alcohol, silence. But he cannot be invisible, like Hector Mann’s comic creation in ‘Mr Nobody.’ Zimmer is rude to the guests, denies his dead wife’s best friend any share of his sorrow. “I live the life that’s possible for me. It doesn’t include going to parties at your house.” It’s a genuinely moving scene, far superior to the later dramatics when Alma Grund, the daughter of Hector Mann’s cameraman, pulls a gun on the ranting Zimmer.

Later in the book when Zimmer takes a plane trip with Alma, he breaks down again, for the last time. Auster shows us a man who’s hit bottom, but in the breaking discovers he will survive: “the worst of what happened to me was suddenly over.” In ‘Book Of illusions’ when we hear, or imagine we’re hearing, Auster speak, we sit up and listen. This may be Auster’s greatest book to date as some would have it, but like all illusions it fails rapidly in the mind. And leaves a peculiar craving. Let’s hope I don’t fail his next book.

Mark Gallacher was born in 1967, the youngest of seven children, and grew up in Girvan, a small town on the west coast of Scotland. The sea at his front door, the Ayrshire hills at the back. His father died in a traffic accident when he was five years old. He graduated from Dundee College of Technology and moved to England and worked in Manchester for a number of years. He returned to Scotland and lived in Edinburgh. In 1999, crazy with love, he moved to Denmark to live with his Danish girlfriend. They have one son. They are still crazy. His pamphlet of poetry, ‘More Than A Dedication’ was published by Envoi Poets Publication - “profoundly moving” - Chapman Magazine; “haunting poems that deserve to be read and re-read”- New Hope International. To read Mark's story, 'Grace Williams' on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.