Review
Paul Auster moves away from the insular to the delight of Peter Ferry
- Invisible
- Faber and Faber
Unseen
Those familiar with Auster will know that he writes about writing, and this novel is formed around the fragmented memoir penned by our protagonist, the Austere Adam Walker.
In 1967 Walker is a student at Columbia University, New York, where he happens to meet a visiting Professor, the explosive, impulsive, demonic Rudolf Born. This typically Austerian chance encounter leads the fearless yet naïve 20 year old Walker into dark, unnerving situations that haunt our tortured hero until his final written word.
Auster is widely regarded as the kingpin of postmodern play, revelling in repeatedly luring his trusting reader down blind alleys before, in a turn of the page, pulling the rug out from underneath them whilst giving a knowing wink. Invisible is by no means a grand departure from what has made Auster his name in contemporary fiction, but it is less an indulgent project that can quite simply be called an unashamed page turner, a thriller rooted in the volatile atmosphere of 1967 America. Although most of the action takes place in this key period of American history, the characters reveal their experiences of this time 38 years later through their penned personal accounts of that era. It is this that makes Invisible a novel of distance, the characters sharing a sense of detachment from their past and quite possibly from their present selves, due in part to the suffering caused by the absence of important people in their lives.
In his previous two novels, Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark, Auster’s protagonists have been restricted to the inner landscape of their own minds, playing out unreliable memories within the confines of four faceless walls. Undoubtedly it is the move away from the insular that makes Invisible the success that it is. Auster’s flowing sentences take us from New York to Paris and later to the remote gothic island in the Caribbean where the reader is left with a final image that resonates far beyond the closing of the book, an image that hints to a possible move away from now tired inward-looking psychological self examinations to possible future desires to write on more pressing socio-political matters.
