Humanity through an academic prism

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Professor Andersen's NightBy Dag Solstad, translated by Agnes Scott Langeland Harvill Secker, 154pp. £15.99

WHAT WOULD YOU do if you saw a murder being committed right in front of you? Would you intervene? Would you report it? Would you debate the motives? Would you simply do nothing, aside from using the experience as a way of assessing your own morality and the ethical response such an event may incite in you?

The Norwegian writer Dag Solstad comes closer than most of us to exploring the differences between the ways in which we like to think we react and the way we actually do. The eponymous central character of this calmly relentless narrative, spanning two hectic months, has arrived at a state of passive acceptance. His life has been dominated by his engagement with literature. He is an academic. Once upon a time he was married. Now he is not. There are no children, only two nephews. It is Christmas Eve, and Prof Andersen attends to the rituals of the season.

Alone in his apartment, he admires his Christmas tree and looks forward to dinner. Central to his thoughts is a slight concern about the crispness of the crackling. There have been other minor irritants, such as the tendency of the tree to slouch awkwardly – and, of course, the electric lights had been tangled. But he managed. Everything is now ready, and all he has to do is change into his good clothes. Solstad looks on as the good professor sighs contentedly; the reader is unsurprised to discover that “Professor Andersen felt at peace, tonight”. Although the professor does not believe in anything, he does like to indulge in the festivities. He is a man who likes to think deeply about most things.

With a few generously broad strokes, Solstad, author of Novel 11, Book 18(2001, English translation 2008), has eased us into another journey of the mind. Yet whereas Bjørn Hansen, the central character of the earlier novel, had made a fundamental decision that changed his life and caused him to uproot, Andersen lives in a tight little shell of routine. His marriage ended so long ago that he gives it no thought. Instead, he inhabits a present in which he mulls over the literature he teaches and acknowledges that he is getting older. And he wonders, Is that it? Is this the life he will have? He is now 55, no longer young but not quite old enough to be overly worried about his age.

Solstad is regarded as one of Norway’s great writers; his preoccupation is not so much story and plot as the metaphysical study of solitude. His characters tend to exist on the margins: in Novel 11, Book 18 Hansen allowed himself to throw in his lot with his mistress when she decided to move back to her small town. He left his wife and son. When the relationship with this daring, glamorous woman collapsed, and she was revealed as ageing and desperate, he retreated to a solitary existence and realised that he barely knew his son.

The professor is different. His self is defined by routine. His way of surviving Christmas is simple: he can listen to carols being sung on the radio and go for walks between resting on his neatly made bed before preparing to accept his various social invitations. He also talks to himself, at length. It passes the time: “I am a non-believer, but belong to a Christian culture, and without a touch of irony I can let the Christmas spirit fill my mind.”

Solstad creates a convincing portrait of an individual who is so consummately lonely that he no longer even recognises the state. Prof Andersen is barely alive; his complacency and cerebral approach to existence sustain him. But this is shattered when by chance he glances through his window and witnesses a shocking event. Most people would react, but, for the professor, action has always come a poor second to analysis. By analysing what he has seen, the relevance of the crime is overshadowed by the moral debate it initiates.

His hosts for the St Stephen’s Night celebration are two successful professionals who have remained married to each other and whose youngest child still lives with them. Their five guests are divorced and remarried – or, in the case of the professor, single. These seven are united by their past. The sequence becomes repetitive, and at times edges towards tedium, but Solstad uses it as a way of assisting the professor to further distance himself from responsibility. He says nothing, then sets off to visit a friend in the hope of discussing what he should do. Yet again the professor takes refuge in intellectual discussion.

Ultimately, he comes face to face with the killer in a sushi bar. Solstad extracts the maximum farce from the situation. A man who may or may not have committed murder only days earlier is now finding fault with the way a university professor eats his food. The dialogue, with its random curtness, appears to be drawing the plot to quite a finale – or is it?

This is a subversive little novel in which morality becomes a football. Whereas Novel 11, Book 18pivots on a decision that defies everything, Professor Andersen's Nightconfronts morality, justice and compromise. Dag Solstad, who is frequently compared, with some justification, to Chekhov, has written a moral, almost allegorical novel in which he is far less interested in heroics than he is in humanity.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times. Her new book, Ordinary Dogs, is published by Faber and Faber