Ambivalent reflections in a wartime hall of mirrors

FictionOsewoudt is small, insignificant, blond, smooth-skinned, looks a bit like a girl and, thanks to his high-pitched voice, sounds like one too.

His life did not appear all that promising, even before his mother killed his father.

Sent off to live with his uncle, he becomes a plaything of sorts for Ria, his unattractive cousin, seven years Osewoudt's senior, and as ill luck, combined with his passivity would have it, he marries her.

Destined to a mere existence running her family's tobacco shop, Osewoudt is not complaining, but he is not happy. It is wartime and Holland is occupied by the Germans. Life drags on for Osewoudt; his wife is a shrew, and his mother, who lives with them, is insane. Everything changes with the arrival of Dorbeck, who is his double, only dark-haired and flamboyant. The theme may not be all that new, but the great post-war Dutch writer WF Hermans, author of the classic Beyond Sleep (1966), takes it and spins a deadly serious, quasi-comic surrealist yarn, brilliantly well translated by Ina Rilke, who ensures no nuance is lost, keeping every reader as bewildered as the Everyman anti-hero.

Kafka meets Walter Mitty with the pace of an Ionesco play, as Osewoudt, who is keen on judo, falls under the spell of the enigmatic Dorbeck. It all begins with rolls of film entrusted by Dorbeck. Osewoudt tries to have it developed but this proves difficult. "And so Osewoudt decided to have a go himself. He'd developed the odd film or two back at school. In the cellar he found a red lamp . . . all he needed was the chemicals." Suddenly he seems to have acquired a subversive impulse. "The celluloid was very stiff; it kept slipping from his fingers, coiling around him like a snake." No images appear. This is only the beginning. Before long, the mild-mannered Osewoudt is behaving like a spy with romantic tendencies and has found a use for his boyhood judo. The story is thriller-like, fuelled by bizarre happenings and red herrings, all very much now-you-see-or-perhaps-you-don't-or-perhaps-it-never-happened-at-all.

THE GENIUS OF the narrative lies in its ambivalence, particularly the ambivalence surrounding Dorbeck - is he a hero or a martyr, or a double-dealing killer? More importantly, does he exist at all? The answer is important - but it is not as central to the book as it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer. This novel is a hall of mirrors, and is also very funny, largely due to the many comic exchanges, increasingly as the novel unfolds and the real issue becomes not so much Dorbeck but the general perception of Osewoudt: is he a spy, or a killer, or merely a madman with delusions.

"You need a disguise," suggests one of the characters to Osewoudt, "couldn't you grow a moustache?" "No" he says, "I don't have a moustache." The adviser answers, "Oh, sorry. Do you want my glasses?" The conspirators huddle in a doorway, "looking around them in case anyone was watching. Moorlag took his glasses off. Osewoudt put them on. Straight lines were now curved and misty, the colours of pavements, buildings, roofs and sky running together like splashes of watercolour paint." Later, when Osewoudt appears to have become a hardened killer, a female spy with whom he meets up remarks to him of their victim: "She was very pretty. Nice figure. Or didn't you notice?"

The Darkroom of Damocles was published in 1958, the year before Grass's The Tin Drum. Both are responses to the war. Hermans was a singular individual. He was born in 1921 and was a physical geographer and made effective use of this aspect of his life in Beyond Sleep, in which an aspiring geologist goes ill-advisedly in search of a meteorite. While working as a university lecturer, Hermans began his literary career and was an established writer, initially a poet, who also happened to be a professional academic. He soon added plays and prose as well as essays - he was an opinionated commentator. Sharp, cynical and witty observation, and unexpected asides, inform his work.

In 1973, at 52, he left Holland and settled in Paris. In 1949, at 28, he published his first novel, The Tears of Acacias. It has a wartime setting - occupied Amsterdam - and also looks to the liberation. In tone it is almost satirical; it is that quality of "almost" that makes Hermans so special. That combined with his directness.

LAST YEAR SAW the 40th anniversary of the publication of Beyond Sleep. As expected, it was a triumph, as new readers responded to the humour and candour and that peculiarly Hermans use of laconic understatement. Even at moments of intense personal crisis, a Hermans character will still notice something, he will ponder and consider.

Under arrest and facing possible death, Osewoudt continues meeting weird and offbeat individuals, some of whom offer strange insights. This is a daring, difficult, often astonishing and always entertaining work from a European master. First published almost 50 years ago, it remains fresh, unsettling, and astute. Perhaps Dorbeck is the devil, or maybe Osewoudt is, or perhaps Hermans is really exploring the nature of truth itself? Read this book, overseen by Kafka, and then try to forget it. You won't.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Darkroom of DamoclesBy WF Hermans, translated by Ina Rilke Harvill Secker, 390pp. £17.99