Darkness fills the days and nights of August

Man in the Dark By Paul Auster Faber, 180pp. £14.99AND STILL THE horror of a world gone out of control continues to dominate the fiction of US writer Paul Auster. Or perhaps fiction is no longer accurate? Auster, who began his career under the aloof influence of French experimentalism, became increasingly engaged in logging highly readable, conversational musings about the ways in which our lives wriggle on the throw of a dice, or a split second.

Chance and Dickensian coincidence were his early themes, now he looks to the despair of reality while always offering some thread of hope.

August Brill, the narrator of Man in the Dark, is an Everyman of sorts - waiting in the dark, the dark that is the now. Brill is a widower living in Vermont for the past year with Miriam, his divorced academic daughter and Katya, her only child, a grown woman who is currently mourning the shocking execution of her boyfriend. This is a society haunted by the destruction of the twin towers and events in Iraq. But Auster pushes the apocalyptic dimension further, his America is at war with itself, here is a country tearing at its own throat. Brill is a book reviewer, although Auster carries the gag no further than that, and is recovering from a car accident. He is 72 and can no longer sleep. By day he watches movies with Katya, a film student. His nights are filled with telling stories to himself; these tales are complicated and terrifying - but then, so is society.

But for all the darkness and the shadow of mortality, Man in the Dark is not as bleak as The Brooklyn Follies (2005), with its stark opening sentence: "I was looking for a quiet place to die." In that novel, the narrator Nathan, who has cancer, is divorced and estranged from his only daughter. By chance, he meets up with his nephew, to whom he was once very close. There is buoyancy at foot and yet the narrative concludes about an hour before the first plane crashes into the tower.

This new book is similar yet different, more obviously intellectual, more refined. "I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness," reports August. "Bright light, then darkness. Sun pouring down from all corners of the sky, followed by the black of night, the silent stars, the wind stirring in the branches." August thinks in a literary way, he expresses himself as one would expect from a person whose life has been dominated by reading books.

The family have had its sorrows but nothing compares with the horrific memory of witnessing the execution of Katya's boyfriend, Titus, of whom August recalls, "His parents named him after Rembrandt's son, the little boy of the painting, the golden-haired child in the red hat, the daydreaming pupil puzzling over his lessons, the little boy who turned into a man ravaged by illness and who died in his twenties, just as Katya's Titus did . . . I think about Titus's death often, the horrifying story of that death, the images of that death, the pulverizing consequences of that death on my grieving granddaughter, but I don't want to go there now, I can't go there now, I have to push it as far away from me as possible . . . I begin to remember the story I started last night . . ."

This is what he does. Night after night, August lies in the dark unable to sleep, making up stories. The stories are wilful inventions, intended to protect him from the reality around him. "They might not add up to much, but as long as I'm inside them, they prevent me from thinking about the things I would prefer to forget." It all seems a bit vague, even random, but Auster draws the reader into August's night-time vigil because the narrator's voice is so convincing. As he lies in bed incapable of sleep, his mind is busy. He prepares a story as if he is gathering the means to make a meal. "Put a sleeping man in a hole, and then see what happens when he wakes and tries to crawl out."

The man in the dark of the title refers to August and it also refers to the sleeping man invented by his imagination, the man in the hole, a character named Owen Brick. With all the care of a playwright shaping his stage directions, August focuses on Brick, noting that he has no idea how he has come to be in the hole. Nor does he know why he is wearing a uniform. Owen Brick "cannot recall having served in an army or fought in a war at any time in his life". Brick then becomes involved in an elaborately surreal plot worthy of Kafka. Auster enters the chaotic logic of the subconscious. Brick is faced with having to make a deal - he has to murder a man in order to survive. His victim is August Brill, retired book critic - and narrator.

It is that type of book, a maverick nightmare narrative that swings and shifts between the absurd and realism. Late in the novel, Katya, who is living with her own guilt as well as her grieving, asks Brill "Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?" His reply is simple, "Because it is, that's all. It just is." Brill, his daughter and granddaughter inhabit a shared shelter.

For all the grief and fear, as well as the weight of despair, the relentlessness of memory, Auster - who has dedicated the book to the great Israeli writer David Grossman and his family, including his soldier son who was killed on the Israeli-Lebanese border in 2006 - arrives at a level of hope, or at least of controlled optimism. It is a thoughtful, reflective book about sorrow and loss, particularly the injustice of loss. It is also an interesting, quasi-philosophical performance, more meditation than novel. August Brill is Everyman, attempting to express what it is like to live in a time of horror and, above all, to understand it.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times