The audio book of Man in The Dark was read by author Paul Auster and he does a brilliant job of bringing this odd story to life. His voice has a soft cadence and a deliberate touch which perfectly matches the slow paced story of a seventy-two year old man who can’t quit get to sleep.
As our tale opens, we find our hero alone in the dark, staring at the ceiling he can’t see, surrounded by an emptiness that he can’t quite feel. To keep himself occupied, he tells himself a story.
A man wakes up in a perfectly round, twelve foot wide hole in the ground. He is a magician, mainly for children’s birthday parties, and yet he finds himself in this hole wearing some kind of uniform with Corporal stripes on the sleeves. He hears the sounds of munitions nearby-he knows that he must be in some kind of war zone. Soon a man comes by and tosses him a rope, which he can barely climb up since he is not in great shape. He is told that he is a Corporate in the army of the Independent States of America and that the Second Civil War is in full bloom and he has a mission to complete.
The old man in the room lets his thoughts wander to the other people living in the house with him, his daughter and his grand daughter. He thinks about the varied and sundry griefs that the three people living in the house have suffered. His leg aches, his mind aches, he misses his dearly departed. He ponders on the structure of his story and how he will deal with this man he has trapped in another world. He still can’t sleep, so he goes back to the story.
The magician is given a small amount of money and told to walk twelve miles into town. Once there he finds that it cost twenty dollars for a meal consisting of four eggs. There are very few options when it comes to food and shelter and his money will not last him long. He wonders what he is doing here.
And so the story goes, hopping from the old man in his room during one long night, and the poor magician who is trapped in circumstances beyond his control for several weeks. There is an element of Kilgore Trout here, as the magician is told that he has to kill someone-and that someone turns out to a person from the ‘real’ world-the old man in the bed.
There are several asides about classic movies, being a writer, and loss and suffering. The man in the dark room was a book critic and he was a fan of Chekhov, well, who isn’t? He also spends time watching classic movies like The Bicycle Thief with his granddaughter and they discuss the finer points of using inanimate objects in films.
Man In The Dark is a short novel, it was only four discs in the audio version. But it is superbly written, each word finds it’s proper place and it is a near textbook example of show, don’t tell-dispite the fact that much of the book is the old man telling stories to himself or to his grand daughter.
And yet it was an emotionally cold book. For all it’s near perfection of technique, none of the countless tragedies serve anything other than shock value. The deaths are so foreshadowed that they mean nothing when they are finally revealed in all their gory details.
Here the show, don’t tell falls flat. The man talks about his sorrow and his grief, but we see none of it. He is a cold and impotent figure who only wants to get a good night’s sleep.
As a writer I found it a very interesting read. Paul Auster has written a great book filled with perfectly crafted sentences and artfully arranged transitions. But he couldn’t help showing off and bringing to our attention the fact that he has written a near perfect book with brilliantly crafted sentences. This pseudo-sci-fi book wants to be Literature, and I’m not completely sure that it makes the cut.
Man in The Dark was well worth the read, but the duel reality plot is abandoned too soon. I kept waiting for the magician’s grief stricken wife to make an appearance and finish the mission her husband didn’t have the nerve to complete.
