Mad Sisters of Esi, by Tashan Mehta

Sisters Laleh and Myung live deep inside the Whale of Babel, but can pass from this extraordinary, vast creature into other worlds. But Myung has a wanderlust to explore these worlds more fully and meet other people, which means abandoning her beloved sister. There's also the enigmatic legend of Great Wisa to make sense of... 

On another world, in another time, Magali Kilta and her adopted sister Wisa are strange in different ways. Magali glimpses moments of the past and future while Wisa can speak to animals and trees. These powers must be kept very secret on the island of Esi, as the locals are terrified of the forthcoming festival of madness, where other worlds and realities bleed into their own. Those suspected of early signs of insanity are hounded out of the community or even killed. 

Via ghosts, legends, dreams, and fragments of history and memory, we piece together how the two pairs of sisters are linked, and all they've been through and lost...

I've been entirely enchanted by this strange, rich and imaginative fantasy told on an epic scale. It's beautifully written and full of characters who feel real, for all they dwell in the most incredible, fantastic realms. These places are vivid and tangible, full of tastes and smells and textures.

There's plenty of suspense to keep the reader hooked. Myung visits an island called Ojda, not knowing (as we do) that her guide Blajine is plotting to kill her. In the years and months counting down to the festival of madness on Esi, there's an ever-growing threat of violence borne from the community's fear of insanity being infectious. As madness blooms across the island, things are especially tense - and strange. I couldn't put the book down.

There's plenty, too, on the way we are shaped by ghosts of the past and the stories we tell ourselves. At a critical junction, one pair of sisters is not reunited because one of them, having heard the full story, bitterly rejects the other, who then makes sense of why:

"I am the right person, just not the same person. It is what happens when you wait for someone to come back to you or you make a map to go somewhere you once loved: they change. Nothing is ever as you left it. ... She disappears. I want to follow her, but I know it won't help. I ache for her. Centuries of waiting and [one of the sisters, but I won't spoil which one] cannot greet me because it is not as she imagined it. Centuries of holding on to a ghost of herself, only to learn it was never going to be like it once was." (p. 389)

What really stays with me is the way time and experience bring perspective to so many of these characters, and to the reader. In the closing pages, the whole thing comes together so that we understand all the connections. It's at once satisfying and sad, the fragments knitting together to make sense of these different sisters, and the love and loss inside them.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi chronicles his exploration of a "labyrinth" of halls full of statues-with-meaning, the place liable to epic floods and the occasional albatross. Only one other living human shares this space - aptly named The Other - but there are the remains of 13 bodies, suggesting a history of travellers through this peculiar realm. And then there's someone else among them - and the tantalising prospect that Piranesi's own detailed journal entries are not telling the full story...

Ironically enough, I was captivated by this strange, beguiling, beautiful tale of a man trapped in a fantasy domain. As with Clarke's brilliant Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, the magical fancy is fused with the entirely mundane, so that even the most outlandish elements feel credible.

One particular joy is that we're sometimes ahead of our narrator, who can be slow to make sense of the evidence presented. When he scoffs at such ridiculousness as "Manchester" and "police stations", we know he's missed something important - and true. I think that then prompts us to read his findings extra carefully, sifting for additional clues. We become active participants in the tale.

It's difficult to say more without giving away some of the mystery - and if you've not read the novel, then stop now. 

I think it's brilliant that the ending is not about some lost eden, forever out of grasp. Instead, Piranesi - if he is still Piranesi - is helped by an amazing character to take charge of all that has happened, and then he helps others do the same. Among the literary and scholarly references, on page 165 there's mention of "Timey-Wimey: Steven Moffat [and] Blink", and there's the same satisfying intricacy and resolution. As with Blink, there's violence and loss, but what could so easily be (effective, moving) tragedy is in fact a joyous liberation. It's beautifully, deftly done - this whole puzzlebox of a book deceptively simple, and perfect.

The Loosening Skin, by Aliya Whiteley

One benefit of the Arthur C Clarke Award for best science-fiction novel of the year moving from April to July is that when the Dr asked what I might like for my birthday, I could direct her to the shortlist. The result, via my generous in-laws, was three of the six titles: Semiosis by Sue Burke, Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi and The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley. (The other three are Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee, The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag and Rosewater by Tade Thompson.)

Of these, I've only read work by Whiteley before. The Beauty (2014) is about a world without women and reads like walking through a nightmare, not least because the narrator is so passive. The Arrival of Missives (2016) is a similarly haunting tale, this time set in a village in the shadow of the First World War. Whiteley is brilliant at taking an outlandish, unsettling idea and playing it utterly credibly.

The Loosening Skin is set in the present day but in a world where humans moult. When, every seven years or so, they shed their skin, they also shed its associated love. At the start of the book, Rose is in a loving, tender relationship with a movie star she's also working for as a bodyguard. Then she sheds her skin and can no longer bear to be in the same room with him. But he's used to having whatever he wants and won't accept that.

As we follow this story, we explore the consequences of moulting. It doesn't just affect lovers - who know from their first kiss that they are doomed. When children moult, they no longer love their parents. This world is full of broken people, struggling with attachment, learning not to love so as to preserve something. Brilliantly, we're told humans have always been like this - which has a huge impact on history and culture. There can be no Miss Haversham in this reality, there can be no Last Tango in Halifax.

There's more than the moulting itself. There's a whole culture around the shed skins - displays of celebrity skins in the British Museum, an underground of illegal sales. Then there's the chance that there might be a cure, a way of preventing the moult - but, of course, at a terrible cost.

I got utterly caught up in this richly drawn, horrible world. It's such a disturbing idea and yet it feels so real. At one point, Rose talks us through her moults in turn, each one devastating. That tale-telling is itself part of a truly horrific episode that haunts the rest of the book. I found the novel haunting, and couldn't get it out of my head, but it's not the horrific moments that got me so much as the simple, everyday consequences that result from this one strange idea. There could easily be more stories set in the same world. I hope there are.

The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún vol 1, by Nagabe

The nice people at Gosh! recommended this when I said I was after something to intrigue the Lord of Chaos, in our efforts to get him to read for himself. I'd already picked up The Deep: Here Be Dragons - the graphic novel that led to the TV series he loves - and asked for something similarly gripping, intelligent and not about bickering heroes.

So, under wise instruction, I looked through a few things and settled on The Girl From the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún, with story and art by Nagabe, and translated by Adrienne Beck. The first instalment (there are, to date, four) looked suitably goth and strange to appeal to the Lord's mother, too, and I thought reading it front-to-back and right-to-left would grab his Lordship's attention. But I thought I'd better read it first.

A small girl lives in a house in the forest with a monstrous-looking but kindly guardian - who she cannot touch. The guardian, apparently a teacher, has contracted a curse that is passed on by contact. Anyone with this curse, or suspected of having it, is killed by the terrified, ordinary people on the other side of a cordon. So the girl really should know better than to wander off on her own...

It's a beguiling and beautifully told story, a lot of it told without words, and what dialogue there is minimal anyway. As a result, we must more carefully study the pictures - the comics equivalent of Scandinoir holding our attention because we have to follow the subtitles. The gentle wimsy of the girl and her relationship with the teacher - doing chores, burning a cake but trying to eat it anyway - plays off chillingly against the threat of the "insiders" who wish these two nice people dead.

From his Lordship's perspective, the main issue will be that - just as we're getting into the story - it ends on a bit of a hook. So I've used the excuse of his potential interest to order the next volume...

Geis - A Game Without Rules by Alexis Deacon

A Game Without Rules (2017) continues the beguiling story begun in Geis - A Matter of Life and Death (2016), the extraordinary, beautiful graphic novel by Alexis Deacon.

When the chief matriarch dies without an heir, a contest is held to find a new ruler for the island state. Fifty contestants - some of them the least likely competitors - then begin some peculiar and deadly games...

Page 81 of Geis - A Game Without Rules
by Alexis Deacon

I've followed Alexis' career for some time as we have a mutual friend (who introduced us, very briefly, late last year because I asked). His books for younger children - Slow Loris, I Am Henry Finch - have been favourites of the Lord of Chaos.

Geis is aimed at older readers and presents an absorbing, rich fantasy world full of strangeness and horror and magic. I meant to post here in praise of the first volume but only got so far as a tweet:

"Geis by Alexis Deacon is great: eerie, epic
fantasy like a fairy tale twisting wrong. Plus
people wear amusingly shaped hats."

The second volume is just as enthralling, full of the same dream-like disquiet and sudden shocking turns - and those excellent hats. The characters from the first book are caught up in games and plots they barely understand, and which not all of them survive. The violence is implied rather than shown, but the beautiful artwork and lightness of touch in the storytelling are underpinned by constant, real threat. A book that compels you to read on.

I eagerly anticipate the third volume, The Will That Shapes The World. You can see more artwork from Geis on Alexis Deacon's website.

Who are you calling clever-clever?

Due to a holiday plus some regular commuting in the last few weeks, I have read a few books for fun and not solely to steal from for work (I've also done that, too). To remind myself in ages to come and to break up my ongoing Doctor Who project I shall endeavour to blog my thoughts on these books. First off:

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
I’d meant to read this for some time but Steven’s accolade as one of Granta’s Young Writers To Stalk (sort of like Springwatch for typing) prompted me to get on with it. It’s exciting, smart and ridiculous (as I tweeted him), taking the high-concept wheeze of a man who’s memories are being eaten by the abstract idea of a shark, and then seeing what happens next.

“'This is so crazy I'm not even going to ask.'

'Probably for the best,' the doctor said. 'It's easier if you just accept it.' 

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts (2007), p. 317.

Mark Haddon calls the book “The bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The da Vinci Code” - on a genuine post-it note stuck rather than printed on the title page, itself an achingly trendy conceit. The book ought to so drip with its own clever-cleverness that I’d have given up early on. The 52-page interruption in the prose where the image of a shark composed of individual letters heads towards us as in a flickbook ought to take us right out of the adventure – as similar textual gimmickry did, I felt, with Philip Palmer's Debateable Space. I want – I love – to be lost in a story and resent the author waving from the margins.

But Steven contrives to make this sequence and the book as a whole enthralling, with twists and characters and digressions on the nature of language that kept me reading on. Bother him, I found it very difficult to put down, right to the last page. I look forward with feverish anticipation to his next one. (There's an excerpt from it in Granta #123; and also he's written some knock-off Doctor Who.)

Books finished, September 2010

A better result than last month. I read The Number Mysteries by Marcus du Sautoy in preparation for an interview for a job I then didn't get (I also had to give a presentation with a mathematics theme and chose the Monument in London). It's a lively, approachable introduction to lots of big ideas, most of which I kept up with.

It covers five main topics: prime numbers; shapes; probabilities; encryption; and how we can use maths to predict the future. There are exercises to do along the way, and more activities on the website. There are QR codes all the way through the book, too, offering additional insights should you be reading with your phone. Du Sautoy ably delivers his lessons to readers of all ages and abilities - and the back cover quotes come from Richard Dawkins and an eight year-old.

It's an engaging and informative book, and proved useful for both my interview and the Astronomy GCSE I've just started. How brilliant to understand how prime numbers might helped cicadas evolve defenses against predators. But, just as at school, I struggled to maintain interest when the numbers were all in the abstract. It's the application of the numbers to solving real-world problems that most excites. Interactive content won't in itself help make the thought-experiment stuff any more enticing.

Kraken by China Mieville was a bit of a disappointment after the glorious and award-winning The City and The City. A whopping great specimen of a Kraken in formaldehyde vanishes from the Natural History Museum, and curator Billy Harrow soon finds himself in amid the increasingly weird underground of competing religious groups with vested interested. While Mieville's work has often been so compellingly original, this felt too often like a knock-off Christopher Fowler, and I found the jokes about Star Trek and pop music a bit trite. It's a fun knockabout thriller with some nice ideas and surprises, which any other day would be quite a recommendation.

Adopting a Child is a guide produced by the BAAF and is part of our initial efforts into the Plan B Spawning Project. Have read various other bits and pieces sent by councils and charities, but they don't count as books.

I'm working on the publicity for Nev Fountain's Mervyn Stone Mysteries, so got to read advance copies ahead of hardbacks and leather-bound editions coming out later this month.

And finally, Operation Mincemeat which is a superb bit of work by Ben Macintyre, whose Agent Zigzag I also adored. It's the true story of the man who never was, the dead body planted on a Spanish beach with fake papers in World War Two, to convince the Nazis that the Allies were going to invade somewhere that they weren't.

Macintyre seems to have followed up every possible lead and angle, speaking to the people who were really involved or their families, in the UK and Spain and Germany. He's got a brilliant eye for odd and telling details - there's the man on page 43 who "never wore a hat", or the tradecraft description on page 71 of "wallet litter". The story is fascinating - the plot itself concocted by a bunch of thriller writers - with an extraordinary cast of extraordinary people. A marvel of a book.

Farley Mount

Spent the weekend at the parents' and on Sunday morning my mum took me to Farley Mount. I've not been there since my early teens, but once it was a regular haunt. My brothers and I would climb the trees, chase the dog and lose frisbees. That might not be of any interest to you, but it's still a weirdly cool place.


I also remember the Ordnance Survey trigpoint pillar being the Master's TARDIS, landed in front of the Dark Tower. I vividly remember scrabbling up the side of that pillar to be king of the castle and to annoy my younger brother. I remember reaching up to the top of the pillar, which is now not much higher than my waist.


The place did seem strangely smaller than I remembered and the short walk from the car park had once been an epic trek. But also I'd forgotten - or never noticed - that it was in an enclosed area, so a safe place for kids to gambol about. Mum also pointed out something I'd always been too short to see. On a clear day you can look out across the fields and spy the Isle of Wight. (I didn't take a photo of that, sorry.)


We let the other visitors leave before clambering up the short slope to the thing itself. They've cut down the trees that I used to climb in, but the graffiti was as I remembered.


It's a weird structure, perched up on a hill and can be seen for miles. I really want to walk the 24-mile Clarendon Way sometime, the ancient road connecting the Roman towns of Winchester and Old Sarum. (The Normans rebuilt the town of Sarum, then found the Roman earthworks too small for their needs so moved to a new site - New Sarum, or Salisbury.) Hoping to do that this autumn.

But what, you're asking, is this weird monument for?

“He likes cats, but not from kindness”

For what might one day be a work thing, I asked m'colleague M to recommend Dirk Bogarde films from the early 60s. Am woefully ill-read in the man's work, so blimey: three compelling, peculiar movies.

In The Singer Not The Song (1961), Bogarde is an oddly well-spoken Mexican bandit. Anacleto preys on a small town until Irish priest John Mills walks in. Mills is determined to win Bogarde over to the side of the angels; Bogarde wants to drag Mills down to his own level.

It's a sumptuous film in full colour, filmed in southern Spain. The story is raunchily Catholic – about community and duty and salvation. There are small roles for Doctor Who later regulars Roger Delgado, Laurence Payne and Eileen Way. And it doesn't quite all come together.

Bogarde, who's grown up through the revolution to hate the church as part of the old regime, speaks in perfect English. Locha – daughter of a rich Mexican (Delgado) and his glamorous, American wife – speaks with a distinctly French lilt. And Bogarde's performance is... well, he doesn't seem all that bothered.

It was apparently the last film he shot in his seven-year contract for Rank. On the DVD extra, director Roy Ward Baker says there was an enmity on set between Bogarde and Mills. But Michael Brooke for ScreenOnline argues that it has the opposite effect on the film: charging it with homoerotic subtext. I'm not wholly convinced.

That's not, though, true of Bogarde's next film. In Victim (also 1961), Bogarde plays a top London lawyer with a pretty wife (Sylvia Syms), who finds himself open to blackmail for giving a gay young chap a lift home. This is six years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the film is apparently the first mainstream effort to directly address the issue.

It takes a comparatively long time, though, for the film to name the love that dare not speak its name. Until then, its lots of people being worried and in a rush, not quite saying why. That sells us on the basic wheeze – that this is a thriller, with a villain to be spotted from the many rich characters – and means by the time we find out what it's about we're already hooked. I can see the producers worrying that audiences of the time might not flock if they knew the subject.

The film puts across a lot of points of view on the subject. In fact, there are several almost-soliloquies, where peripheral characters state their Opinion on the matter. It seems keen to encompass a range of views, but they puncture the thrill of the story, taking us out of the action.

It's beautifully played by Bogarde and Syms, with a nice turn from Alan MacNaughtan (who I recognised from Sandbaggers and To Serve Them All Our Days) and a whole world of people who would later be in Doctor Who.

The film is much written on elsewhere, mostly noting that it's a brave choice of role for Bogarde a) because he was mostly then known as a teen idol and 2) because he kept his own private life private.

But if I'm not misunderstanding, Bogarde's character is not a practising homosexual. He promises Syms that he hasn't broken his promise to her – that he only gave Boy Barrett a lift in his car a few times. An earlier, alluded-to dalliance at college doesn't seem to have been acted on either. And before we know what the film's about, we see Bogarde in a passionate snog with Syms.

Rather, Bogarde seems open to blackmail for a thought crime - “I wanted him!” he declares to Syms in a pivotal moment. The all-important photograph – which we ourselves never see – shows him sat next to Barrett. As is said in the film, the only thing to suggest anything untoward is that Barrett is crying.

If Bogarde weren't such the moral type, I could see him easily bluffing his way through – especially since the Establishment seem just as bent as he is, or don't care what he does in his own time. But it's an extraordinary film; a complex and involving thriller with a rich cast of possible villains and some neat twists along the way.

You can still hear Matthew Sweet's interview with Syms about the film on The Film Programme in July.

The Mind Benders (1963) is a bit like an English version of the Manchurian Candidate (1962) – though rather than Communist villains brainwashing a man to assassinate a Presidential candidate, here a chap's colleagues at Oxford make him perfectly beastly to his wife.

Again, there are some fun cameos to watch out for – Delgado again, a young Edward Fox, and Wendy Craig as the university bike.

The method for making Bogarde nasty is an eight-hour spell in a flotation tank. I'd half expected the plot to develop with Bogarde then exposed to extreme aromatherapy. But instead it does something just as extraordinary – and pulls back on the promise of a tragic ending to put everything right again. There's not a lot of apology from the chaps, but otherwise everyone ends up okay.

In all three films, Bogarde seems above the petty concerns of ordinary mortals; his gaze falls with equal withering on priests, bigots and women. He's gaunt, elegant, bequiffed – and eminently watchable for such striking and strange roles.

Holes in our heads and other stories

"People are too often terrible advertisements for their own beliefs."

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, p. 357.

The Dr took me to see Derren Brown's magic show, Enigma, for my birthday back in June. Even before I'd read his book I suspected how some of the tricks might be done. Perhaps he wasn't reading people's minds, he just remembered which cards they'd taken; perhaps he used a loaded die...

I'd thought the book, Tricks of the Mind, would be a magic primer, detailing his card-sharpery and the mechanics of illusion. Indeed, Brown begins with a simple coin trick and a simple card trick. He explains misdirection and showmanship – at least as important as the simple “trick” of palming a coin or remembering a sequence of cards.

But he then goes on to explore all kinds of gaps in our cognition that can mean we’ll believe very odd things. In doing so, we learn how to use our memories better, how to hypnotise ourselves, and see how neuro-linguistic programming, psychics and other belief systems are able to ensnare us...

Brown tells us he uses a mixture of these techniques himself. He also tells us something much more important: that what he does is a trick.

The joy of magic, I think, is in knowing it’s a trick – a way of fooling our perception a given event. The performer doesn't really have psychic abilities or a way to sidestep physics. We just have to puzzle out how it was done. Brown talks about laying false clues to muddle the audience when they try to review what they've just seen. But even if we can't figure out how trick is done, we know there is an answer.

On that basis, it's easy to see where Brown's thinking overlaps with scientific enquiry. He's intrigued by NLP but cynical about its cult of personality and resistance to meet its great claims with evidence. Brown is a doubter, though he also talks earnestly about having previously been an evangelical Christian. There's a sense - one I sort of share - that he hates the thought of being fooled again.

He might labour the point, but Brown’s good at explaining why, if you have a proposition – that a certain chemical has healing properties, that the world works in a certain way, that there’s some kind of God – the onus is on you to prove the proposition is true, not for others to prove that it isn't. That's especially important if your proposition encourages some kind of action.

With the zeal of the convert Brown hopes to convince us to doubt. In many ways, Brown's book reminded me of Dawkins' The God Delusion – it's smart, it's lively, it covers a great deal of ground and it explains complex ideas simply. Yet the petulant tone makes it read as if written by a clever 17 year-old. It’s hectoring, ranty and the jokes are often forced. That can give the impression – in both books – that the author has all the answers, whereas the whole point is that we don't settle on easy answers.

Rather, Brown explains the strangeness of reality. In the section on lying, he explains how people telling the truth include all kinds of odd, incongruous details. (I'm reminded of Orwell on Charles Dickens and the genius of his “unnecessary detail”.)

On which point, though I've still not got to Ben Goldacre, I'm hesitant about m'colleague Jonny's review of it:

"Yes! That’s exactly what I already thought, but put slightly more clearly!"

As Brown and Dawkins both spell out themselves, a lot of science is counter-intuitive. In fact, one good test of a scientific theory is whether it confirms what the proponent already "knows". Brown has a whole section on "confirmation bias".

That in turn reminded me of Flat-Earth News by Nick Davies – and especially the bit on heroin use and the war on drugs, where policy seems based on comforting, fundamental beliefs and not on physical evidence.

In fact, Brown’s book has make me connect dots between all sorts of disparate stuff. I shall blog at some point on Father Christmas and on birthdays – two subjects much scrawled in my notebook.

Tricks of the Mind is then a primer not in magic trickery but in strange and wondrous reality. Despite the painful jokes and adolescent tone, it’s an extraordinary book.

Other recent reads:

Austerity Britain by David Kynaston
Loved this; intend to blog my notes. But then I said that about Flat-Earth News, too. Oops. So here’s the Telegraph’s glowing review.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
A funny, provocative collection of leftie newspaper columns full of sharp one-liners. Not as heavyweight as the other stuff of his I’ve read, but more hits than misses.

The Ghosts of India by Mark Morris
Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with Ghandi. Mark explores the last complex and controversial days of the Raj, for ages eight and up. Plus there’s spooky monsters. I wish I’d thought of this.

Johannes Cabal – The Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard
Reviewed for Vector, but didn’t think that much of it.

Me, Cheeta by Cheeta and James Lever
Another birthday present, the autobiography of the chimpanzee who played Tarzan’s mate. I thought the joke might wear thin quite quickly, but it’s an often very funny read. Sometimes it’s funny because we read between the lines, sometimes because of Cheeta’s animal perspective. Cheeta’s last meeting with the aged Johnny Weissmuller is beautifully moving. What’s more, it’ll be hard to hear salacious showbiz tales without thinking of that ape.

Now reading Spies by Michael Frayn.

Trause: a snake

My post two years ago on The Brooklyn Follies suggests Paul Auster’s work is all aimiable stuff with little incident but musing and conversation. But I realise that’s not right; there’s a terriific sense of threat in a lot of his work, of contentment living on borrowed and overdue time. And another quality that makes him so addictive: Auster is really weird.

And it’s odd that it’s two years since I last read any of his stuff having been so devoted. But really it’s just ‘cos I’d pretty much read everything, and was saving his latest one. (There’s a new book out in August, and also some more films, too; see Paul Auster news.)

Travels in the Scriptorium has the same eerie feel as The Music of Chance and In The Country of Last Things. There’s the same sort of man caught up in a world of strange rules which hint at terrible violence. There’s the same doubt about whether these rules and repurcussions are real or just in his mind. There’s the same eerie sense that he may be imprisoning himself. It is a mystery story where, to the protagonist, everything is mysterious.

In this case, we don’t even know the guy’s name – he’s just referred to as Mr Blank. He spends the whole of the book in one room, but for trips to the toilet. And his main concern – without ever daring to find out – is whether they’ve locked him in.

“He can't remember how long he has been here or the nature of the circumstances that precipitated his removal to this place. Perhaps he has always been here; perhaps this is where he has lived since the day he was born. What he knows is that his heart is filled with an implacable sense of guilt. At the same time, he can't escape the feeling that he is the victim of a terrible injustice."

Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium, p. 2.

Blank is an old man with a past he can’t quite remember. That might be due to the coloured pills they feed him, or maybe they’re limiting his decline. As the book continues we learn Blank once had great authority, sending people out on gruelling missions. Though this seems to have done them terrible harm, none of them holds it against him. Or do they?

Anna, the pretty nurse who he’s known for at least 20 years, is said to be the only one of his visitors we can trust – but how do we know that for sure? The other visitors – another nurse, a policeman and a lawyer – all offer tantalising glimpses of Blank’s life, without ever explaining who or what he is. And always events are being watched by hidden cameras and a microphone.

Our job as readers is to piece together the tantalising hints. There are, as always in Auster, stories within stories that inform our thinking. In this case, Blank has a manuscript to read, an allohistory of a different Amercian civil war, where people are sent on missions that are not what they seem. The implication seems to be that this is Blank’s own story – he wrote or inspired or informed it. A clue to his identity is the name of the given author, John Trause; another of the anagrams of or playings on Auster’s own name who crop up as writers in his stories.

In counterpoint to the unfixable and unknowable there are arresting, vivid moments. Mr Blank breaks his fingernails as he tries to peel off a label, and there’s a lot of detail about his pissing and erections. This intimacy helps us to share Blank’s own sense of dislocation; we are trapped inside his muddle as he is.

It reminded me quite a bit of the feel of Lost Highway or of a few things by David Cronenberg. You know things aren’t right, that rules are being transgressed, but there’s a dream-like lack of certainty about what.

Spoilers…

… for …

… the …

… ending …

… coming …

…up.

The ending, I think, suggests that Blank is the author, his missions the stories he’s written and his characters now in charge. There’s a sense of the inmates taking over the asylum, of roles somehow being reversed. It’s a clever-clever po-mo conclusion, and not long ago me and D. were discussing how we’d both written plays about a guy realising he’s in a play ‘cos we’re both so original. But I’m not sure that’s what the book is doing, and it’s the uncertainty that lifts my slight disappointment and keeps me pondering on.

There’s also something chilling about the nature of his confinement; all he and we’ve discovered in this single brief day will be forgotten by tomorrow. I fear how my own characters might set upon their creator. Especially the one I killed so many times.