This is made of up three short novels: City of Glass (1985); Ghosts (1986); and The Locked Room (1986). According to Paul Auster, the author, they're more a triptych than a trilogy. We're right at the end before the narrator tells us that the three stories are essentially the same story: "But each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about... I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it's in the struggle."

Auster, born in 1947, died this April, and the many obituaries made me remember that I'd always wanted to read more of his work.

I'd read Oracle Night, back in 2005. Diary entry: "Very readable. In fact, I sat up until gone midnight reading, which I haven't done for ages." (I remember nothing about the plot but I was interested to read that the conversation that inspires protagonist Sidney Orr's story is based on an anecdote presented in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.)

Then, in 2010, I read City of Glass, the first in this trilogy. But I read it while waiting for, and then travelling on, a plane (never the best circumstances). Diary verdict: "He's a gripping writer, but somehow the endings are never satisfactory..." I always meant to finish the trilogy, but somehow never did.

The other week, the suite of novels appeared for a reasonable price in the book sale at Boulevard. The narrator says of Daniel Quinn, the protagonist of the first part of the trilogy: "Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance." Very appropriate then: A chance purchase.




Paul Auster

The three parts are held together by their New York backdrop; by a detective theme (in the first, an author is hired to act as a detective; in the second; the lead character IS a detective; in the third, an author takes on the role of detective in an attempt to find out about a missing friend); and by a network of cross-referencing (the purpose of which is not to cohere logically, but rather to suggest associations). And, to me, the theme that ties it all together is the act of writing, and the influence of writing on identity.

There's a detailed summary here, but briefly, the stories go like this:

CITY OF GLASS

The opening: "It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not." The caller is asking for Paul Auster, who -- he says -- is a private detective. According to the real Auster, this happened to him. Someone called him in the middle of the night under the assumption that they were calling Pinkerton's, the detective agency. The following night the same person contacted him, with the same request.

Auster (the real one) eventually got rid of his late-night caller. Not so Daniel Quinn, our protagonist (also an author, but a hollow shell of a man since the death of his wife and child some years earlier). After fielding a couple of calls, he goes along with the caller's misapprehension, and arranges to meet him. It turns out that this Peter Stillman is a pretty disturbed person. While he was a child, his father held him in captivity, incommunicado, for many years. Now the father is due to be released from the secure hospital where he has been held, and Stillman junior says that Stillman senior is trying to murder him. Stillman (and his unlikely wife) hire Quinn (aka Auster) to keep an eye on the former mental patient.

Which he does. So consientiously, in fact, that Quinn starts to lose himself in the fictional person of Paul Auster, detective, and then in the elusive person of Stillman. When he loses his quarry (Stillman eventually disappears from his lodgings), and can no longer follow him on his long, rambling walks through New York, Quinn feels bereft: "It felt as though he had lost half of himself."

He contacts the real Auster -- who's a writer, of course, not a detective -- but Auster knows nothing. Quinn can't raise Stillman junior or his wife on the phone. Having lost Stillman senior, he feels the most logical thing to do is to mount guard over the apartment building where his client lives.

"It is at this point in the story," says the narrator, "that he began to lose his grip." He ends up training himself to sleep for very short intervals, subsisting on practically nothing, and living in a dumpster... This is absurd, of course, but it is all made to sound very logical. It shouldn't be surprising that Kafka was one of Auster's literary influences...


Singapore: Also a city of reflections and distortions

A long time passes. When Quinn runs out of money, he contacts Auster again, and is told that the elder Stillman jumped off Brooklyn Bridge a while ago... Quinn goes home, to find that someone else now lives in his apartment. So he takes up residence in the Stillman apartment, currently abandoned: "The case was far behind him now, and he no longer bothered to think about it. It had been a bridge to another place in his life, and now that he had crossed it, its meaning had been lost."

At this point, the narrator comes out of the shadows. He's a friend of Auster's, and it's Auster who tells him about Quinn. The narrator intuitively feels that Quinn has ended up at the Stillman apartment. When they check this out, they find that Quinn has disappeared, but his red notebook is there: "As for me," says the narrator, "my thoughts remain with Quinn. He will be with me always. And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish him luck."

So that's the ending I found "unsatisfactory" the first time round... It does make more sense (though "sense" isn't really the right word here) in the context of the other two parts of the triptych.

GHOSTS

Here we're in 1947. White recruits private investigator Blue (who was taught his skills by Brown) to keep Black under surveillance.

I have to say I found this colour thing really annoying... But I think this second part of the trilogy is more explicit about the relationship between an author and his/her characters.

Again we have a melding of identities: "For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself." He makes up stories about the characters he comes across: "As the days go on, Blue realizes there is no end to the stories he can tell. For Black is no more than a kind of blankness, a hole in the texture of things, and one story can fill this hole as well as any other." Blue's reports for White leave him, as their author, dissatisfied: "He says to himself: what happened is not really what happened. For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say."

Later, we find that Blue has lost "the future Mrs Blue". He has been too devoted to his job to keep in contact with her, and she has found someone else. There's a scene. "He realizes that he has thrown away his life."

To try to shake things up a bit, and lure Black into conversation, Blue disguises himself as a tramp. Black talks to him, tells him about the great men who have walked this area. Blue responds: "Ghosts." And the conversation continues:

"Yes, there are ghosts all around us... Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he's there, he's not really there.
"Another ghost.
"Exactly."



They meet again, when Blue follows Black to Manhattan. Black says he's a private detective; he has been hired to watch this guy, and write about it... Blue asks: "Does he know you're watching him or not?" Black replies: "Of course he knows... He's got to know, or else nothing makes sense... He needs my eye looking at him. He needs me to prove he's alive." Blue thinks there was never a White after all... It's all just he and Black...

Blue insinuates himself into Black's apartment building, and goes up to where he lives: "The door will open, and after that Black will be inside of him forever. He knocks, the door opens, and suddenly there is no more distance, the thing and the thought of the thing are one and the same."

He later returns, when Black is out. He steals papers from the table, but when he gets home, he realizes they are his own reports. Blue has a kind of breakdown: "To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is, even though Blue does not know it."

Just look at him, Blue says to himself at one point: "He's the saddest creature in the world. And then, the moment he says these words, he understands that he's also talking about himself."

That evening, Blue visits Black. There's a violent altercation. Blue beats Black up, and isn't sure whether he's dead or alive when he leaves, taking the manuscript Black has been working on with him. Later, Blue walks out of his flat. "And from this moment on," says the narrator, "we know nothing."

This was my least favourite part of the trilogy. Cold, abstract, alienating. But thought-provoking.

THE LOCKED ROOM

Here our (never named) narrator, who writes articles for a living, uses the first person throughout. We learn of Fanshawe, who was once his friend, but who has disappeared, and is assumed to be dead. Fanshawe's wife, Sophie, contacts the narrator about the possibility of publishing Fanshawe's manuscripts. She had employed someone called Quinn to look for Fanshawe, but he'd given up the case...

Fanshawe's work turns out to be very good. The narrator and Sophie get together, and eventually marry; a kind of Fanshawe industry starts up. Again we have this blurring: "The more fully I disappeared into my ambitions for Fanshawe, the more sharply I came into focus for myself." People even start to speculate that there is no such person as Fanshawe -- that the narrator has invented him, and written these books himself. He wonders about actually writing a book or two under Fanshawe's name, once the current (real) books have been published. He muses about "what it means when a writer puts his name on a book, why some writers choose to hide behind a pseudonym, whether or not a writer has a real life anyway".



Then Fanshawe contacts him to say he's still alive, but no-one must be told of this. He says: "Writing was an illness that plagued me for a long time, but now I have recovered from it." The narrator doesn't tell Sophie. But he is haunted by the idea of his friend.

At the suggestion of the publisher, he agrees to write a biography of Fanshawe: "There was never any question of telling the truth. Fanshawe had to be dead, or else the book would make no sense... The book was a work of fiction... Instead of an investigator, I was now an inventor." This formula has its origins in Auster's own life, too. Once employed as a census-taker, he encountered a widespread reluctance in his target demographic to open the door to him... So his supervisor told him to make it all up. He invented whole families...

Sophie starts to worry that her former husband is dominating her new husband's life. But the narrator heads to Paris, still attempting to track Fanshawe down: "After all these months of trying to find him, I felt as though I was the one who had been found. Instead of looking for Fanshawe, I had actually been running away from him... Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning." All he can see is one image: The door of a locked room. "This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull." He goes on a bit of a bender, which certainly has results: "He was gone -- and I was gone along with him."

The narrator tells us: "The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story..."

The narrator instigates a ridiculous confrontation in a Paris bar with a random guy he addresses as Fanshawe. The man says he's not Fanshawe, he's Peter Stillman... "Stillman was not Fanshawe -- I knew that. He was an arbitrary choice, totally innocent and blank. But that was the thing that thrilled me -- the randomness of it, the vertigo of pure chance." Stillman, exasperated, beats him up.

He goes home. He knows something else is going to happen, tries to be ready for anything: "It is the power of this ANYTHING, I believe, that has made the story so difficult to tell. For when anything can happen -- that is the precise moment when words begin to fail... Fanshawe himself was not death -- but he was like death, and he functioned as a trope for death inside me."

Then Fanshawe is back in touch. He summons the narrator to Boston, won't let him enter the room he is in, has a gun, and refuses to be addressed as Fanshawe. He says he watched Sophie, and the narrator, and the baby for about a month, camped outside the apartment building... And he has written his explanation for everything in a red notebook... The narrator doesn't remember what happened after that. The next thing he knows, he's outside, with the red notebook. He goes to catch the train. He reads the notebook: "All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out... It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it."

He destroys the notebook, piece by piece.



***

So what did the narrator say goodbye to? Remember the quote at the top: "I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters."

Maybe it was writing, given the trilogy's recognition of the way authorship -- the whole act of creating characters, and telling stories -- messes with your brain. Auster says that it was meeting his second wife, author Siri Hustvedt, that saved him from becoming Daniel Quinn. So maybe the narrator, too, carried on writing, but was able to say goodbye to the kind of authorship that becomes all-consuming and life-destroying. Whereas Quinn and Blue disappear without trace, the I-narrator of the third section manages to vanquish the ghost of Fanshawe, and walk away.

Or -- and this is a very fascinating possibility -- is Ramon Espejo right, and the farewell is a farewell to modernism, and a (cautious) embrace of the postmodern?

The argument goes like this: "The novels forming The New York Trilogy increasingly accommodate the postmodern (while growing increasingly realistic)... The stories can also be read, then, as chronicling the characters' (and allegedly Auster's) journey toward the postmodern. Quinn cannot make it. Blue might be more fortunate than Quinn. The narrator of The Locked Room is certainly the most successful of the three in having managed to skirt Fanshawe's threat. As far as Auster's literary career is concerned, the trilogy spells it out with astonishing insight: his novels will not be like those of Quinn or Fanshawe, but not like those of White or Stillman either. His fiction will undoubtedly be informed by a contemporary sensibility and concerned with current issues and theoretical debates, but also sympathetic with older narrative structures and forms and certainly aware of the literary tradition."

But, of course, it's dangerous to make categoric assertions. Auster himself says that the key idea is "learning to live with ambiguity". And he describes his literary ambitions like this: "I’ve always wanted to write what to me is beautiful, true, and good, but I’m also interested in inventing new ways to tell stories. I wanted to turn everything inside out. I suppose it’s a tremendously ambitious stance: not to be satisfied with conventions, to play with them sometimes, then to expose traditional norms and stretch them beyond their limits..."



***

These novels are very intellectual, full of literary references (Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Poe, Cervantes...), and pages of rabbit-hole details about curious incidents and phenomena. And, of course, they're awash with the writerly sleight-of-hand of postmodernism: Doppelganger figures; an increasingly blurry boundary separating author, narrator, and character; ambiguity, fluidity, and lack of resolution; the interrogation of language; the deconstruction of the detective genre (as this commentator points out: "There is no easy way out, no neat, pat answer as in most detective novels. Not only can we not say whether the butler did it, we do not even know what he is supposed to have done").

And yet they're very, very readable. Intriguing. Spellbinding. You have to read on, even though you're baffled, bewildered, even annoyed, maybe even wondering sometimes whether you're being sent up (a story in which the characters are all named after colours...??).

But you just have to read on...


"In Auster’s looking-glass text, we get a strange mise en abyme effect, the feeling of standing between two mirrors and seeing yourself repeated endlessly, in an abyss of the self."