KTH RDGWY

Night Work is about a man called Jonas who wakes up one apparently ordinary summer’s day in his home city of Vienna to find that the television isn’t working, the newspaper hasn’t been delivered and the internet connection is down. He accidentally slices open his finger in the kitchen and it occurs to him that nobody else has ever seen the bare bone he can now glimpse. He goes to the bus stop. There is no one on the street. There are no buses, no cars. Fairly quickly, Jonas comes to realise that he is the only living creature in the city. There is no one else. There are no people anywhere. He is utterly alone.

I’ve written here recently about Ferenc Karinthy’s Metropole , and mentioned in passing Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled . In my own small mind, Night Work forms a sort of loose trilogy with these books. I’m not very well read. I’m sure there are other books which place a character in a city which makes no sense to him, and subsequently examine ideas of isolation and fear and panic. Panic books. They prod that scary childish part of me that is scared of being abandoned. All three of these books alarmed me in the reading in one way or another, but there is a rising scale. The Unconsoled is rather beautiful, gentle. It’s disorienting certainly, but it has the quality of a dream, in which the peculiarities tickle and stimulate, and it is, or it is to me, ultimately a positive, warm book. Metropole is much more unforgiving. It is more extreme, and its sense of dread more pervasive and persuasive. It has an open ending, to which you can attach ideas of your own, depending I suppose on your temperament. I felt doomed.

Night Work though, in terms of effect on me, was of a different order altogether. I found it genuinely scary. It unnerved me. I felt odd when reading it. I had to stop sometimes, get up from where I was sitting, walk around, look at things, think about something else, look at something on the television. I didn’t like reading it at night. I had to stop leaving it by my bed.

Jonas begins, very quickly, to get the idea that he is not alone. Things happen. He finds doors he left open shut. He finds a photograph of himself behind the bread bin that he can’t account for. His solitude is so peculiar to him that it takes on an otherness that is impossible to reconcile with reality. He sets up video cameras to film himself sleeping. He begins to think of the person he watches on these tapes as The Sleeper. The Sleeper does strange things. Frightening things. The Sleeper starts to use the night.

There is a literary mechanism here that brings to mind Dostoyevsky’s The Double , and Stevenson’ Jekyll And Hyde , and similar stories. But what is most unusual about Glavinic’s book is the horrible spotlight that the set up places on this idea of a man haunting himself, terrorising himself. There is nothing else in the world but Jonas. With the hell of other people not available, Jonas creates it out of parts of himself. And though it’s fully diagnosed from the beginning, this pathology persists and worsens and begins to unravel in the reader both the sense that it can ever be overcome, and any notion that understanding it might have been of any use in the first place.

Night Work is wonderfully well written. The pace is perfectly judged. The tension, and the often excruciating suspense, is completely at the service of large ideas about isolation, witness, and existence itself. It’s one of the ironies of the book, and one of the clever tricks it plays on the reader, that you become increasingly conscious as you go on, of how the activity of reading is such a solitary experience. You wander through this book alone, wanting to take someone with you, wishing there was someone else at your shoulder reading the same lines as you. And then you stop and think about that for a minute. And it becomes a terrifying idea.

Glavinic’s only other book currently available in English is Carl Haffner’s Love Of The Draw . It’s a fictionalised portrait of the Austrian chess player Karl Schlechter, whose style of play emphasised caution above all else. It’s a very different book to Night Work , and it hasn’t stayed in my mind to nearly the same degree. But it’s quiet and sad and lovely, and it shows a skill in the portrayal of relationships that you don’t, obviously, get any clue of from Night Work .

Glavinic seems, on the basis of these two books, a writer of immense range and talent. A (lukewarm) review of Night Work in the LRB last year by Philip Oltermann gave me some idea of the Austrian context in which Glavinic writes, and, tantalisingly, an idea of what’s going on in some of his other books. Night Work is published by Canongate, in a slightly silly cover that suggests a high tech surveillance thriller. Well, perhaps that’s not so silly. I don’t know. I hope they’ve done well enough with it to persuade them to publish the other books. I want to read more by this man. Lots more.

Regardless though of what else might come, Night Work is an amazing, arresting, alarming piece of work.