Encounters with books

The reader’s sympathies tend naturally to lie with the young boy at first. But Jack is a frustrating protagonist to root for. He resents his mother’s new partner and becomes more distant from his brother and younger sister. He harbours obscure resentments. He brings his girlfriend on a walk through some no-man’s land by the lake and tells her that the little flat stones are graves; they are in a graveyard for unbaptised babies. In one passage depicting a small-town rite of passage – a scuffle among the boys followed by an encounter with girls at the local chipper – his attention lingers on the girls and then skips on:

Shoulders nudged, heads flicked; legs, shapes and sizes were admired; tongues clicked, and as I came from the shop with two Cokes, Liam was talking to a girl from the convent. The amorous dogs hadn’t been distracted for long and were regrouped, snapping at each other in their excitement.

It’s disturbing image, just quietly dropped in there. Those dogs return over a hundred pages later at a moment of what should have been tenderness: “… and the old anxieties and self-doubt returned. I was waiting for the mongrel street-wise dogs to arrive sniffing and snapping; for a herd, heifers and their calves, to come bumping and bucking from among the trees and to walk in and foul the water; for a ram with flared nostrils to charge among the ewes.”

The narrator has implicated the reader too deeply in his story for him to be able to distinguish to what extent to what extent Jack’s predicament is a result of Catholic Ireland’s repression, Jack’s own morbidity, or the tragic secret his mother hides.

The author Paul Soye evidently holds to the Heraclitean wisdom “A man’s character is his fate”. After almost 200 pages chronicling his teenage years, the story jumps to London. The immersion in the buzz and hum of the metropolis is an invigorating change – for the reader – but it will not deflect the inevitable tragedy. His new girlfriend, marriage, and promotions at the concrete plant are sketched over in a couple of dozen pages. This should be the happiest time of his life. But his character has been formed, the trap is set, the return to Ireland looms closer.

The novel is a meticulously crafted depiction of that peculiar confluence of family loyalties, sexual shame, and love of the land which used to power the psyche of rural Ireland and still does in many hidden ways. The story has the peculiar quality that you get the impression the author himself is struggling to comprehend the forces at work here. Psychologists and sociologists will be free to draw their own conclusions, treating the novel as a window to reality which no interview or statistical survey can ever access.

The Russian woman who wields her sexuality with skill and creativity jolted my memory. She initiates a sort of ‘play seduction’ with the main character, an aging academic philosopher. I recall this had fascinated me – I was no doubt still steeped in the very Irish association of feminine charm with sinfulness.

No ‘aha’ moments of instant familiarity. This throws into doubt the continuity of Aiden. How can he even begin to assess the project he set himself back then?

The novel is structured like a thriller. The main character, a German professor called Zweig, catches a fleeting glimpse of a student of his from decades previously – Neumann – outside a London railway station. This student had been a deep-thinking and troubled young man in 1930’s Heidelberg. He had been under the influence of Nietzschean theories of rising above good and evil. Zweig had read newspaper reports years later of how Neumann had inherited millions from an old man who died in mysterious circumstances. And now Zweig spotted him in the company of an old and obviously wealthy gentleman.

Zweig plays a ‘what if’ game with his suspicions. But then more and more evidence accumulates – a police inspector friends reveals Neumann was investigated briefly over the death of yet another old man in Maidstone.

It’s a thriller workling on two levels. On one level Zweig and his friends track down Neumann and piece together the evidence against him. But through flashbooks to pre-war Heidelberg and readings of Neumann’s published articles, Zweig pieces together the mind of a man who has strayed far from conventional morality.

The core question is whether Neumann’s nihilistic philosophy set him on a course that led straight to murder, or whether (the more comfortable thought) all criminals are basically self-deceiving, petty egoists. Crime in that case is an expression an inferiority complex.

Zweig does not for a moment doubt Neumann’s integrity and committment to living life with purpose. Could such a man have striven to rise above the merely human by setting himself beyond good and evil? He recalls a quote from Neumann:

All human beings are insects, and the gods laugh at us. There’s nothing we can do to become greatest … What can a man do to try to be more than an insect?

Wilson shows remarkable prescience. The decades since this novel was first published have thrown up megalomanic murderers time and time again.

‘In this truck is a man whose latent genius if unleashed would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?’

That’s from the Yorkshire ripper.

There’s a huge sense of intellectual excitement in the novel – coupled with Zweig’s sense of a loss of authenticity in his own life. Whether or not Neumann is a criminal, Zweig has been shaken from living day-to-day by habit.

The novel cleverly holds back from any encounter Neumann until half-way through the book. And in a reversal of momentum, it is Neumann who comes to the lair of his pursuers. The atmosphere of this meeting is tense and subtle: the reader begins to suspect that it is Zweig who has abandoned any seriousness of thought, Zweig perceives sees only personal malice in the encounter, while Neumann is still on his search for Truth.

The author clearly took these ideas as seriously as Dostoyevski did when writing his Brothers Karamanzov. In his contention that mankind is on the verge of a new evolutionary breakthrough in consciousness, Wilson may yet be proved right.

The novel deserves to be read again. But more than that, the “plot engine” deserves a re-visitation – a two-faceted manhunt, to pin down both the physical man and the ideas which drive him.