KTH RDGWY

I have been smuggling myself out of Ireland, piece by piece, since 1999. I get nervous at customs. But I’m never stopped. I remember when visiting Belfast as a child that there were scary checkpoints with armed soldiers, and policemen would look in my mother’s handbag every time we went into a shop. In Lurgan where the kerbs are painted red white and blue and my grandfather is buried we once heard a muffled explosion, and we all looked at each other. But there was nothing on the news. In Bangkok recently they checked my bag at the entrances to shopping malls. They were checking everyone’s bag. Not just mine. Once, while I waited to board a Eurostar in Paris, the heavy anti-blast curtain suddenly dropped, and the area in front of me cleared and went quiet while something suspicious was investigated. Nothing happened. They lifted the curtain again and the policemen were all smiles.

I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t get nervous in front of a line of policemen, a checkpoint,  passport control. How can you not be nervous? The State is a lunatic. It twitches and flips.  And even so. Have you never seen a film or read a book? Or been somewhere in your imagination where you would never go in life, and fear that you have carried the traces of that journey back with you like tell tale chemicals or a scent? Do you not think you smell guilty? That the dogs will pick you out? If you do not worry that you smell of something despicable, then you are probably already lost.

After I read The Kindly Ones , I travelled back through immigration to the land of deep suspicion, the country where ads at bus stops tell you to keep an eye on your neighbour - your neighbour the potential benefits cheat, the potential terrorist - back to the city where a lot of people worry about running into the police when they go out in the evenings in much the same way that they worry about running into a mugger or a drunk with a possible knife. I was not stopped. It’s an ugly place to live sometimes. If you’re reading certain books it’s cute like a skinny kitten.

I sank into my chair. And started on Alone In Berlin , Hans Fallada’s distressing scurry through the rabbit holes of futile resistance to the Nazi mind. You see how a reader can become read? There were not a lot of laughs. Though, having said that, there were more than you’d think. The literal translation of the German title is Every Man Dies Alone . Which is the title it was given in English by Melville House , the American independent publishers who rescued it from obscurity (in English) a couple of years ago and published it properly, as it deserves, making the simple quiet point that it’s a great twentieth century novel and now here it is - read it. I don’t know why Penguin felt that the title needed changing. Perhaps it was felt that Every Man Dies Alone might be a bit of a downer. For people who want to read a book about life in Berlin under the Nazis. It’s a silly change, and it’s not unimportant. The original title, the idea of it, the problem and the despair and the ultimate dignity of it, is woven through the text in the last third of the book, and it’s appropriate and right. Alone In Berlin is not quite right. Much of the fear in the story lies in the fact that in Berlin in the early 1940s no one is alone. No one. People live on top of one another. In each other’s pockets. Spies are everywhere. Informal, part time, self appointed spies. As well as the other ones. You might argue that the fictional version of the real Berlin couple at the centre of the story - a couple who resist with all of their tiny strength - are alone in their dissent. But they’re not. There is a messy, embarrassed and complicated solidarity with others, a patchwork of tentative affirmations and denials that constitutes the weakness chiefly exploited by the police and Gestapo officers who hunt them.

This is very different to the Littell. Perspective, again. There is no concern for authenticity here. It was written in 1946. There is no need to establish credentials, no need to provide a fine grained researched context. And there is no automatic respect either, no concern about tone. Fallada is there. He just writes. And so it’s something of a shock, coming bruised and shaken from The Kindly Ones , to find the beginning of Every Man Dies Alone so … enjoyable.

It’s a really good thriller. Fallada was a jobbing writer for most of his life, and here he employs all of his considerable skill as a plot wrangler to give us a page turner, filled with character and drama. Melodrama, even. The characters are solid working class people with useless drunken husbands or with timid melancholy wives; with disappointing children, or hopeless parents. For me, they brought to mind characters from O’Casey. There’s the constant worry about money, and about getting another drink or another bet on another horse. There’s trying your luck with a woman who kicked you out last month. There’s the deferred grief of a son killed at the front, or worse, a son who is bragging about killing at the front in ways that appall. There’s the desire for quietness, some comfort maybe, the hope that when you take in that man you kicked out before that this time he’s changed. And most of all there is the constant battle with the sheer bad bloody luck of living. Especially in a place and time like Berlin in the early 1940s. It’s thoroughly engaging.

Hints come to us, and the characters, of the sort of stuff we read about in The Kindly Ones . But they are vague. There is knowledge of the camps, which most of the people in the book fear as a possibility for themselves, but in an abstract sense. Nothing about what might happen there is known very solidly by anyone. There is certain awareness too of what happens to the Jews. But even then it remains unnamed, a nebulous sort of bad thing that evokes pity and revulsion and fear. Fear most of all. Fear is the raw material of Every Man Dies Alone . It drives and harries and most of the time it conquers the characters - almost all the characters. It is so all pervasive and stifling as to appear to them the natural way of things - how else could it be? A sourceless, penetrating fear like freezing rain.

Otto and Anna Quangel realise that it is of course not sourceless, that it is a product and a currency and a weapon of the state, and they take a stand against it. A stand so warped by the power of their fear that it is almost certainly useless. But they don’t know that, and in ways that Max Aue would understand their failure does nothing to diminish their courage. They live in a block of flats in central Berlin. Their neighbours include, downstairs, kindly retired Judge Fromm. Next to him, the Persicke family - low level Nazis with a cunning bully of a son called Baldur who is something in the Hitler Youth. Upstairs, Frau Rosenthal, a Jewish woman whose husband has been taken, and who no longer steps outside her front door. Across the yard the good for nothing gambler Emil Borkhausen who lives off his wife and pays scant attention to the legion of children she also cares for. We also meet the Quangel’s postwoman Eva Kluge, and her pathetic husband Enno, and Trudel Baumann - the fiancé of the Quangel’s dead son. Throughout the book we follow and revisit these people and others in an arrangement of story and character as finely and movingly (and comically) played out as any drama you’re like to read.

Such fun!

I was so relieved not to be sunk in the muck of Max Aue’s decaying consciousness that for a while Fallada’s book was a joy to me. Here were people living, not theorising. Trying to survive rather than justify. Here are small defiant actions, bloodless and principled. The involvement I felt was free of complicated implications for myself, free of confusing entanglements of perspective and second guessing and insinuation. I could see who the good guys were. But Fallada, the bastard, is far too good a writer to hook you and not gut you.

Otto decides to write postcards. He writes questioning, anti Nazi messages on postcards, and he leaves them in public areas of Berlin buildings. Cautious. Timid. Terribly afraid. That is all. Useless, you’re tempted to think. And, as it turns out, it is utterly useless. But Fallada foreshadows le Carré in his ability to make you sweat over a scene in which a man walks down a stairwell and pauses, for just a moment, by a windowsill.

His campaign is shared by Anna. Trudel learns of it. Around them, the other characters continue with their own battles, sometimes colliding with the fall out from the Quangel’s postcards, sometimes veering off on apparently unrelated adventures of their own, snapping back into the main narrative with sometimes a slightly clunky judder, more often with a precise and chilling click. The book is full of scenes and episodes which tingle in the memory - such as Enno Kluge’s time living with (or off) widow and pet shop owner Hetty Haberle. Her attraction to Enno is simply that he is wanted by the Gestapo. Her husband, a communist, disappeared into the camps and died there before the war even started. Enno can’t quite believe his luck. And early in the book there is a short few pages in which Judge Fromm, at huge risk to himself, takes in and hides Frau Rosenthal in a spare bedroom. For her own safety, she can’t leave the room. Her mix of gratitude and misery, and her lack of ability to bear her suffering is rendered exquisitely.

But perspectives shift. And Fallada, not far into the book, shifts his perspective to the men hunting the mysterious postcard agitator. And he gives us short but utterly convincing glimpses into the mindset and behaviour of those who must have made up the majority of ordinary Nazis. These men and women are ignorant, stupid, brutish, violent, unpredictable, and, in their small realms, immensely powerful. Amongst them are others, a little like Max Aue, who think too much, who wonder and worry and get on with it anyway. One of these is Inspector Escherich of the Gastapo, chief investigator of what he calls “the hobgoblin case”. He’s not a very good detective, but he’s sensible, and patient, and he is convinced that sooner or later the hobgoblin will put a foot wrong. His superiors are stupid, and impatient, and he balances delicately between looking busy and waiting.

Escherich is Fallada’s Porfiry Petrovich. And funnily enough, you can imagine him thinking of himself in that way too. Almost good, almost bad, he is the model of the compromised man, the man who has walked himself step by step into a corner, a man who hands over responsibility for his moral survival to a set of contingencies over which he is relieved to have no control, telling himself that he has no other choice. He is a dimmer version of Max Aue. And in being less well equipped for the role, he appears both more pathetic and more human.

In a book full of many shocks, it is the trinity of violent acts involving Escherich which are the most affecting, the most startling. The first is in a chapter entitled simply Escherich and Kluge Take A Walk . It is a beautifully written account of a terrible thing. The second is when Escherich, having made an unwise comment in a meeting, is stripped of his office and thrown immediately into the cells where he is relentlessly beaten by men who obeyed his command twenty minutes earlier. The third it would be wrong to reveal. Though it comes as less of a surprise than the others, and is described with a chilling and an almost forced lack of sentiment by Fallada.

There is so much else. The paranoia. The whispers. The children. The absurd trial. The last third of the book, which takes place almost entirely in prison, is punctuated by moments of kindness, by characters who seem, through tiny acts of goodness, to be almost impossibly heroic. There is cruelty too, in abundance. And this time there is no Aue to move us quickly on, to escape into the numbing effect of doing it a hundred times, a thousand times. Fallada allows us, forces us, to stay with those who barely survive, and to stay until the end with those who don’t.

What I started in relief I finished in a great deal of sorrow. Which is an old fashioned word, and may even be an old fashioned notion. Fallada wrote Every Man Dies Alone in less than two months at the end of 1946. In December of that year he wrote to sister that “at last, I’ve got one right.” He died on February 5th. He did get one right. Completely right.

At the end of all this, as at the end of all things, what you feel most is sadness. An acute, overwhelming sadness. If, in blunt summary, Littell gives us access to the shock, then Fallada gives us access to the sadness. And both are part of what happened, and are parts of what we are in the wake of what happened, and we are what these men made us. You grow to affinity with these people. These strange people of another language and culture and another time, a time difficult to imagine in the sunny hills of London or the western edges of Dublin, or on the edge of all Europe where the ocean offers nothing - the great and glorious refuge of nothing at all. We are, we remain, tangled up in these lives, and the sadness of it is immense.

But it is transient. These people are not real people. And they are brought to us by writers who were not them. And all these things I read will fade, because literature is useless next to …

No, not useless. Of course not useless. It’s just that sometimes …

At one point in the midst of all of this, in a Sky enabled west Dublin refuge, in the damp heat of late July, I was pinned to the History Channel (Military) for a sequence of documentaries on Germany’s dash into Russia, the drive into the Caucuses, the initial success, Hitler’s hubris and the slowing down into a terrible bloody frozen mess. There is film of almost everything. Nothing very long. Just clips. Scenes. As if war is a series of tableaux. Which is of course I imagine it largely is. The blood appears grey. Stalingrad is a series of shards.

Then there was The World At War . I caught an episode one evening. It popped up on BBC2 for no apparent reason, as if my subconscious had been put in charge of programming for the night.

It was this episode of The World At War . The one about the Nazi’s racial policy.  It includes the testimony of Rivka Yosselevska. You can see and hear her on YouTube. Right now, if you want. And I’ve embedded it below. Fast forward to about 7.10. Or you could watch it all.  Or go to You Tube and watch the entire episode. Or you can simply read her account , as given at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1967.

There are many horrific and remarkable things about what she has to tell us. Watching her, it is difficult not to feel shame at what was done to her. Difficult not to feel shock. Very difficult not to feel that just this one woman, just this one, has suffered enough for all of us; that even if nothing else happened in all of human history, what happened to this woman is enough to make it all for nothing, to make all of our achievements count for nothing. It is difficult in other words not to feel an almost overwhelming despair at her words. The most remarkable thing about what she has to tell us is that she speaks to us as a dead woman. Other accounts are from survivors. Their stories tell of how, at the last minute, someone arrived, something changed, something happened that saved them. Not Rivka Yosselevska. No one arrived. Nothing changed. She was lined up and her family was shot and her child was taken from her arms and shot, and she was shot, and she fell into the pit of corpses and stayed there in the blood, and yet here she is, on YouTube for god’s sake, telling us about it. And you can see, or I can see, or I feel that I can see, that I am being spoken to by a murdered woman.

Literature does this sort of thing too. Both Fallada and Littell do it, in their different ways. It is an approach to truth. But with Rivka Yosselevska, there is no approach. There is no method, no art, no artifice, no mediation, no demand on us to judge the success or otherwise of her testimony. There is only the terrible shock, and the terrible grief that comes from listening to her.

I don’t know what literature is for. I suspect it exists, perversely, because of people like Rivka Yosselevska. It exists because there exists in us a sort of battered malfunctioning love, which hears words like Rivka’s and tries -  honestly tries - to imagine, just for a moment, what that must have been like. What that must have felt like, tasted like, looked like, smelled like.

And it breaks our heart.

I went to Kilkee this summer reading Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones . I read it on the train and on the boat. In Dublin I went to the launch party for the latest issue of Stinging Fly , edited by my friend Sean O’Reilly. Desmond Hogan was there and he read, he scorched at the room, for too long, barracking us for his misfortunes, his punishments, his exile from Kerry and the boy he tripped on. Desmond Hogan stands at a podium and declares like Ian Curtis stood at a microphone and sang. He jerks his head, his body, he barks one word but not the other and you don’t know why the emphasis is where it is, and he reels through his language as if fighting with it, with the sentences and the words, and I was looking at him and thinking about Ian Curtis and Joy Division. I remember in my school some older boys formed a punk band called Neü Belsen. Sean O’Reilly spoke about the artist and the state. I can’t remember now what he said, but I remember that it was true. The next day I drove to Kilkee with my sister and her boyfriend. I played really good music but nobody could hear it above the noise of the car.

The Kindly Ones is distressing. It’s the fictional memoir of a fictional SS officer, written in French by an American between 2001 and 2006. Narrator Max Aue is a perspective as much as a character, which is as it has to be, given that the main problem with writing seriously about the racial policy of the Nazis is the problem of perspective. Where do you situate the reader? With the victim? Why? Anyone can empathise with the victim. More interesting to find out who can empathise with the perpetrator. Or if not empathise, then at least begin to understand. And if not understand then experience. There is a lot of experience in this book. But what sort of perpetrator can a reader live with for over 900 pages? Can it really be a realistic one? Surely these people, these men, were either brutishly insensible to their own humanity, or they were vacant drones of remote control state violence as impenetrable to understanding as the distance killing missiles of the Afghan Pakistan border, or they were simply insane. Or some mix of those three and other tendencies more or less impossible to read about for very long.

Littell’s perspective is Max Aue. A Franco-German SS officer more or less dragooned into it after being caught cruising, and aware that his sexuality could kill him. A cultured man in carnal love with his sister. A man with a missing father and a mother he has come to hate. A committed though thoughtful Nazi not without doubt; a dedicated servant of the Reich. A murderer (of course). A reasonable man. A fiction. A liar. Insane, delusional, implausible. Compelling. He becomes, over time, the problem and frustration of perspective incarnate. He is not himself. Do we believe him? Are we expected to believe him? The disasters of his own personal psychology seem at times to be an excuse, or a reason, or a distraction. He is an answer to the question of how to write about the Nazis, and he’s a good answer. His testimony is wholly convincing - mostly through being by turns wholly unconvincing, tedious, self indulgent, contrived, shocking, grotesque and absurd.

In the fist third (the book is actually divided into seven parts - after baroque dances apparently - but in my mind there are three acts, more or less geographically anchored in the Ukraine, Stalingrad, and Berlin; or physically determined if you like into sick, wounded and insane) Aue is attached to an Einsatzgruppe as it follows in the wake of the Wehrmacht’s drive east, ‘cleaning up’ - which amounts to shooting the Jews. All of the Jews. The account includes what must be Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev in which 33,771 Jews were murdered on September 29th and 30th 1941; or perhaps it is Rumbula, where the total was about 25,000. Perhaps it includes both. As well as others. There are so many. A lot of the time Aue has no idea where he is. Everything gets hazy. In Stalingrad, well … Stalingrad is amongst the greatest achievements of human depravity and despair. It is a farce of severed limbs, feral children, corpses and the frozen snow. The Stalingrad section ends in a long dream sequence after Aue has been shot in the head. He recovers. I think. Later, based in Berlin, he is involved in an attempted reorganisation of the camps, which he visits like a sleepwalker, ineffectual as a breeze. Too many inmates are dying before they have been sufficiently utilised for slave labour. His sister, with whom he is still besotted, visits. He goes to France. To see his mother and step father. There are strange twins there. Something happens. He flees.

Aue convinces at first, and for a long time. He is an educated reasonable man. Cultured. He likes and knows his music and his books. He has that eyebrow-raising incestuous childhood behind him, and a liking for being fucked for all the wrong reasons. But he’s basically explicable. He’s not a psychopath. It won’t do to call him a monster. And yet. And yet he is patently insane. There are great arguments to be had about this. I can make I believe a good case that for most of the book Aue is in fact dead. I can make another similar though probably contradictory one about his ubiquitous friend Thomas. There is a great deal of doubt (and Littell names people with care) about the very existence of Thomas at all. Certainly the twins, and the detectives who pursue Aue through a collapsing Reich, and the absurd Bond villain Dr Mandlebrot and his interchangeable female blonde bodyguards, all seem as though they could just as well be products of a fever. But this fever is purposeful. You feel its usefulness. It may be the only possible response to the facts.

It’s a fever I soon shared. Infected by the prose, the most unreasonable things became not reasonable but inevitable to me. How else, I kept on thinking. How else could it have played out? These are humans after all. On all sides. In Kilkee I was miserable. The stones seemed stupid and the ocean was just a sea and everywhere there were people who seemed not to be thinking about the Nazis. I wanted to visit the house in Kilaroe, but I couldn’t, and no one remembered anything about it. I went to the golf club to use their WiFi and drove my sister’s boyfriend to Limerick for the train and the next day I got up early and took a bus there and took the same train myself, back to Dublin, and my head was full of wartime travel, which was nothing like the travel I was experiencing, and my imagination was worse than reality or in any case they were misaligned to such an extent that I was discomforted and raw and I read all the way about Aue and the corpses, the corpses and the mud and the smell.

There is a lot in this book, more than I had expected. Much of it is hard to fathom. By which I mean not that it’s hard to understand, but that it is, almost minutely, wrong somehow. Off. I don’t mean that Littell is off. I mean that Aue is. What is happening to him, to everyone, is of course - to understate it absurdly - a little bit off . But it is more than that. There is a crack here, a crack in the glass of this story, in the perspective. Our perspective. We are here in our century, with our assumptions, our memorials and our veneer of wisdom, and we have the facts at our disposal. And the facts are simply not enough. The Kindly Ones gives the facts back their distortion, the outrageousness of their existence, their human obscenity. Littell has done something that is a sort of dream for fiction writers - he makes the reader scared of the book. Not just what is in the book. Not just the horror of the Ukrainian forests or the ruins of Stalingrad or the stench of the camps. But scared of the book itself.

It’s Aue. It’s his character. His perspective. It’s the uncanny feeling of liking him, and finding him sometimes honourable (relatively, and then noticing the relativism) and of trying to find for him an alcove in all this badly organised evil in which he can somehow minimise his exposure, his responsibility. And of knowing simultaneously that he is dangerous, unhinged, incontrovertibly guilty. He talks (at length) about right and wrong. Performing one’s duty. Knowing when something is wrong and doing it anyway, and being no less culpable when you don’t know. He is, as you would expect, deeply concerned with notions of responsibility and recklessness, kindness and cruelty. He writhes in and out of all this on his own and in conversations with his friends. Civilised conversations over ersatz coffee, schnapps. But still the killing continues, on a scale that lends to everything an air of absurdity and bathos which undermines all talk, all attempts to drape his life and his actions in the guise of ancient, perpetual arguments. But our perspective is Aue. It’s his shoulder we stand at. And we are allowed to lean on his learning and his thinking and his education and his manners. And while we stick with him and test our moral courage, other perspectives fall unnamed into mass graves and he watches them die or remain alive as the soil is dumped on them, and he wonders abstractedly how else it could have played out. How else it might have been. Perhaps next time, if the organisation is better … And what else can a man possibly become, in such a world, other than deranged?

Even in the small world of the book, standing in for the large world of what happened, it is possible to feel some of the derangement. Involved in it. In reader form, as it were. It’s a creative alliance with the writer. If the circumstances are right, and you allow it. If you are for example in an empty house in west Dublin watching the military documentary channel all day long. In what looks superficially like a concern for authenticity, the narrative of The Kindly Ones is thorough, dry, direct, plodding. Often it is plodding. Aue describes his life as you might describe symptoms. And Littell has the confidence and wisdom to allow him to be, for really quite long periods, boring. I felt a shock like a poke in the arm, a hand on the skin of my arm, when I found myself for the first time wondering idly how long it would be before the next massacre, the next “action”, the next war crime to excite my revulsion. Why exactly are you reading this book? You’ve found a kick in here? Really? Aue’s narration reminded me sometimes of American Psycho . More subtle, none of the comedy. But the same dreadful threat of swallowed hysteria as Bateman’s. That bubbling nausea. The horror, then the banal, then the horror, then the banal. Until each becomes a relief from the other.

And if reading is about self exploration (and maybe it is - lying there in bed with your free hand stuck in your underwear, and your ego busy placing your self in the story, fretting a continual What would I do? ) then the upshot of this bloody marathon was my realisation that cowering little fuckers like me, in less cosseted and comfortable circumstances - in war in other words, or in its wide and blasted hinterland - wouldn’t last five minutes. Either literally or morally, it doesn’t matter.

The Kindly Ones is one of those rare books whose tone is so precisely appropriate to its content that a sort of harmonic other is created, a shimmer above the text, that has you accepting the narrative inevitability of what you’re reading while simultaneously not quite believing a word of it. And your doubt is doubled, as it turns back on itself with self recrimination about your ability to remain above all this, to be certain of your moral shape when you suspect - you know - that you would melt just as grotesquely as Aue, were the flames to approach you, even now. The effect is one of a creepy dream state, threatening, a half awake nightmare, over-tired glimpses of strange, disturbing scenes which you feel guilty for seeing, and ashamed of understanding. And you begin to know that the only way this level of involvement with this amount of slaughter could possibly have been experienced in reality is as a nightmare, with the same disorientation, the same neurotic concern with things that really do not matter. How can a man oversee and partake in the murder of entire populations, daily, other than by pretending he is doing something else? Like organising labour, moving units around a railway system, allocating resources to munitions factories, meeting clearance targets, reading a novel. The bureaucracy, the incriminating paper trail, the bizarre souvenir photograph albums created by soldiers involved directly in the killing, are perhaps not so unbelievable when you consider them not as documents of the crimes, but distractions from the crimes. Insane alibis. It was not, they seek to say, what it looks like. It was more. It was worse. It was easy.

There are sections of the book which have lodged fast in my mind - the long dream sequence in Stalingrad; a similarly fevered but more focussed episode at his sister’s deserted house in Pomerania; the long trek in and out of the front line with Thomas in their attempt to get back to Berlin, and the terrifying children who accompany them; the last pages, including the encounter with Hitler in the bunker - which provided me with one of the most surprising laughs I’ve ever had - to the U-Bahn tracks, to the zoo, and Aue’s final act of self demolition (or, if you prefer Thomas as Dostoyevskian double, self restoration).

It’s a marathon, and there are moments, when you are lost in page after page of interminable detail about the logistics of labour organisation or the arguments about linguistics and racial determination, that you may feel like abandoning the whole thing. But there is purpose in Littell’s insistence on making this seem like a document, and it lies in Aue’s insistence that it is somehow honest because it includes the horror. Perspective, again. Our early 21st century perspective, distant but, we like to think, fully informed. We have memorials, minutes of silence, visitor’s centres. We weep for the victims, because it is easy to imagine being one of them. It’s hard then, but useful, at this stage, to have our attention directed towards the perpetrators of evil rather than towards the victims. Isn’t it? What’s to be learned in a consideration of how much we could bear this sort of suffering? A lot, a little, none, who knows? A catastrophe could befall any of us. Could befall our loved ones, our families. We would last as long as we last, confused, terrified, suffering, appalled, and that would be that. But the extent to which we could imagine inflicting this sort of suffering - facilitating it, allowing it, watching it, justifying it, living with it - that is hard. But it is important. Is it possible that we ourselves, you, I, given the wrong circumstances, could bear being the catastrophe?

Yes. Easy.

There is an inland village in the county of Clare called Kilaroe. And it is not really a village so much as a post office and a primary school, a pub and a two pump garage with attached mini-market, shared between the town-lands of Alva and Rahaniska. The post office has been the subject of a continuous row since 1992 - a row that has made the national phone-in shows and once the television news - and the public windows are footnoted with posters demanding it be saved, and insisting that everyone, everyone, needs to cherish rural Ireland.

When I was a boy holidaying every year on the coast nearby, there were stories about a house in Kilaroe. The house was about a mile from the village, in Alva, an usual part of Clare packed with dense small hills where little woods nestle in the dips, and bits of streams cough and splutter by the roads like wounds. It’s not like Clare at all.

The house was a bungalow, or it was an ordinary two storey. It was a 1950s purpose build of peculiar design with secret rooms and tunnels into the fields, or it was an old farmhouse from famine times, converted and expanded. It had been occupied since 1947, or 1956, or 1963, by a foreign couple who were said to have at least two sons, possibly three. The rumours changed as I grew older. Or rather, as I grew older I was admitted further along the path of suspicion, trusted with more complicated articulations of what was basically distrust.

What I first heard was that it was a haunted house. That ghostly figures could be seen at the windows. Strange sounds emanated from it at night - howls and screams and silences. Then I was told about a murder. One of the sons had killed a girl in the attic. Or in the kitchen. Or he had killed a boy. Or he had killed one of his brothers, and hence the confusion about their number. And maybe it was haunted, and maybe it wasn’t, but it was a house of evil, and you could feel the pulse of it if you walked by on the road. Then when I was in my early teens I heard that all of that was nonsense, deliberately put about to scare off the children, and that the house was a brothel, that a red light burned in an upstairs window, and there were no sons, just “daughters”, and the place was notorious but discreet and tolerated, even valued. A year or so later, and that theory seemed immature, silly, naive. The man of the house was a criminal. But he was no mere brothel keeper. He was a big, international criminal. He was a smuggler, obviously, but also a counterfeiter and jewel thief. He was wanted by police forces all over the world, but who would think to look in Co. Clare? But no, that was nonsense too. That was movie nonsense. He was an IRA man. He wasn’t a foreigner at all, he was from Ennis, and he was one of the men behind Guildford, and Birmingham, and he had slipped out the door at Balcombe Street and there was a bomb factory in the barn, and sometimes cars arrived from the north in the early hours and hooded men were bundled into the house and later, shots could be heard in the woods.

When I was about seventeen I heard that the man was a Nazi. At first I think he was supposed to be a Nazi like the ones in The Odessa File and The Boys From Brazil . He had the a swastika button on the reverse of his lapel. A portrait of the Führer  hung over the fireplace. He plotted long into the night about how to get it right next time. But the story mellowed over the years. He was an old man. An old fugitive. He had changed his name and he lived like a recluse and his wife was a haunted woman and they were prisoners of their own fear and shame and so much time had passed and how could such things be addressed, here of all places, and really they were only to be pitied.

Much later, I heard that he’d died. And that his widow had sold the house and returned to Germany, where she had lived another couple of years somewhere in Bavaria, and that one of the sons still visited Clare every summer and could often be seen swimming in the Pollock Holes in Kilkee, where the wags called him Adolf, which he didn’t seem to mind.

I believed every version of the story about the house. Every version seemed completely convincing and true until I heard the one that superseded it. The last story I heard was that he was a Nazi, and I have sought no further clarification. I like the idea. I like the idea of an old Nazi living out his life in a peculiar house in a quiet and peculiar place on the edge of Europe, baffled and ashamed or defiant and bitter - it doesn’t really matter. Clare is a place that reels from terrible things, so old that they are barely named, so hard to imagine that they survive by haunting, and there is nowhere in its landscape that is not infused with oddness and a quiet sleepy violence - a delicious sort of threat. And it is an impossible fact but whatever happened here happened everywhere, and whatever happened everywhere happened here, and so it is with books, and so it is with stories and rumours and the past.

When you swim in the Pollock Holes you can see a lip of rocks at eye level, and beyond you can see the Atlantic and its waves and the cliffs in the distance and storms passing north or south on the horizon, and it is all colossal,  and you can feel - it is possible to feel - either that you are nothing at all, or that you are lucky.

Faber have begun to publish their series of the complete works of Beckett in newly edited editions and in a "unified design".  And they look good. Rhys Tranter, who runs the wonderful A Piece Of Monologue site has kindly tipped me off that on the back of the new edition of Mercier And Camier is a quote from me. This is a lovely thing. It makes me feel quite pleased with myself. No no, Sam, please, don’t thank me, I’m happy to help.

I’d like to think that Faber have used me in an attempt to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. It’s more likely that I’m the only writer who’s ever bothered to write anything about Mercier And Camier and they had no choice. The quote is from an article I wrote for The Guardian ages ago, and you can read it in full here .

It’s been raining now for eleven days. Small Ellen went yesterday to see her uncle, who lives near the west gate. She endured the admonishments he likes to deliver, and returned to us with seven silver coins and a porcelain bowl. We got nearly forty silver coins for the bowl from Hagger. Small Ellen demanded a meal at Stintow, and who were we to argue. She had two deserts. Last night we slept in the hotel by the curved church. The beds were soft and cool and the water we washed with was clean.

Today Flum killed a policeman. It was a mistake. We are running now and have no disguise. All the city’s signals are flashing and we are at the mercy of the wide walls and the narrow gates. Small Ellen has a cough. I fear the worst.

In London since last Thursday the sky has been unbroken blue. I’ve been going out to watch the sun set. At night I have seen the stars. The noise is of traffic and people. For once, there is no airplane noise. The city is a little calmer, a little more lovely. On Saturday while I was walking, I took photographs of the sky. I saw others doing the same, shyly, in the way that people get the cameras out when it’s snowing. It’s a nice feeling.

If we’re lucky - I mean if mankind is lucky - then we are living during the time when the planet is at its dirtiest, noisiest, most polluted. In a few generations time people will either be living in a cleaner better place, or they’ll be clambering over each other for higher ground, cooler latitudes, clean water, food. It’s a little annoying - to think that you are living either in the worst of times, or the end of times.

Eyjafjallajoekull has done us a favour. It’s a neat, relatively painless but still dramatic reminder that we live on a planet. You know. A big blob of rock and water floating in space. You might live in a nice house, in a sophisticated city, in a rich western country, with a pension and broadband and a credit card. But you’re hurtling through the universe, sustained by a delicate mixture of gases, protected by a paper thin atmosphere, in a narrow band of temperature between a hot death and a cold death, on a planet that is changing, moody, impermanent, given to outbursts of violence and driven by complicated systems of self regulation that don’t include our well being in their calculations. We’re all of us hanging by a thread. Or several threads, I suppose. The thread of unlimited cheap air travel, available at the drop of a hat, seems a bit frayed. It probably won’t snap, not yet, and over the next few days they’ll tie a knot in it and we’ll all be back on Ryan Air, complaining about the fact that they take us all the way across Europe in an afternoon, for the price of a new shirt, but don’t quite take us to the door of our hotel and want us to pay them for a sandwich.

We don’t know we’re born.

A French film production of my first novel The Long Falling starts principle photography in Northern France and Belgium this week. It’s directed by Martin Provost , who made Séraphine , which starred Yolande Moreau - who also takes the main role in the new film. The two of them have, as I understand it, been the driving force behind getting this project - a difficult sell, I’d have thought - off the ground. The novel has been adapted to a French/Belgian setting, and names and other things (including the title) will change considerably. I don’t know anything about the adaptation. I didn’t want to, and didn’t ask. But these are talented film makers, and I’m very glad it’s them, and I wish them well.

I’ve lost count of the number of times books of mine have been optioned over the years. The first time it happened I took a deep breath, thought about the money, and tried to keep a close eye on what they were up to. But I soon realised that film options are a weird sort of futures trading and have little to do with the actual business (never mind the art) of making actual films. It has become quite a welcome, modest, source of income for me. Film makers get in touch, offer money to have exclusive rights to try and develop a script and raise more money to film it, I say yes, they pay me, and then they can’t get it together and after a year is up, maybe even two, they disappear. Suits me.

It suits me because I don’t really want anyone to film my books. They are books. Novels, mostly. Complete unto themselves. They are not blueprints for art in another medium. Why can’t film makers just make films? Do they not have ideas of their own? It puzzles me. Making art might be thought of as a sort of elaborate, public cleansing ritual. It’s odd and unsettling to have some guy come along and climb into your dirty bathwater.

And I can’t be the only reader who gets pissed off when Hollywood comes stamping all over a novel that means something to me. When I love a book, I dread - and I really do mean dread - that some bastard will film it. And worse, that the film will be a commercial success. That characters and scenes and ideas that are alive inside me in complex non visual ways involving language and tone and a carefully, skilfully evoked atmosphere, will turn up as squashed, horrible, crushed reductions all over the television or the radio or the sides of buses.

Most recently for example, The Road . I have no idea if it’s a good film or not. I really don’t care. The point is that that man and his son have lived in my head since I read the book, and my emotional attachment to them, and to it, is so deep and genuinely meaningful to me, that the bits of clips that I glimpsed before I could hit the remote, the bits of useless special effects that suddenly appeared on the TV during ad breaks before I realised what it was, the face of Vigo Mortensen being anguished on posters, have - despite my vigilance - somewhat spoiled the life of the book in my memory. Where it lives as a world, a feeling, built on the language of Cormac McCarthy and the material of my own imagination and experience, and where it should be allowed to live on - without being subjected to a jarring translation into mundane specifics.

Next year, god help us, we get the Tintin films. You have no idea how depressed this makes me. Really. When I was about eight, my Dad bought me a copy of The Black Island in Dublin city centre. I read it in the car on the way home and it changed my life. Seriously. During my teens I learned more from Hergé about how to write than I did from any other writer. (For a superb account of just how good the Tintin books really are, I can thoroughly recommend Tom McCarthy’s Tintin And The Secret Of Literature .) And I lived in those books. Part of me still lives in them. To this day, when I take to my bed, it’s The Calculus Affair, Tintin In Tibet, The Seven Crystal Balls , that I take with me. Most of all it’s The Castafiore Emerald - one of the very few almost perfect books - that sustains my imaginative life. I have smuggled bits of Hergé into every novel I’ve written. Sometimes people notice, and it thrills me.

My point though, is simply that the boy detective and his friends are fully alive in my imagination. They live and breathe and speak there, and the colours of their world and the tones of their voices, though not fixed, move within an orbit created by the skill of Hergé as a writer and an artist, and by my own experience of reading about them, and my childhood and my youth and my life, and that inner world is precious to me, completely precious and valued and loved; and next year, with a deluge of advertising, breakfast cereals, action figures and nauseating celebrity interviews, that bastard Stephen Spielberg is going to fuck it all up, and no matter how much I try to isolate myself and ignore the whole horrible thing, my beautiful inner world is going to be violated by Jamie fucking Billy Elliot Bell and Andy fucking Gollum Serkis, and Nick fucking Frost and Simon fucking Pegg. And even if these people (all of whom I, annoyingly, quite like) create something marvellous, it won’t be my marvellous - the one me and Hergé created - and I’d really rather that the whole project was hit by a shooting star, an Inca curse, something, anything, that shut it down now and forever.

I’m not sure there’s anyone quite as emotionally invested in The Long Falling as I am in the Tintin books. But I know there are people to whom it means a great deal. I hope you won’t mind the film too much. If you think you will, I hope you can avoid it. I’m sure that won’t hit the takings too much.

The truth is that I needed the money. And I am sufficiently removed from the book that it doesn’t tug at me at all. To be honest, I can’t remember much of it. If I watch it (and I suppose I will at some point) I probably won’t be able to spot many of the changes. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of intrigued at the idea of a bunch of people running around the Belgian countryside acting out scenes I imagined all those years ago. And I love Grace, and I hope they realise that …

Actually, it seems that it does tug at me. Because I remember things now that I had forgotten. Maybe I won’t watch it. I don’t know. I really don’t.

If I was rich, I wouldn’t allow anyone to make films of my books. But I’m not. Sorry about that.

This morning, two letters. One is from the Pope to the people of Ireland. You can read about that vacuity elsewhere. The other is from me to the Diocese of Westminster, formally declaring my defection from the Catholic Church. The timing is entirely coincidental, but I like it.

It’s a very long time since I was anything other than a relaxed, contented atheist. I avoid religious ceremonies of all kinds as much as I can, and have tried to be ecumenical in my anti-religious thinking. But, I’m Irish. I was baptised into the Catholic Church. I was educated at a Jesuit school from the age of 8 to the age of 18. I received communion and was confirmed into the Catholic Church. I went to a Catholic University. It’s hardly surprising if most of my atheism is, so to speak, Catholic atheism.

While I haven’t claimed the Catholic Church as mine since I was a teenager, the Catholic Church continues to claim me. And you, if you received a Catholic baptism. The superb and straightforward website www.CountMeOut.ie explains how the Church continues to count us, the baptised but long gone, amongst its congregation. And it helpfully provides the resources for putting an end to this by formally ‘defecting’ from the Church. Though focussed on people in Ireland, it will be useful to Catholics anywhere who don’t want to be counted as Catholic any more. In my own case for example I printed off a PDF they supply, and addressed it to the diocesan office where I am resident along with a cover letter I wrote myself. In due course, I expect, some poor, miserable priest whose job it is to deal with the hell-bound, will write to me with a confirmation that I am no longer a Catholic.

I probably would never have bothered doing this if it wasn’t for my unfocussed feeling of disgust and anger over the recent child abuse scandals. Defection is a small but practical stand against what would otherwise be a detached, distant horror. And I can’t really think of a better word for the widespread rape and sexual abuse of children by priests of the Catholic Church, which has been, over generations, systematically covered up by the hierarchy of the church, up to and including the current Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. (For a decent summary of just how entangled Ratzinger is in this, have a read of Christopher Hitchens. ) This cover up involved moving rapists and abusers around rather than reporting them to the civil authorities. As a result it led to the creation of more and more victims, and more and more suffering. This litany of facts, which reads at first like the berserk plot of a particularly distasteful Dan Brown novel, is now so well established and documented that I frankly, honestly, cannot understand how little has been done about it. I cannot understand why many bishops in Ireland remain in their jobs. I cannot understand why they, and others, including Sean Brady, have not been arrested on suspicion of, at the very least, not reporting a crime. I am baffled as to why an international police investigation has not been launched. I genuinely don’t understand it. The Catholic Church hierarchy is morally vacuous. As Johann Hari has pointed out , if it it were any other sort of organisation, it would not be tolerated. It would have been shut down.

If you received a Catholic baptism and are now an atheist, or a person of no religious beliefs, or a ‘lapsed Catholic’, I hope you’ll think about defecting via www.CountMeOut.ie . If you remain a Catholic, please, at the next mass you attend, when you recite the Nicene Creed, consider the line We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church and consider the implications of your personal solemn endorsement, given what the Church has been involved with in your lifetime. If you still wish to stand up and proclaim your faith in it, then shame on you.

“Have you a library?”
“We have two: one for film and one for music. I am in charge of the latter.”
“What about books?”
“Books?”

I read it first I think when I was in my late teens. It is coupled in my memory with Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers , and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect I must have read them at the same time, or one after the other, or perhaps Burgess’s endorsement of Alasdair Gray got me to Lanark (“Gray is the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott”). Anyway. Earthly Powers has some explicit gay sex scenes, and Lanark confused me. So one of them was regularly consulted and the other was read once, fast, and I wasn’t sure that it had fully settled in me.

Lanark was too disturbed to feel the tears on his face. He said,
“You don’t know me. I’m not called Thaw. I’ve been none of these things. I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt.”

And although reading it now is much like reading it for the first time, there are scenes and lines that are suddenly, acutely, familiar; and I have had the occasional nagging sense that ideas in it have found their way into my own work. Though I may be mistaking being human for being a writer. It’s a book full of recognition. I’m like that . Or, I know someone who does that . Or - this is the way it works .

Duncan shut his mouth. After a few minutes Mr. Thaw said on a note of pleading,
“Tell me the matter, Duncan.”
“I had a wish to be an artist. Was that not mad of me? I had this work of art I wanted to make, don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know; something epic, mibby, with the variety of facts and the clarity of fancies and all of it seen in pictures with a queer morbid intense colour of their own, mibby a gigantic mural or illustrated book or even a film. I didn’t know what it would have been, but I knew how to get ready to make it. I had to read poetry and hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint. I had to learn how things and people felt and were made and behaved and how the human body worked, and its appearance and proportions in different situations. In fact, I had to eat the bloody moon!”

A quick summary … is difficult. There are four Books, and they are presented to us in the order 3, 1, 2, 4. Books 1 and 2 form a structurally straightforward, realist account of the short life of Duncan Thaw from boyhood to early adulthood in and around Glasgow. He wants to be an artist. He is doomed. Books 3 and 4 bracket this conventional narrative with the peculiar adventures of Lanark, a version of Thaw in a version of Glasgow called Unthank - and other places - that is fantastical and absurd and which echoes what we know with the grotesque distortion of what we suspect. Lanark wants sunlight and love. He is doomed.

Lanark ran to his bed, grabbed the radio and flicked the switch; he said, “Get Dr. Munro! Get me Dr. Munro!”
A small clear voice said, “Who is speaking, please?”
“I’m called Lanark.”
“Dr. Lanark?”
“No! No! I’m a patient, but a man is dying!”
“Dying naturally?”
“Yes, dying, dying!”
He heard the voice say. “Will Dr. Munro report quickly to Dr. Lanark, a man is dying naturally; I repeat, a man is dying naturally.”

It’s often funny. Earnest young men usually are. And it’s an easy, relaxed read, despite its length and the peculiarity of the structure. Things happen. People talk. It fairly gallops along. It’s full of bits you’ll want to mark and come back to. It’s quotable. And it has Gray’s own beautiful bookplates to ruin your eyesight on.

Like a lot of readers, I am moved more by the story of Duncan Thaw than I am by the rest of it. I find it impossible to read of the death of Mrs Thaw without weeping. And I love Mr Thaw. I love his good sense and his dignity, and his patience with his son. I love his love. Thaw himself is a pain in the arse of course, but my god, he’ll break your heart. And he is, more than Lanark, the emotional centre of the book. He’s where the reader stands. This reader anyway. Despite the fact that his life is narrated to Lanark, and that Lanark is the container, it is Thaw that makes sense to me. The book insists that what we understand about Thaw is bracketed by what we don’t understand about Lanark. It is from the sunless confusion of Unthank, up to the familiar streets of Glasgow, and then back down again, that the book and the reader moves.

I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can.

But I can’t really get along with Unthank, the Institute, Provan, the Council - all the elaborate architecture that exists in Books 3 and 4, and which seems ultimately, to me, to do not much more than elucidate by deprivation what we get from books 1 and 2. As with all delineated fantasy a fair bit of time is spent on exposition. Time spent explaining a metaphor is time spent weakening it. The best bits of 3 and 4 are the formless, drifting intuitions and impressionistic resignations of Lanark. When he simply falls into a sad acceptance that he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, and that it isn’t fair. Which is when he is mostly Thaw. Sometimes you get the feeling that his (Thaw’s, Lanark’s and Gray’s) fear of women might derail things completely, or that the voluble self-conscious nervousness about everything will swamp us. The trouble taken to get him into politics towards the end, and have him attend the Council assembly in Provan, feels to me less like a nod to Kafka and more like a kind of epileptic fit to him. It does create a powerful pathos, finally, but it seems like an over amplified insistence on universality, on extrapolating the cruelties of Thaw’s small world into a larger one.

“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eighteenth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness.”

I have a dim memory of feeling that Books 3 and 4 were over my head the first time I read them. Now though I get the sense that Unthank is half vision of the messy innards of the capitalist mistake, and half a topography of Gray’s own lack of confidence. Because there’s too much of it, for me. And it’s too clever - its contrivances laid bare and pointed at are contrivances nevertheless. There is too much elaboration and emphasis. By the time Gray himself appears, as Nastler, the king, to tell Lanark how it’s all going to end, and to parade his “Index of Plagiarisms” (they are no such thing), I’d had about enough.

Which is probably why Gray brings it all to a halt not long after. It’s too fine a book, and he is too skilled a story teller, to ever actually lose the reader. And in any case, he anticipates and undermines this sort of criticism, sometimes by directly making it himself, from inside the text, more often through his wonderful sense of pace and timing and tone. Lanark is persistently engaging. For a book that is 560 pages long, written over the best part of 30 years, that is some achievement.

And make no mistake. I’m the man who climbs a mountain and is moved to tears by the view but complains then about the ache in his knees. Lanark is one of the great books. There is nothing comparable really. Idiosyncratic and berserk, it swells in my nit-picking consciousness with a generosity of spirit and an ache of love and sadness that did, it seems, after all, settle in me all those years ago, hidden, like a piece of advice, waiting for me to be old and broken down enough to hear it.

And it’s what Thaw, and Lanark, and Gray are really interested in and long for - kindness, fairness, and love - that Lanark delivers. Gray’s socialism and his furious compassion for people animate this book. It’s full to bursting, but with a very calm centre, and if there are stutters and hesitations and missteps, Gray is well aware of them, and they are honest and involving. And Lanark trips through this clutter of obstacles and doubts and diversions, and emerges as a bright, sunlit memorial to the ideas of art and decency and generosity and love. And when all that fails - as it inevitably does -  we are left at least with the hope of “annihilating sweetness.”

I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of a life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?