TRAVELS IN THE SCRIPTORIUM
by Paul Auster
Faber ₤12.99, 132 pages

Paul Auster’s fiction has always been self-referential. Travels in the Scriptorium, his latest novella, takes this attribute to new heights. This is one for Auster aficionados.

“The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed,” the book begins, “palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor.” His name is Mr Blank. The objects around him - table, lamp, wall - are labelled with strips of white tape. A surveillance camera captures his every move, while a microphone records every utterance. “Who is he? What is he doing here? When did he arrive and how long will he remain?” the narrator asks, as if readers were incapable of asking such questions.

On the desk are two manuscripts and a pile of photographs of vaguely familiar people. The phone rings. A man calling himself James Flood asks to see Mr Blank. The old man agrees, reluctantly.

While waiting for Flood to appear, Mr Blank is visited by his carer, Anna, who feeds, bathes and dresses him. She also provides quick sexual release. “You’re so good to me,” he says. “I want you to be happy,” she replies. But a hazy form of guilt stirs within him. “I’ve done something terrible to you. I don’t know what it is, but something terrible... beyond forgiveness.” “You did what you had to do,” she replies, “and I don’t hold it against you.” In passing she mentions other names - David Zimmer, Peter Stillman - that Mr Blank, his mind addled by pills, appears to recognise.

Mr Blank’s attention turns to one of the manuscripts on the desk, an unfinished tale by a certain John Trause. Flood arrives, demanding to know about someone called Fanshawe who wrote a book in which Flood was an incidental character. Fanshawe was, Flood says, one of Mr Blank’s “operatives”. “You mean someone I sent out on a mission?” Mr Blank asks. “An extremely perilous mission,” Flood replies.

Mr Blank’s doctor, Samuel Farr, pays a visit next. Then comes Sophie (who was once married to the writer known as Fanshawe). Finally, Mr Blank’s lawyer appears: “I’m Quinn... your first operative.” Quinn reveals that Mr Blank is locked in the room because charges have been filed against him for offences ranging from defamation of character to first-degree murder. Many people, among them a certain Benjamin Sachs, hold a grudge against him.

When Quinn leaves, Mr Blank flicks through the second manuscript on the desk called Travels in the Scriptorium, by one N.R. Fanshawe. “The old man sits on the edge of the narrow bed,” it begins, “palms spread out on his knees, head down, staring at the floor... “

There is something of Italo Calvino’s The Non-existent Knight in this post-modern twist, though here Auster lacks Calvino’s joyful storytelling zest. There are echoes of Krapp’s Last Tape, by Samuel Beckett, though we are deprived of Beckett’s tightness and precision.

Auster has always rewarded his fans by making them feel clever. He turns assiduous readers into detectives, dropping clues (and planting red herrings) that link his books in a complex and self-perpetuating web of allusions. Yet even someone unfamiliar with Auster’s earlier work will realise, soon enough, that Travels in the Scriptorium is an elaborate in-joke.

For isn’t Anna, Mr Blank’s considerate carer, the heroine in Auster’s In the Country of Last Things? And didn’t Farr, the doctor, also play a part in that novel? David Zimmer is Anna’s husband in that same book and he is the protagonist of Moon Palace. Mr Blank’s lawyer, Quinn, is the ersatz detective in City of Glass, while the name Peter Stillman applies to two characters, father and son, whose history Quinn agrees to investigate. John Trause, author of the unfinished manuscript read by Mr Blank, is the elderly writer in Oracle Night. Benjamin Sachs is the central figure in Leviathan. Fanshawe is the missing writer whose identity is usurped by the narrator in The Locked Room.

The novel’s title is reminiscent of Voyage Around my Room, Xavier de Maistre’s 18th-century mock-philosophical treatise. But Travels in the Scriptorium comes across as an earnest philosophical statement about storytelling and the author’s fate. Here is the novelist, old and confused, held to account by his own characters. The ultimate punishment is to find himself forever locked within his own work.

“Without him, we are nothing,” the novelist’s own creation writes, “but the paradox is that we, the figments of another mind, will outlive the mind that made us, for once we are thrown into the world, we continue to exist forever, and our stories go on being told, even after we are dead.” Luigi Pirandello said as much 75 years ago, though his play Six Characters in Search of an Author was less contrived and far less self-indulgent.