Desperate parable on a lost utopia

THE imitator or maker of an image knows "nothing of existence", says Socrates in Plato's Republic: "He knows appearances only."

Illustration: Michael Perkins

THE imitator or maker of an image knows "nothing of existence", says Socrates in Plato's Republic: "He knows appearances only."

The Greek is speaking of Homer here, but similar criticism has been levelled at writers and artists of all kinds in the millennia since: that they copy images, for instance of virtue, without knowing the truth of virtue, without knowing it in reality.

Plato and his proxies suggest it is our everyday world in which authentic experience is found. We get closer to the truth of a chair, its quiddity, or thisness by making one. We understand physical passion through the touch of another. We know the pains and pleasures of motherhood by bearing a child.

But where would authenticity reside in a society where such experience is known only at second hand, through chain stores, internet pornography, in-vitro fertilisation treatments? The answers put forward in Michael Collins's seventh novel are deeply unsettling and their logic is pursued remorselessly to bitter ends.

In Midnight in a Perfect Life, an author known for the bleakness of his fictional investigations enters darker territory still. Narrator Karl is a 40-year-old writer whose youthful success has dribbled away with the years. His third novel grows more ambitious as the likelihood of its completion recedes. He calls it the Opus and knows it is terminally stalled. Short of money, he has taken to moonlighting for fetish websites and art magazines. His only recent success has been the ghosting of a once-feted writer's noir thriller.

Karl needs money because the alarm of his wife's biological clock has gone off. Lori, who is three years older than Karl, cuts a pitiable figure. She describes herself as damaged goods and is literally so, since a botched abortion in early life has made natural conception almost impossible for her. Fertility treatments are expensive, however, and she is the main breadwinner.

But Karl has already taken out a line of credit on their condo, a "glass cage" whose soundless elevation, high above Chicago's urban bustle, is emblematic of their middle-class alienation. Even though the money was used to pay his mother's nursing home bills, his admission, made to the reader before Lori learns of it, is just the first of many asides that suggest that he is not to be relied on.

Whether it is as a man we should mistrust him or as a narrative voice, or both, is a conundrum that gets only more intricate as the pages pass. Karl would have us believe the waning of his creative powers has left him weakened and depressed, not his full and decent former self. Yet the lack of empathy he shows in relation to Lori and her need for a child is closer to a sociopathic fugue.

I . . . understood that this was more than just a yearning in her, it was something deeply biological . . . hardwired millennia ago. It was the kind of yearning that drove migration, that sent salmon swimming against currents, the kind of bewildering mating spectacle you saw on cable TV, the ardour of a black widow drawing her mate to union then killing him post coitus.

Just as in 1992's The Resurrectionists, Collins's protagonist emerges from the smoking crater of family life. We come to understand that Karl's attitudes are coloured by his own father's money troubles, infidelities and eventually his suicide: a death perhaps inspired by a murder he committed.

Karl's first two novels mined the vein of his past, the dark muse who was his father. But his present situation demands a reckoning of which he is not capable. When his agent offers him a commission to write about Lori's IVF treatment, he reluctantly accepts. Yet Karl's disgust with Lori's "zealot's earnestness", her doctor's hocus-pocus incantation of esoteric medical terminology, precludes even this effort.

He claims his talent has been "eclipsed by bad conscience".

Instead, he moves to a bohemian sublet in a mainly homosexual precinct of the city in an effort to reconnect with the world. It is a move that damages his relationship with Lori and threatens his sanity, too. He becomes obsessed by a murdered girl whom he interviewed for a magazine on the day of her death. And he is equally fascinated by a beautiful hermaphrodite who performs daily for a webcam in an apartment across the way.

When the reclusive author whose last novel Karl ghosted renews contact, the pair embarks on a project that mixes these real figures with the plot of a new crime fiction. The senior writer seems to be egging him on, to act rather than write: to make some savage gesture against the age and his emasculated status as a poorly paid writer and a man. Whether Karl is an idealist whose cynicism is a defence against feelings of inferiority or a cold-blooded inheritor of his father's genes comes to seem less important than the insights he wins along the way by adopting these masks. The tangle of plots and subplots, the tracking back and forth in time, the push and pull of his relationship with Lori all tighten around the Gordian knot of the present: an era of escapist kitsch, whose central text (according to Karl) is Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie.

Karl's philosophy is dire, mercilessly so. It recalls French author Michel Houellebecq's misanthropy without its accompanying exuberance. At one point Karl quotes a character saying of America -- "the greatest democracy in the world" -- that it is a place where you could say anything you wanted, except that nobody was listening. But the dreary paradise our narrator decries could surely be anywhere in the developed world.

Hyper-reality is the term contemporary thinkers use to describe the failure of consciousness to distinguish between fantasy and reality in a world where media and technology are constantly reshaping reality. And it is that failure which, Karl suggests, divides our democracies from the utopian model Plato outlined 2500 years ago.

By embedding this idea in a sad and solitary mind and setting it in motion, Collins has given us a desolate parable on the dangers of losing our grasp of the authentic. What irony, though, that the task of truth-telling should fall, once again, to one of Homer's depthless image-makers.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.