Fiction: Living in the German Democratic Republic before the Wall came down, Stefan Vogel, the hero of James Lasdun's Seven Lies, is a man born into compromise.
Duplicity is his natural mode of existence, beginning with the relationship with his mother - a scheming former aristocrat whose bourgeois values sit perfectly in the agreed fictions of the upper echelons of the Party. When she decides that he is the poet-intellectual of the family he adopts the role, putting it on as a mask that gradually attaches itself to his face in a permanent way without ever actually belonging.
There are smaller lies all along the road but this is the first big lie of his life. It involves him in sexual humiliation, a duplicity that becomes a career, and ultimately in betrayal.
When Vogel begins to write a memoir, part of a desire to "exorcise the past", we are never led to expect that we will be told everything. The memoir is for his wife to publish after his death, therefore withholding will play the same part in his truth-telling as it plays in fiction. Other characters too tell their life stories in various half-truths or lies, but from the outset we are aware that the book is a fictional memoir about a fictional memoir, a lie within a lie.
Lasdun is both an elegant and an austere writer. His prose is always beautifully balanced and perfectly adapted to the character's thought processes. Master story-teller that he is, he is he is content to leave us hanging on the slenderest of hooks - "I was bought" Vogel tells us, instead of the usual - "I was born" - and the result is a pace close to that of a thriller.
And here is Lasdun on Vogel's realisation that he had lost his innocence: "Quite simply, the straightforward relation of cordial respect, or at least neutral interest, that is supposed to exist between people who have no prior reason not to respect each other was no longer available to me . . . In its place, it seemed, was an intricately shuttling machinery of silent interrogation and devious concealment".
In response to the inauthenticity of his life and the lives of those around him, Vogel creates his own myth which is called America. In time he "defects" and brings his lover to New York. Lasdun is acute and moving on the plight of the underclass in that city. "They were homeless, they believed, simply as a result of what they called their 'bad choices'. But they also believed that the good life was attainable to anyone in this great country of theirs, themselves included, and that all that it required was for them to make, instead of those bad choices, the 'right' choices, which they would make as soon as they were 'ready'."
The set of false symbols that constituted politics and social life in the GDR is very well handled, and the early part of the book seems to be saying that "society" is a construction founded upon agreed untruths. When the action transfers to America the opportunity presents of universalising this observation. The chapters that describe Vogel's American experience are beautifully written, but seem too slight to carry the thrust of the argument forward. There is a subtle point being made, for example, about the possibility of authentic dissent in the socialist state as opposed to the bland, self-centred and apolitical idealism of the American poor; but it is allowed to slip through the consciousness of the narrator. It is a pity that this latter part of the book should be so reduced. One wished for more.
The epigraph recalls Martin Luther's remark that every lie requires seven further lies to support it. Lasdun demonstrates the power of a lie to shape human existence and ultimately to undermine it. This is an elegant, moving and intelligent book.
William Wall's most recent novel, This Is The Country, will be be out in paperback next month
Seven Lies By James Lasdun Jonathan Cape, 199pp. £14.99