FICTION FILES: In his book The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded: "Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat."
This sentence springs to mind when reading Ben Okri's wayward new book, In Arcadia. It's not a poem, but it reads like one: it's a novel that doesn't so much tell a story as recount a dream.
Perhaps we have these days, even those of us outside the universities, those of us immersed in the mainstream and what's available in Eason's, grown used to reading novels which are, one might say, a little "unusual" - bright colours among the uniform pale yellow and tan, books which refuse to be lapped up, which cut the tongue, whose taste is not the familiar, not the usual mild sweet tang of soft white bread, or the glue on the back of a postage stamp, novels which require a little study and some savouring.
One thinks of the dead and unique W.G. Sebald, for example, and of Ben Okri, writers of similar strange ambitions, and both available in B-format paperback. They're similar, but they're also opposites: where Sebald's charm and magic is deliberately faded, and wilted, and forlorn, Okri's is bright, and striking, and angry.
In In Arcadia, a group of people are invited to take part in a television programme that documents a journey to paradise - to Arcadia. What the individuals have in common is that they're all failures - or rather, if one might be permitted to say so, sinners. "We had all lost something, and lost it a long time ago, and didn't stand any chance of finding it again. We lost it somewhere before childhood began."
The book is the story of their pilgrimage, then, but the pilgrims' stories are less interesting than Okri's unmistakable musings and meditations. The book is a torrent - part stream of consciousness and part drunken rant. "I'm a child of my times. My heart is ash. My feelings are frozen. My eyes are dead. My thoughts are cold. Nothing stirs in me. Nothing surprises me. I expect the worst. Human beings stink. That's a fact."
The tone is consistent, and it's a rush, and it's irrefutable.
Okri has written a book about a small select group of very confused people. Its appeal in Ireland, therefore, as elsewhere, should be wide.
• Ian Sansom's The Truth About Babies is published by Granta
Hector Mann is a Hollywood star of the silent silver screen, whose life is turned upside down when his fiancée shoots dead the "other" woman who is carrying his child.
Hector disposes of the rejected woman's body and then takes off from his life, to be presumed dead for the next 60 years. It is only when a grief-stricken literature professor, whose wife and sons have been killed in a plane crash, makes his first steps to living normally again through an old Hector Mann movie, that the truth gets a limited release.
Intriguing, but that is only part of the plot of the multi-layered new novel from Paul Auster. Fittingly enough from this author, the novel is called The Book of Illusions - for all of Auster's novels have been books of illusions in one way or another. He specialises in a sort of laconic narrative, which, while on the surface is matter-of-fact recitation, concerns events so fantastic that they beggar belief. Life, of course, is often stranger than fiction, but it is something in the heightened atmosphere of Auster's deceptively simple prose that adds to the other-worldly atmosphere.
Style and substance co-exist in a sometimes uncomfortable union: in earlier novels Leviathan and Moon Palace the reader feels they are moving along with the story, but In The Country of Last Things and The Music of Chance the reader is just about left outside Auster's balletic contortions.
The Book of Illusions reveals this New York author's usual obsessions, laced with hommage to the great French philosopher-writers of the past - in this case, Chateaubriand, an 18th-century figure whose work the protagonist, David Zimmer, starts to translate during his recovery from his total bereavement. Chateaubriand's memoirs translate as Memoirs of a Dead Man, and this is a motif for the whole story of Hector Mann, as well as of David Zimmer's resurrection.
As usual with Auster, this is a very American novel, despite its obvious enthusiasm for the European intellectual tradition, and existentialist conundrums: what is being? Can you be within and outside your own life simultaneously? In previous works Auster has shown his enthusiasm for baseball, the quintessential American obsession, majestic desert landscapes, and the call of the road, Kerouac-style. In The Book of Illusions, classic American cinema, the era of the silver screen and silent comedies, is his symbol.
Auster's special skill is to write stories that could be dreams as if they are soap operas, fusing the cliffhanger narrative with a deeper exploration of human dilemmas. His previous novel, Timbuktu, was disappointing, but The Book of Illusions is a return to absorbing form.
• Angela Long is a freelance journalist and critic
In Arcadia. By Ben Okri. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 231pp. £12.99 The Book of Illusions. By Paul Auster. Faber and Faber, 321pp. £16.99