It is all in his case history of the Wolf-Man. But the case-history belongs to the analyst, not to its subject, to the reason that seeks to control experience. It has the truth of art. But if the patient is a writer, the truth belongs to him, and not to the analyst. And if the patient has composed his story, then the truth of the fiction that the analyst constructs from the patient’s account loses its basis and becomes falsehood, not fiction: ‘psychoanalysis is writing at its greatest desire to prove. We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves in making up fictions which invade propriety.’

Brian Castro’s new novel contains the story of Sergei Wespe, or Wasp, Freud’s Wolf-Man, who was born in 1887 to a Russian aristocratic family with an estate at Kherson, near Odessa. At the age of six he saw his parents’ ungainly coupling. While still a child he was seduced by his sister Anna, two years his elder. One or both of these events caused the neurosis that made Sergei a lycanthrope. After a passionate and tempestuous youth, Anna committed suicide at the age of twenty. After a dissolute youth, Sergei arrived in Vienna and remained there until his death in 1978. During this time he marries Therese, who gasses herself after the Nazi invasion. The novel tells also of Sergei’s later analysis by the fraudulently qualified Australian Art Catacomb (an assumed name), of Catacomb’s own sordid career, of the distinctions between their lusts and their loves, and of Sergei’s parents and relatives. This is set against the background of two wars and a depression, the Russian and Nazi revolutions, the gas chambers, and the nihilist terrorism of the 1960s and 1970s.

All these events are contained in the novel called Double-Wolf, but this grand narrative is not. There is no single voice to authorise any particular character or narrative, no authorial superego to moderate the conflict of ego and id. Various narratives are carefully located in time and place – Katoomba 1978, Vienna at various dates, Kherson, Odessa, Munich – but these are addresses for recollection, meditation, gossip and narratives that may or may not be accurate. Each is true to the time of its telling, but even in the telling it falsifies what it tells. The narrative associated with each place proceeds more or less chronologically, so that if we choose we can reconstruct a grand narrative from them, but the form of the book at the same time questions· the validity, the authenticity, of every such construction. The only authenticity is the truth of the dream, the world of the wolves, of the id in which there is no time:

(‘The Russian Formalists’, she begins, ‘have this thing about real time – the sequence of events as you turn the pages – and story time – the correct sequence of events in the story itself ... which of ten have to be read backwards – Formalism or feminism it had the same effect of detumescence.)

Like most of the novel, the title Double-Wolf is itself ambiguous. The wolves are both the id, the unreasonable unconscious, and the guarantee of reason against time that seeks to deny it. The double-wolf itself may refer to Sergei and Freud, the analyst who tries to take over his life, to Sergei and Art Catacomb, his second analyst who is also his younger alter ego, or to the two analysts, Freud and Catacomb. Each of these pairings is, of course, an example of the doubleness of language and experience, of life and our attempts to interpret it:

I asked Grandad: ‘What about the goat in the grandfather clock?’

‘Can’t you hear him?’ Grandad said. ‘He’s going tick tock, tick tock, in there.’ ‘Is the wolf outside?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Then who wins?’

‘The goat. Because he has control of time. See his beard?’

But pure reason still has it over time. In time all the great truths crumble. In time interpretations dissolve, but pure reason remains in its wolfishness... strength, talion, perseverance and surprise. There is cunning in the old goat, but it is not enough. The wolf, too, makes use of time.

The wolf uses time, he moves within it. It does not control him. But this does not make him free. Sergei and Artie are controlled by their obsessions – with buttocks, genitals, anality, eros and thanatos, bondage, penile expression and introjection. Their women are objects of their lust even when they are loved. The Wolf-Man is by definition male. Women may awaken men, but beyond that their only role is to become whores, Marthas, dehumanised exploiters or suicides. This reduction of women is part of the social context of all the events:

When you dug up graves to study decomposition you saw faces which imploded in the sun and in that horror you saw more clearly what was always hidden from you: the true face of the human... the point at which God always excuses himself.

Hallucination? Reality? Obsession projected on reality until it becomes real?

Although Double-Wolf deals with the impossibility of true knowledge, either of the individual or of society, it does not retreat from the reality principle into the fashionable concept of language as a game without meaning. Life may be a game, but the stakes the characters play for are as high as eternity. The id constantly drives the ego towards eros, the instrument of eros deals in death. The father threatens the son with his instrument still erect from copulation with the mother, and the son in turn seeks the death of his father and of the successive father-analysts who try to replace his id with ego. Both Sergei and Catacomb exercise their will by turning guns on the innocent, and eventually try to shoot each other. These actions are matched first by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, and then, with more sinister consequences, by the Nazis. The only escape is by turning to thanatos, or death, the eternity that provides the complete fusion the self seeks with the world.

The ego may write the disastrous history of the twentieth century, but the id creates it. The wolf is the image both of purity of desire and of the Nazi death-squads. Its suppression produces neurosis, its expression produces terror. It allows no one, least of all the reader, to remain innocent:

His father crawled on all fours and hid behind sofas and he had a wolf-mask over his face, springing up and terrifying the children.

Sergei seems halted at the anal phase of development. Only when Freud persuades him to forget the body does he admit that he ‘emitted a little turd that night, a hard, shiny little nugget … without using an enema’.

The narrative is similar. The characters give of themselves only reluctantly, hesitant to commit themselves to history. By telling their stories, they surrender to the ego that ‘hates writing that is without reason’.

The writer is like the hunter who in fairy tales ‘appears out of nowhere, has no social continuity and beheads the wolf or disembowels it while it is asleep’. Reason maintains the status quo, while the id tries at any risk to extend its boundaries.

Double-Wolf takes the double risk of accepting the limits of the story in order to extend the boundaries of reason. It tries to do the work of both ‘Herr Truth’ and ‘Herr Cunning’, the maker of stories and the maker of signs. The story pretends to reason, the signs without reference offer only a maze, and yet the two makers turn out to be the one who through his destruction offers the secret of community. I am not sure what secrets Castro’s maze of signs and stories offers, but I am confident its obsessional images will continue to haunt its readers as long as they remain sites for the eternal warfare of ego and id.