Timeless fiction

Beckett's true genius lies in the prose, which shaped novelists such as the great South African JM Coetzee. It is his greatest legacy, argues Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

It is the pain, the despair, the cruelty, the magnificently eloquent silences and above all, the deranged hope and that shattering, spluttering humour that elevate the work of Samuel Beckett. He is the final - and for many, the defining - craftsman of European literary modernism. Pondering the horror of existence, he articulated the essential unease of being human. Yet he never missed the insane, lyric comedy of life's dance of chaos. Therein lies his magic. As with fellow humanist JS Bach, Beckett laid down the rules of his art.

He was the humane master of pauses and double-takes, at all times noting the fiascos and epiphanies that shape any life, all lives. He listened as intently as his master JM Synge had to the sound of speech as spoken.

Early in his career Beckett identified what would prove his enduring landscape - memory. Memory: bleak, touching, profound, angry, unforgiving and relentless - the weighted sack that stalks us all. His revolutionary influence on European absurdist drama of the 20th century and beyond, most notably on Harold Pinter, remains monumental. Ironically (and Beckett loved irony - he cultivated and nurtured it with hothouse precision) his true genius lies in the prose, and it shaped novelists such as the great South African JM Coetzee.

On stage, Beckett's theatre lies at the mercy of its thoughtful, cryptic humour. The audience is laughing so hard, lines are often missed. Many a theatre-goer must fully appreciate the plays as texts read in isolation, when the only laughter is that of the lone reader.

The fiction stands timeless and timely. It is Beckett's greatest legacy. Look to a story such as First Love, in which the narrator recalls returning to the bench, the site where his haphazard meetings with his tragic, pathetic lover-of-sorts occurred, "at the hour she had used to join me there". Intent on ending their bizarre relationship, "I longed to be gone" he confides to his reader, but remembers having first asked her to sing.

"I thought at first she was going to refuse, I mean simply not sing, but no, after a moment she began to sing and sang for some time . . . I did not know the song, I had never heard it before and shall never hear it again. It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees."

As would Krapp some years later in that most remarkable and tender of plays, the narrator of First Love, a frequenter of graveyards, beguiles through his candid re-living of a life lived.

For every reader or theatre-goer who associates Beckett with bleakness, despair and alienation, a far wider audience acknowledges him as the master of black, absurdist comedy which was born in the 19th-century Russian mind of Gogol and others, to be carried on by Bulgakov and perfected by Beckett, the Irishman who wrote in French and remained Irish in becoming universal.

In his early fiction, such as the Dublin of Belacqua's student adventures in More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) or Murphy (1938), Beckett left no doubt as to his comic powers. Watt (1953) signalled the beginning of the shift to a darker world of humour undercut by fear and hope. Yet even as the despair deepened, the comedy never disappeared. At the heart of Beckett's bleakly optimistic vision is his understanding of the unreality of life on the surface and his profound grasp of the subterranean subtext that is existence. His characters experience the futility of what Beckett considered the dilemma of enduring an "existence by proxy".

BIRTH AND DEATH, with the long, slow hell in between, are his themes. Early in Endgame (Fin de Partie, 1957; English translation published 1958) when Hamm asks of Clov: "What time is it?", the reluctant servant replies: "The same as usual". That play uses to fine effect the device of limbo or the static, the fear of death, the dread of living, which Beckett employs so brilliantly throughout his Trilogy - Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, the three novels written in French during an intense two-year period between 1947 and 1949, which also produced Waiting for Godot.

The novels of the trilogy also mark Beckett's abandonment of the third person narrative of Murphy and Watt - both written in English - in favour of the monologue form which ideally suits his central protagonists, characters striving for exactness. They are frightened of death, terrified of living and some are not quite sure of having been born; they all possess a flair for the dramatic.

Molloy (1951, translated into English in 1955) consists of two monologues, the first delivered by Molloy, the second by Moran the policeman who unsuccessfully pursues him. The miserable Moran, an equally unhappy father and employer, considers himself a thinker, and functions by ritual. Father and son set off on an ill-fated journey, a precursor of the one undertaken by Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot. But the lasting impression of the novel is that of Molloy attempting to figure out a series of strange events, not least how he came to arrive in his mother's room. "I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I'd never have got there alone . . . What I'd like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying."

Interior debate of this kind continues, and with it memories of his mother, an awareness of his overcoat and hat and having decided to visit his mother, his struggle to cycle his bike while on crutches. "So I got up, adjusted my crutches and went down to the road, where I found my bicycle (I didn't know I had one) in the same place I must have left it. Which enables me to remark that, crippled though I was, I was no mean cyclist, at that period . . . I fastened my crutches to the cross-bar, one on either side, I propped the foot of my stiff leg (I forget which, now they're both stiff) on the projecting front axle, and I pedalled with the other."

All of this serves to set the scene for the zany comedy of his accidental killing of a small dog.

"I made things worse," reflects Molloy, "by trying to run away. I was soon overtaken, by a bloodthirsty mob of both sexes and all ages. . . " The bereaved owner rescues Molloy and then expects him to assist her in the transporting home, and subsequent burial, of her pet. For some time, possibly a year, he stays at the woman's house as a kind of replacement pet. Every piece of information, each digressive aside, is relayed in a laconic, deadpan tone. It is horrifically funny. Moran's adventures are less so, as his narrative is undercut by a chill quite unlike any other in Beckett's oeuvre. Conducting himself as a parody of a strict Edwardian, Moran, having been abandoned by his son, returns home from his failed pursuit of Molloy, and discovers his hens and bees have died. He closes where he began, but in a variation of the facts.

MALONE DIES (1951; Beckett's English translation, 1958) is the deathbed soliloquy of a character preoccupied with thoughts very like those of Molloy. This time the burlesque comedy of the early piece is transcended by a poetic grandeur. Malone is far more deliberate. As he lies in bed, his days contained within the boundaries of physical necessity, eating and soiling, Malone in his reveries wanders through a maze of memory and anecdote. "I hear the wind," he muses, "I close my eyes and it mingles with my breath. Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging endlessly."

Only too aware of the meaning of "mortal tedium", Malone recalls a phrase: "Nothing is more real than nothing." Although trapped in his bed, Malone renders the search for a pencil lost among the bedclothes into an epic quest. "What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours of intermittent efforts." Ever the optimist, Malone decides: "I should really lose my pencil more often, it might do me good." His bed becomes a battlefield, such is the power of his imagination to move beyond his physical confinement. He can be philosophical; he can also be exasperated. "If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window." Malone Dies is the most cohesive of the trilogy novels; it also has echoes of Molloy.

The Unnamable (1953, translated into English 1959) moves beyond the laconically anecdotal, resigned tone of the two earlier works, to stand alone. It assumes an urgency motivated by the narrator's sense of panic, caught as he is in an Kafka-esque state of bewilderment. Whereas Molloy and Malone are ultimately more interested in objects and memory than in themselves, the Unnamable is distressed by his predicament. He does not reminisce as freely. He needs answers, or at least to be able to make sense of what he knows: ". . . Who is talking, not I, where am I, where is the place where I have always been, where are the others . . . it's nobody's fault."

It's a bleak monologue, discharged in a rush. "Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude." A glimmer of humour prevails: "I think I'll soon be dead, I hope I find it a change."

Molloy and Malone retain fond memories of their dead mothers. The Unnamable differs. Neither certain nor convinced he was born at all, he announces late in the narrative, having returned in his imagination to the town of his youth: "I'm looking for my mother to kill her, I should have thought of that a bit earlier, before being born."

Early in his career, Beckett revealed comic flair, but as his vision evolved, he began to explore the inner paralysis that is not imposed by a culture or a society but comes from within ourselves. He exposed the self.

Born on a Good Friday, he took his leave at Christmas in 1989. It was he who once said: "I could not have gone through the awful mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence." He left much more and came closer to explaining the business of being alive than most writers would dare attempt.