Controlled complexity

Czech writer Ivan Klima's The Ultimate Intimacy (Granta, £12.99 in UK) is a quiet, intense study of a man who moves from a state of emotional neutrality to one of controlled complexity. Daniel Vedra is a Protestant pastor and is kind, caring, somewhat remote. Now long-married to Hana, whom he loves but who has never inspired the depth of feeling he had - and still has - for Jitka, his first wife. She died young while their daughter was a baby, and he accepts that his emotional life belongs to the past.

In some ways, he could be reminiscent of an earlier, more obviously troubled Klima protagonist, Adam Kindl in Judge On Trial (1991), except that for Daniel, life itself begins to replace philosophy and internal debate.

Central to Klima's fiction is his humane understanding of emotional and moral conflicts and his sympathetic rendering of such dilemas. Yet whereas Judge Adam Kindl, surrounded by cynical colleagues, begins to question the law and the fact that truth and justice have become empty concepts, doubt for Daniel is more personal, more fatalistic. Having experienced the closed world of Czech life in the years before the Velvet Revolution, Daniel is now in demand as a spokesman on the changing face of society in the new Republic.

Part of this openness is his discovery of his late father's name on a list of informers. "My immediate reaction was that it had to be a mistake," he writes in his diary. "How many people who found their close relatives or friends on it thought the same? What do we know of the private distress even of those who are closest to us?"

As the narrative opens, Daniel is busy performing his duties. On completing that day's sermon, he listens to the congregation which sings "badly, terribly in fact". His thoughts are also with his mother who is dying in hospital, and he is due to collect his sister who is arriving back from the US. Of the congregation he wonders "how many of them truly believe the words they are now singing?"

Among those present in the church is a stranger he has never met who reminds him of his dead wife. Each of his flock has their own problems, problems to which he is privy. In a wider context he ponders: "What is stronger, faith without doubts, or faith that contends with doubts?"

Klima evokes the randomness of a life caught up in various situations. Daniel is a prominent member of his community and is involved in counselling wayward youths; he frowns at a husband who wants to leave his dead marriage; and while he cares for his wife, the two children he has with her, and his eldest child, he does not really engage with them. Daniel's sole confidante is his journal.

His mother's illness becomes another obligation: "I ought to go to the hospital. I think about my mother all the time, but the awful thing is that even though she is still alive I think about her in the past tense." She dies and for the first time in his life Daniel has money. When he hears an uninsured emigrant worker has been injured in a fall he offers to pay the Russian's hospital fees and then questions his motives for doing so.

The narrative moves between the various ongoing situations which make up a dense, episodic plot. The characters caught in these circumstances are far from happy but are too apathetic to act.

When Daniel accepts an offer to be driven to another church to conduct a second morning service, it is clear that chance has little to do with it. Bara, the unknown woman, has already attended Daniel's services and feels drawn to him. An intense conversation soon follows, as does an affair, the fervour of which is somewhat surprising, considering Daniel's diffident personality.

Their love story is acted out against a noisy backdrop of assorted trauma.

In the midst of all the melodrama, including teenage pregnancy and suicide attempts, Klima skillfully catches the confusion, ambiguity and the stalemate strangling the lives of his characters. Written in a flat, careful prose, this work is typical of Klima's slow, deliberate, almost reporter-like approach to narrative. Workmanlike and understated, he is a most deceptive writer.

His dialogue is often formal, even stilted, and yet Klima invariably catches real life at its messiest. Humour is scarcer in The Ultimate Intimacy than in any of his previous works. Most of the exasperation is provided by Bara and Samuel and is too tragic to be funny. Above all, he consistently explores the way in which the banal becomes the profound.

Klima's achievement remains his humane understanding of moral and emotional confusion and his ability to question these dilemmas. Clear-sightedness, truth and, in his own phrase from Judge Of Trial, a moral grandeur undercuts his work. His concern is the ordinary - not always the easiest of territories to walk, but this he does with grace, compassion and insight.

In Waiting For The Dark, Waiting For The Light (1994), which is set during the immediate aftermath of the 1989 upheavals, he follows Paval, a relentlessly philosophising, world weary cameraman as he confronts his uneasy relationship with himself and his place in a changing society which isn't really changing. Paval's dilemma never acquires the moral grandeur of that suffered by Adam Kindl or Daniel Vedra, but it does illustrate what happens when the impossible is won, only to be found wanting. In that novel Klima also confronted - and answered - the question facing so many writers from the former Eastern Bloc as asked by Andrei Bitov amongst others: "What will we write about when it is all over?"

Klima, although silenced under the old Czech regime, has never been a political writer, yet his work examines ordinary life as lived under repression. Judge On Trial is one of Europe's great post-war novels, and it may well remain Klima's finest work. Love And Garbage (1987) is a funny and adroit exploration of emotional duplicity. Smaller achievements such as My First Loves, My Golden Trades, Waiting For The Dark, Waiting For The Light and now this new book all testify to the wise, thoughtful Klima's importance as a witness of life as lived and as a major European novelist.