Yes, I understood, God’s truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we’re to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don’t we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain blows the whistle to retreat, is taboo.

It’s only in Part Two, titled Winter, that things go badly wrong for Aaron. He kills somebody, a woman, in a tragic shooting accident and then runs away to escape, not from the law but from himself. He hides away in a nameless jungle, could be in central Africa, somewhere humid and lush and corrosive, where morals and metals decay. All of this is told fast and fiercely, in a handful of pages. But it’s at this point, when the life of our mysterious hero should take on more weight and power, that the book falters, becoming hesitant and unsure. He does terrible things and terrible things are done to him. He’s a young man on the lip of his adult life, but all his promise gets used up in the wretched struggle to survive. Trouble is, as Aaron’s life breaks down, the narrative does too, names and details changing from one paragraph to another, febrile scratchings-out and rewritings in Anton’s unmistakable old-young hand, could be a child’s or a geriatric’s.

The crisis took place at the start of World War I, a time of widespread and intense anxiety. Whether it was a dark night is difficult to say, but there is no doubt that it was a period of extreme confusion. Jung’s biographer Gerhard Wehr refers to it as his night sea journey.

She separated herself from life so that she could finally heal her soul. We have seen this theme over and over, how the dark night is fulfilled in some form of withdrawal from active life.

Doctors turned to ice with emotion. The nurse who fell asleep in the middle of an operation. The infant put back together after hours of surgery, only to be killed by a bomb that fell on the hospital a moment later. The father who kept a scrap of cloth tied with a string around his neck, filled with teeth, proof his son had existed, though Mara knew he would never be sure they were his son’s. The same man who watched his shoes being stolen from his feet by someone who thought he was dead.