More kicks than you might think

With celebrations in full cry for Samuel Beckett's centenary, Michael Hall offers beginners some ways in to what can seem obscure and bleak territory
Samuel Beckett
Finding a single home ... Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Jane Bown Jane Bown/Jane Bown

According to one character in Endgame, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness." Let us smirk, then, at loss, destitution, deprivation, pain, suffering - always suffering - despair, fear and guilt, hopelessness, then death. That always raises a chuckle. But what of life and those bringers of life, our dear mothers? "They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more," is the cheery verdict delivered in Waiting for Godot.

Welcome to the mirthful world of Samuel Beckett, the much-worshipped, much-misunderstood Irish writer who, had he lived, would be 100 today. In his centenary year, the spectre of Beckett is more visible than ever, with events taking place around the world to celebrate his work - the poems, novels and, above all, the plays, which have achieved the sort of iconic status conferred only on the greatest art. "Beckettian" has become a familiar adjective; EastEnders' scriptwriters have been known to base entire plots on Beckettian schemas; his influence on art and culture, both high and low, is inescapable.

But visibility does not equate with accessibility. The fact is that for a vast number of people Beckett remains as formidably obscure as he was to his first audiences. How, then, does one begin to "get" Beckett? Why, indeed, would you bother, given his reputation for being the "poet of nothingness"? Will he depress you, drive you to drink or worse?

Depending on your constitution, perhaps he will. But there's much more to this great writer than an impossibly bleak view of the universe. Honest. He's incredibly funny, for one. And he's fond, in a puerile way, of the word "arse", which, in my view, recommends him highly.

So, in the interests of your self-improvement, allow me to take you on a trip round some of the highpoints of arguably the most important writer of the 20th century.

Where to begin? Well, in Beckett's case, certainly not at the beginning. The young Samuel Beckett was a precociously brilliant but arrogant scholar whose first attempts at prose - notably, the posthumously published Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in 1932 - are close to impenetrable. Beckett packs an intentionally incoherent plot with dense literary and philosophical allusions, quotations and foreign languages (Latin, French, German, Spanish and Italian), seeming generally hell-bent on infuriating the reader with his studied abstruseness. Not for the uninitiated, then.

As James Knowlson, Beckett's official biographer and probably the pre-eminent Beckett scholar in the world, explains: "The early works are all characterised by intellectual brilliance, complexity and difficulty for the reader. There are many erudite allusions - to Dante, Sir Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Shakespeare, Descartes, the philosophers, Goethe. You name it, it's there. Everything but the kitchen sink."

Knowlson, incidentally, is a good person to ask about this complicated and unwieldy body of work. While many academics have written about this austere master, Knowlson is the person Beckett called "the one who knows my work best".

So what is a good point of entry? "I think Murphy is a good text for beginners to start with," says Knowlson. "It's funny, it's still quite complex but it has a picaresque quality to it. And it does have London, and Dublin, and it does have identifiable characters that you can get interested in."

Published in 1938, Murphy follows the romantic misadventures of an introspective Irishman in London who wrestles between desire for his prostitute-mistress, Celia, and a longing to escape into the darkness of his own mind. It's arguably the book in which Beckett's mentor James Joyce's influence figures most tellingly, and it ends with a gratifying bang - Murphy dies spectacularly, incinerated by a gas explosion.

A major turning-point in Beckett's life and work was the second world war, which he spent in Paris under Nazi occupation. Beckett joined the French Resistance, eventually fleeing into hiding in the south of France, where he composed his last English novel, Watt. Returning to Paris after its liberation, Beckett experienced what Knowlson describes as "a sea change". His experiences during the war - including the loss of many close friends, murdered by the Nazis - together with time spent before the war in Jungian psychoanalysis, contributed to a new-found maturity in Beckett the artist.

Things came to a head with a kind of Joycean epiphany as Beckett stood over his dying mother's bed. "I became aware of my own folly", he later recalled, in a moment regarded as crucial to his artistic development. "What he saw," explains Knowlson, "was that, like Joyce, he had been striving for literary power, for control over the material, when in fact his whole zone of being lay in that area of impotence, of ignorance, of stupidity [...] This was something which he was then able to channel in an exploration of what he saw as the essentials of being."

Around this time, he began writing in French, in a bid to work, he said, "without style". He then embarked on a "frenzy of writing" during which he produced a huge raft of prose, poems and plays, among them the works which would eventually secure his reputation: the two plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and the so-called "trilogy" of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. These are starkly original works, with Beckett dismantling both the drama and the novel forms and leaving in their wake much uncertainty as to what exactly constitutes a play, or a story.

Godot was famously described by the Irish critic Vivien Mercier as a two-act play "in which nothing happens, twice." It single-handedly revolutionised the modern theatre. Meanwhile, the "novels" (the label doesn't quite fit) show Beckett proceeding from the mere semblance of a plot and a non-linear, circular narrative in Molloy to the complete abandonment of conventional narrative structure by the time he gets to part three, The Unnameable, in which an increasingly fragmentary self attempts in vain to establish the grounds for saying "I" and having that mean something.

The plays and novels of the middle period are beautiful and they are funny, but they are difficult and will confound any reader in search of straightforward storytelling. Brendan Behan's own strategy for reading his countryman may be instructive here: "'I don't understand what Samuel Beckett's works are about," he said. "But I don't understand what a swim in the ocean is about. I just love the flow of the water over my body."

One thing you soon realise reading post-war Beckett is that the work hinges upon ambiguity and uncertainty. By design, there is no one interpretation, so don't squander your energies searching for them. As he said himself about Joyce: "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself." Beckett's art, too, is not to be understood, but rather, to be experienced.

If you can't be bothered with Murphy (I've spoiled the ending, so I wouldn't blame you), then you could do worse than seeking out the late trilogy of novellas first, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. These masterpieces of spare, enigmatic prose represent, according to Knowlson, "the flowering of the older Beckett spirit".

This is the point at which Beckett has reduced, condensed and distilled his preoccupations into passages of startling purity and sharpness. It's as if Beethoven had stripped a whole symphony down to a handful of notes, each deployed in a way that evokes great flights of composition.

So take a leaf out of Brendan Behan's book and dive in - the water's fine.

Michael Hall is the managing editor of TopWriters