Judging by the cover of the book, the title should be "Thursday Nights at the Hefner Household". I hate to disappoint people who rely on their book covers to give them an accurate reflection of the contents, there is no rich people's blind grope-a-thon party taking place here. If that should sour your prejudgement of the novel, then so be it. At least someone was kind enough to warn you.There are times I think that Banville reads with utter glee the reviews of his own novels, rubs his hands together while cackling and says, "Think that last one was ambiguous and oblique? You ain't seen nothing yet!" Only with a cool accent (I assume he speaks with an accent, at least to these American ears). Then he comes out with something else delightfully enigmatic, with that finely tuned prose laid so softly that you can easily hear the gnashing of teeth from people attempting to "get" it.If you're someone who likes to feel like you're on a similar wavelength to whatever the author is transmitting, this one is probably going to frustrate you. I can't even say it's his most evasive plot, as I thought "Athena" was as solid as fraying gossamer and from I remember of "Book of Evidence" I suspect I'd have a different interpretation of the book if I read it a second time. The plot itself, or what persists of it, is fairly straightforward: Alexander Cleave, former famous actor, comes back to his old house and decides to get lost in memories. Along the way he hangs out with the guy who takes care of the house and his teenage daughter. He argues with his wife. He waits for his daughter. Things happen without really happening. At some point, life happens, or at least Banville's fractured stained glass version of life, pristine from a distance. It's only when you get close enough that you can see where the moisture is starting to seep in.If there's one word to describe the book, it's probably "static". We're not quite at Beckett levels but from a very real standpoint the book is completely wrapped in words. Snatches of dialogue poke through, like that one Pink Floyd album everyone likes but for the most part the voice that breaks through is that of the narrator, telling us about himself. But like most Banville narrators he's not exactly vibrant and full of zest, instead for the most part he's clinical and slightly distant, speaking with a precise diction that lights a slow fire without ever bursting into screams, like that weird town in Pennsylvania that never stops burning underground. You can see the signs that things are getting hot and that someday something bad is going to happen but for the most part, it's not so bad to visit.None of this would have a prayer of working if Banville didn't have such control of his prose. While his narrators are often cut from the same dry cloth, he's often able to shade things so that one can never be mistaken for the other. His other characters might have given off a tinge of menace, but here Cleave comes across as both weary and sad, wandering through the haunted rooms of his own life and not sure if he's become a ghost himself or he's doing a fairly good impression of one. Along the way he treats us to scenes from his life, memories, ruminations, like someone who has dumped out all the contents of his life onto the floor and is trying to figure out whether it's worth sorting out or if he should just chuck it all in and say the heck with it. As such, you're not dealing with a conventional plot and any enjoyment of this is going to depend on how much you tune into Banville's "voice" via Cleave, as all the events come across as somewhat incidental, stray instances from a life that has been in the process of slowing down. If you're like me and you enjoy his writing style, you could read about him describing the exits on a highway all day and derive some interest out of it. If you're waiting for a plot or mystery to kick in, you're in for a long wait. He throws in ghosts and hints of buried memories but those come across as feints, something to keep the kiddies interested as he digs deep into the character. There's even an undercurrent of "Waiting for Godot", as he and his wife alternate waiting for their daughter to arrive from wherever she is, talking about her as if she's right outside.That alone probably keeps the novel from being as effective as it could be. It hums along pleasantly enough but as soon as it starts to gather enough mass to steer itself into the direction of Cleave actively affecting events as opposed to merely drifting through his memories, the book is practically over. A late tragic event shows that Banville still retains his ability to infuse some good old fashioned emotional power into the proceedings, as we're touched by the death of someone we never even meet. But is the point of the book to lead up to all that, or are we meant to find other reasons and meanings in the displays? It's hard to say, and as typical for Banville, he's not quite saying. Sometimes his prose seems to me a wondrous approximation of a version of life infused with a shimmering poetry, all ice vowing never to be melted. And for all the seemingly aimlessness of its episodic structure, this is one of his few books that is willing to let that ice crack slightly, and allow a little blood to seep to the surface. Only a little, and you have to stick with it to find it but its enough to remind you that a heart can exist underneath those stacked prisms and its more than an empty construction of exquisite words.
I read John Banville's Cleave/Vander trilogy backward, starting with Ancient Light, then reading Shroud, and ending with Eclipse. This first book, which introduced Alex Cleave, his wife Lydia, and his daughter Cass, is the least satisfying of the three, but John Banville continues to be my new obsession nonetheless. Those who love his work often comment about the beauty of his prose; I completely agree. Eclipse brings 50-year-old Alex Cleave, a stage actor who believes his career is finished, back to his boyhood home. This book is much more descriptive than the other two, even Ancient Light, which primarily takes place in the same location when Alex was 15-years-old. Despite the thread of common themes, it is hard to believe that Banville was planning the other two novels when he wrote this one. Alex does not appear in Shroud, which is Axel Vander and Cass Cleave's book, and the Alex -- boy and man -- in Ancient Light is almost unrecognizable in Eclipse.So what do these books have in common? Themes: the unreliability of memory ("But am I rightly remembering that night? Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be making everything up" (page 55); the difficulty of parenting an ill child -- especially one with a mental illness; the grief of losing her; Alex's similarities with Cass, his struggle to separate the real from the imaginary; our various personae and the masks we all wear. This book stands out in its portrayal of mood and atmosphere: "There is an archaic quality to certain summer days, the ones that come at the close of July especially, when the season has reached its peak and is already imperceptibly in decline, and the sunlight thickens, and the sky is larger and higher and of a deeper blue than before...In that dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge" (page 135). Is that not a sentiment familiar to all of us? The house where Alex grew up is a character: "Air stands unmoving here, unchanged for centuries, it seems; vague draughts swim through like slow fish. There is a stale, brownish smell that haunted me as a child..." (page 140). I've marked many such passages, with notes about connections with the later books. I tell people that it's not necessary to read Eclipse before Shroud and Ancient Light, but I'm glad I have now read all three. I hope that Banville gives us another volume about Alex. I still want to know more.
What do You think about Eclipse (2002)?
Alexander Cleave, outworn actor whose glory days are gone, sets the elegiac tone of his first person narrative as part of the setting of a performance ill-omened from the start. There is little in terms of plot line in this introspective journey into the mind of a tormented character that assimilates the structure of a Shakespearean tragedy. Like a deft snake charmer, Banville reconstructs the inner purgatory of a man in five acts, leaving no space for cathartic redemption or hopeful light at the end of the tunel. Something has died inside Alex. Fictional life on the stage, which had been truer than reality in the past, doesn’t fill the gaping void inside him any longer. Haunted by memories and dragged down by the rarified relationship with his wife and his mentally unstable daughter Cassandra, the apple of his eye, Alex struggles against a growing sense of disembodiment as he gropes in the darkness of his subconscious, searching for the secret well of grief from which springs of sorrow benum him into a detached stupor. In a desperate attempt to shake off the impending sense of doom that plagues him, the actor retires to the abandoned seaside house of his childhood, which has fallen into disrepair over the years, expecting to reconnect with the missing part of himself. Once more, it’s in waves of detailed images that Banville stirs the waters of his swelling, unreliable narrative. Grey ash on a carpet, the glowing stub of an unfinished cigarette, a bloodstain, red like passion, on a gauzy dress, white like the pallor of a corpse drowned in a foreign sea, grimacing clowns in a morbid circus, doors ajar in mute stillness and disquieting sensation of being observed, stalked, of life being usurped by ghosts blind to the past but prescient of a stillborn future. Straddling the classic gothic and the psychological thriller, Banville presents the veritable protagonists of his tale of woe. Loneliness, identity and erratic memory merge the currents of present and past, fiction and fact, prose and poetry in an ongoing contradiction between thematic lines and stylistic deployment. The exquisiteness of Banville’s writing, full of light and suggestive natural imagery that stimulates all the senses, doesn’t match the gloomy background of a scene never static but ceaselessly fluctuating between unbearable beauty and sordidness that attracts and repels the reader at once. Banville is a sensualist, a linguistic sybarite, a sorcerer of the word, he probes and taunts and smirks with delectable artistry, making the reader fall prey to the ballast of his deeply charged lyrical overture. There is no escape for those who bask in texture, cadence and impeccable sentence structure when submerged into Banville’s works, to sink into the writer’s murky waters means to drown in agonizing rapture.Amidst the climatic display of flawlessly developed metaphors that go full circle, I can’t help but wonder about the trait that distinguishes Banville from other writers. There is something of the foreigner in his use of English, maybe something to do with his Irish heritage that places him as a Pilgrim in his own language, a native of his own style, an insurgent of standardized limits.The result of what appears a fragmentary chronicle on the surface is an understated, maybe also predictable, requiem that shakes the reader like an authentic classic.And Alexander’s last invocation of his lost muse, his Miranda his Perdita, his Marina, achieves the quality of the divine in its cold, remote aloofness like the dead light of stars that brighten the darkest night without giving off any warmth nor any hint of exoneration. Words are the only artifacts left to hold on to after the curtain falls and the actors have abandoned the stage, and memory becomes the only means to remember their faint echo, their fading scent of sweat, tears and remorse. “I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.”
—Dolors
I chose this book for a very strange reason which I will blog about soon. The reason - to clear my head of my own prose before completing the last two drafts of my manuscript. I'm not in a position yet to decide yet whether this worked but if I go on to read the other two books in the trilogy - I'm guessing by then the answer will be yes.Because of course - as most readers of Banville know - he has a unique style that can be overwhelming at times. Reading his book The Sea was actually like being scoured by the sea, unrelenting wave after wave crashing over the reader and dragging them out into the depths of the ocean. At least that's how I felt after reading that wonderful book. This book I discovered was quite different. More like being gently lead into a strange garden full of interesting things by an unreliable fairy that flits this way and that. It's hard to keep up sometimes but the lyrical musings, the doubling back and the reminiscences are mesmerising. Banville's metaphors are to die for!Here is a particularly vivid passage: "It was like clasping in my arms a big marvellous flustered bird that cooed and cawed and thrashed wild wings and shuddered at the end and sank down beneath me helplessly with faint woeful sounding cries!"And I love when he writes about the ghosts in his childhood home:"They have their own furniture, in their own world. It looks like the solid stuff among which I move, but it is not the same, or is the same at another stage of existence. Both sets of things, the phantom and the real, strike up a resonance together, a chiming."I can't go into details of course but the ending was a shock and ensures that I read the next book in the trilogy - Shroud.I thoroughly enjoyed this. My only criticism is that I'm unsure about what actually happened at the circus.
—Debbie Robson
I laughed when I read one review that called this book a word pile collapsing into a jumble. Banville is one of those writers whose words are gorgeous (Life is everywhere, even in the stones, slow, secret, long enduring), but there's a niggling joker on your shoulder groaning and snorting over the meandering, apparently directionless journey those words take you on. Oh, god, the Irish, it says, what masters of misery! all pallid, jiggling flesh and backed up drains. That, of course, is part of Banville's, shall I say, charm? He renders a state of mind that is, finally, mesmerizing. You sink with his characters into the texture of their vivid gloom. Everything is highlighted, every odd memory inserted into a queer semblance of a plot. I read this after Ancient Light (which has more get up and go than Eclipse) and am beginning to think Banville is writing about writing - poor old Alex Cleave locked up there in his room sorting through a jumble sale of memory and plucking out the most salient. Cobbling them together as best he can, trying to make sense of them. It's not a job for the weak.
—Sheila
