I love Irish fiction and John Banville is not only one of Ireland’s best prose stylists, he’s one of the best prose stylists writing today. He’s not a well-known author, and unfortunately, I doubt that he’ll ever be on the top of the bestseller list (unless as Benjamin Black), though he certainly deserves to be. His books are masterpieces of style; they are highly introspective, character driven stories of men who have attempted to build lives on the basis of fraud and deceit, only to see those lives eventually come tumbling down around them like the flimsiest house of cards. In The Untouchable, Banville introduced us to the art critic and Soviet agent, Anthony Blunt. In Eclipse, it was the embittered actor, Alex Cleave. In Shroud, it’s Axel Vander, virtuoso of the lie, who takes center stage, for Banville lets us know almost immediately, Axel Vander is not really Axel Vander, although Vander, himself says he is at the beginning of his tale:My name is Axel Vander, on that much I insist. That much, if no more.We first encounter Axel Vander in his home in quaint Arcady, California (a very thinly disguised Berkeley). Vander’s a Belgian born intellectual, a professor and internationally known literary scholar. But, as in all of Banville’s works, nothing is at it really seems, and we soon find out that Vander has much he’s been hiding. As Vander says:All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.It’s quite clear that Banville, who likes to base his novels on the lives of historical persons, has based the character of Axel Vander on Paul de Man, a Belgian born Yale scholar and founder of deconstrutivism. Although de Man was revered when he died in 1983, in 1987 it was discovered that as a young man in Belgium, he’d written several very anti-Semitic articles for the Flemish newspaper, Le Soir. Vander’s dead wife, Magda, even shares her name with de Man’s wife. Vander also seems to have been drawn, to a lesser degree, from French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, a man who, like de Man, was revered as a cult figure, and a man who, like Vander, murdered his own wife.Although Vander seems proud of his lies, and proud that he’s gotten away with them, this decidedly misanthropic, elderly widower doesn’t like himself any more than he likes others. He’ll chase people away from him with his walking stick, he’s almost always drunk and he describes himself as a man with:that gnarled leg, that crazily skewed dead eye, and all that sagging flesh, the pot belly and the shrunken acorn below and its bag suspended by an attenuated string of yellowed skin like the head of garlic on its stalk.Axel Vander doesn’t spare others, but to his credit, he doesn’t spare himself, either.The day we meet Axel, he’s just received a letter from a woman in Belgium, a researcher who's stumbled upon the truth of Axel’s past quite by accident and now, for reasons unknown, is threatening to unmask him. Axel is determined not to put up with any such thing, especially not so late in his life, when he has but little life left. He arranges to meet his nemesis in Turin, that northern Italian city whose claim to fame is that it is the home of the once revered Shroud of Turin, a shroud that has been shown to be as fake as is Axel Vander, himself.Vander, a Nietzsche scholar, with "a passionate and all-consuming belief in nothing" plans on attending a seminar on Nietzsche at the university in Turin (the city where Nietzsche had his final breakdown), and he also plans on doing away with his would-be unmasker. When Vander, who could hardly be a less sympathetic character, arrives in Turin, however, his nemesis is not who and what he thought she would be. When Vander meets Cass Cleave, a fair, fragile, red-haired Irish beauty, rather than feeling the murderous rage he was prepared to feel he felt:…as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat at the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden.Cass Cleave, it would seem, is certainly no match for Axel Vander. In addition to being frail and fragile, she suffers from Mandelbaum’s Syndrome, a syndrome that causes her to have seizures and aural hallucinations despite the fact that she’s tried several different kinds of medication, all with very allusive sounding names: Oread, Empusa, various Lemures and Lamia.Shockingly, Vander and Cass embark upon an affair, and Vander says:I loved her. I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside.In fact, Vander and Cass spend three months in Turin, making love, visiting castles and cemeteries and trying, in vain, to view the notorious shroud. As this unlikely duo makes its way around Turin, we are told most of the story in the first person, from Axel’s point of view, though at times, Banville switches to the third person and gives us Cass’s thoughts as well. Cass, we learn, is a woman fighting demons of her own, but just what those demons are, other than the syndrome to which she’s subject, is never made completely clear. Like Axel’s identity Cass’s demons, as well as her motives in contacting Axel Vander, are quite opaque and misty.Axel Vander seems to be searching for "one last chance" in the person of Cass Cleave. He seems to see her as his redemption, and for that reason, his desire for her knows no bounds.Cass doesn’t have quite the same passion for Axel, though she does feel much for him. She does, however, have a passion for death and she wishes to be:Gone like that without a sound, like slipping out of a room and turning and quietly closing the door; in her mind she saw a hand, it was hers, slowly relinquish the polished knob and her miniature, curved reflection on it shrink to a dot of darkness and disappear.Vander and Cass are, of course, both headed for tragedy on a grand scale. That’s not a spoiler; that’s something that’s obvious from page one.As in all of John Banville’s books, ghosts and specters flit through Shroud. In particular, is a red-haired man who is always following Axel Vander. Whether this man is real or is simply a product of Vander’s fevered imagination is never made known, but one thing that is clear is that he is based on the red-haired man who shadowed von Aschenbach through much of Thomas Mann’s gorgeous novella, Death in Venice. And Vander and Cass eventually come to be seen as something of a King Lear and a Cordelia, though on a much less grand scale. Banville loves allusions and so do I, but Shroud, I think, may suffer from a few too many. The problem is, that while Banville’s languidly exquisite prose is still very much in evidence, the story, itself simply can’t support all the allusions Banville heaps upon it. And Axel Vander and Cass Cleave eventually come to be seen, not as Lear and Cordelia, but as Harlequin and Columbine.I think it goes without saying that Axel Vander is a very unsympathetic figure, but Cass Cleave, despite her many problems...perhaps because of her many problems…is not a sympathetic figure, either. She’s barely more than a shadow, a wisp of a human being. While it’s difficult to understand what would entice her to enter into a sexual relationship with someone as unsavory as Vander, it’s even more of a mystery how someone so frail and fragile could endure Vander’s sexual predilections. It was also not believable to me that someone like Axel Vander, who had spent his entire adult life building and maintaining a lie, would see, in the very thinly drawn Cass Cleave, a chance for redemption. Indeed, it strains credibility to even think that Axel Vander would even consider redemption to be something he should seek. The book begins wonderfully and I could see that Banville was going to explore one of his favorite themes: the uncertainty of identity and the fragility of the self, but about halfway through the book, at the point where Axel and Cass begin their love affair, all verisimilitude, for me, at least, was lost. Axel Vander committed his crimes so he could come to the United States because there he says he would not be required to be or do anything. He could be pure existence, itself. And now he is risking throwing it all away.Cass Cleave just wasn’t a strong enough character to cause this kind of change in anyone, although Vander says:I seized on her to be my authenticity….She was my last chance to be me.Okay, fine. But Axel Vander has spent the last sixty years obliterating "me. I just couldn’t buy his sudden turn around simply because Cass Cleave discovered his real identity. And that brings me to yet another problem with this book.Shroud is an extremely atmospheric book, drenched in death and decay. Some of the descriptions of rain-soaked Turin are gorgeous in the extreme and the book is almost worth reading for those descriptions alone. But, Banville has filled Shroud with mystery. He’s set his readers up for a huge revelation that never comes. And what little does come is pretty inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things. Certainly nothing worthy of the demons both Vander and Cass are attempting to elude.I’m not sorry I read Shroud. I did thoroughly enjoy it, more than some better written books, and I am an admitted "Banville junkie." I want to read everything he writes, if not for the story, then simply for the gorgeous prose. Perhaps Edna O’Brien, a fellow countryman of Banville’s is the only author writing today who can string words together as beautifully as does Banville.Although gorgeously written in Banville’s exquisitely voluptuous prose, and to the author’s credit, eschewing all sentimentality, in the end, Shroud just doesn’t pull it together. Still, I would recommend it, as long as the reader knows he won’t be entirely satisfied in the end.
Banville keeps playing with words and intention. He teases and probes, mocks and beguiles, baffles and enlightens with his darkly pleasant wordplay. A pattern of recurrent symbols drenched with double entendres, the deliberate use of anagrams, of menacing coincidences, of literary connections. What is fiction and what is reality? Nietzsche affirms that “there exists neither “spirit”, nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions.”What is hallucination and what is remembrance? Banville is of the opinion that“what is remarkable is not that we remember, but that we forget”.Banville shrouds his story in mystery and drags the reader through the nooks and crannies of his antihero’s mind, the highly acclaimed literary critic Axel Vander who is also an irascible old man, recently widowed and haunted by the ghost of his docile wife, who bears the cross of a fraudulent identity and a diffused past in the Antwerp of WWII. Threatened by a letter from an enigmatic woman called Cassandra Cleave, an uncommon femme fatale, that reveals secrets that would disrupt Axel’s staged life, he leaves the comfortable impersonality of Arcady, the rural paradise of California, to meet her in Turin. Once again, the Irish artist paints his characters using the sfumato technique, wrapping them in a sort of haze that blurs the contours of their figures. The unreliable narration shifts from Axel’s first person narrative to Cass’ third person without warning and in both cases, the more the characters explore their psyches, their pasts and their memories, the more undefined they become. Reflection and identity serve as settings where the “non-action” gradually unfolds.This novel is part of a trilogy, and so it is no accident that the actor Alexander Cleave, protagonist of the sequel Ancient Light who is also Cassandra’s father, and the writer Axel Vander, Alex and Axel, are both impostors who lie with eloquence and without the slightest shred of shame about their pasts. Their monologues, almost soliloquies with Shakespearean ascendancy, dissolve the distinctness of their features in the askew labyrinth of their consciences, leaving only an indistinct shade of their separate beings in the mirror of Banville’s prose.It is not fortuitous either that the downfall of the nihilistic protagonist takes place in Turin, where the mad philosopher lost his last vestiges of sanity, or that Axel’s first essay was about Shelley who drowned his poetry in the surly ocean in the Gulf of La Spezia. Every intellectual reference or choice of expression is intentional and contributes into creating a dazzling masquerade ball where the reader swirls and the characters dance to the rhythm of Banville’s elastic, atemporal narration, making of fallacious simulation an artistic genre on its own.But Banville’s genius doesn’t stop there. The pregnant imagery and plot twists are not the most fundamental aspects of his novels. It is the superb portrayal of such a disturbing emotional landscape that reveals the true “beauty of the monster”, of the irredeemable villain, Harlequin and Prince at once, that provides a voice for those who vacillate between life and death, light and shadow, fear and cynicism, and possesses the exceptional quality of awakening tenderness for the loathsome hero who is incapable of loving someone else, for he can only love himself in nauseating self-disgust.Nevertheless, once the dead have found their voice, not even the Holy Shroud of Turin can save them from being crucified in performance, they are beyond redemption because, as Macbeth envisioned, “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor placer that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. So yes, maybe Nietzsche and Axel Vander were right and there is no God, but there will always be Shakespeare… and Banville.
What do You think about Shroud (2004)?
Banville writes beautiful prose, and he deals with serious themes. I can't help feel, however, that he's in danger of writing the same story over and over. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book, but it is another ornate, precise, heavily allusive novel about an elderly male character who is the unreliable narrator of his own story, whose identity is fluid, and who spends a lot of time reflecting on the themes of truth, representation, and memory. Now, I love all those techniques and themes, but I feel like Banville has used them and examined them in at least three of his novels (that I have read) already, and I don't think Shroud is his best treatment of them (in my opinion, that would be The Untouchable). Still, this is a better, more serious, more engaging, and more stimulating novel than 99% of contemporary novels.
—Simon
Did you ever finish a book and think, "I get it, but I don't know if I REALLY get it..."? This was one of those. I'm pretty sure there's layers of meaning or inferences that went completely over my head. But I'm okay with that. Alex Vander is a crotchety old man who leaves for Turin from the US when he is contacted by someone he's never met regarding a secret in his past. But this isn't really about that, not completely. Nothing happens the way I thought it would and I would stop every once in awhile and think, "What is really going on?". Alex's past and future meet in his present, in the experience of meeting the stranger who knows his secret. I kinda liked it... I think.Food: this is a dinner party observed through a window. You can't hear what's being said, but you can make out what they're having, who's interacting with who, and you can start to distinguish relationships and personalities. It's entertaining and mysterious and all on the outside, looking in.
—Maryann
I read with surprise a UK review of Shroud by John Banville. It was quite critical saying that “a couple of passages midway point take the narrative clean off its hinges...a lesion in the book’s reality that never fully heals over.” The reviewer cites the main problem being Banville’s management of the points of view, particularly the merging of the two POVs in the middle of the novel. I noted the merging while reading it but found that it was (for me anyway) quite in keeping with the general tone of the book and with what I believe Banville was trying to achieve. This is not a spoiler and if anything will help future readers who are wondering what is happening around page 125 or so. As readers of the first book in the trilogy Eclipse will be aware, one of the two main characters Cass Cleave is mad. “She looked at her watch and sighed. A single, gloating voice began whispering in her head.” Or this: “That was how it was with her, she was the plane and her mind was the jet engines trying to speed away from it. She was barely held together. The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces.”It was quite a relief (in this book) to finally discover what Cass is suffering from and it’s no surprise either that in many ways Axel Vander is mad too. As he says himself so eloquently - his life has been a series of poses. “I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie.” The book is filled with references and allusions to real and imaginary characters. There are Nabokian references cited by the reviewer. (Note to self: Read Nabokov.) Allusions to Harlequin, Cordelia and the life of Paul de Man and of Nietzsche. I love the rendering of Vander’s youth in Antwerp and the onslaught of Naziism. The scenes are believable and tense. Turin is very much present too. “They came out into a long, cobbled piazza. A bronze horseman strode motionless above them in the dark air, with a light from somewhere gleaming on his brow.” When Vander arrives in London during WWII he meets the very wealthy Laura - a fascinating character who had me reeling with a decision she makes. With Vander being a writer Banville has to be on top of his game when depicting the thoughts of this difficult, cantankerous and very old man. I loved this observation: “Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself bit in the gap between actuality and the mind’s apprehending; the eye registers the event but the understanding lags.” Although much is gradually revealed by Vander to the reader we are still left wondering is the shroud still over our eyes? I was cursing Vander for a final tricky revelation at the same time praising his choice of just three simple words: TIME. NIGHT. WATER that finish one of the most important last scenes in the novel. I found that after swimming through page after page of brilliant adverbs, dazzling adjectives, clever verbs in abundance, when I came upon these three simple words that the effect on me as a reader was staggering! How they stood out! How powerful they were! How powerful John Banville’s prose is. He is my new favourite writer!
—Debbie Robson
