Alex Cleave is a moderately successful stage actor. In his mind he is terribly successful, but there are many hints throughout the book that all is not the way he paints it, either in his life or his career. Midperformance, Cleave suffers a nervous breakdown and retreats to his haunted boyhood home to recover, much to the dismay of his estranged wife. There, Cleave struggles with ghosts, real and imagined, which bring him to terms with the realities of his ruined life, the shambles of his marriage, and his tense relationship with his emotionally disturbed daughter Cass. Banville uses this rather thin plot, with it's reminiscences of the Victorian ghost story to shape a narrative that is poetic and ultimately tragic.
This novel is short on action or even plot. Rather it is a subtly drawn character study, rendered in some of the most exquisite prose since Henry James. Banville has an uncanny sense of the inner workings of his character. Cleave is an actor, and as such has the touch of the liar about him. As his mind drifts from present events to the remembered past you watch as Cleave's mind skirts around the real problems of his life. He engages in self-aggrandizement, rationalizations and most especially avoidance when faced with anything unpleasant. He admits to lesser failings readily to avoid confrontation with his greater failings. His observations of the other characters in the novel are well drawn, but slanted. Banville's brilliance is shown particularly in the life of these peripheral characters. Lydia, Cleave's wife, seems on the surface to be a shrew...and yet, you leave the novel with the sense that her complaints against her husband are more than justified. Lilly, the daughter of Cleave's rather odious caretaker, is a mysterious cypher, by turns superficial and yet possessing glimpses of a very complicated inner life that Cleave only barely understands.
The central haunting figure in the novel, Cleave's daughter Cass, is not even physically present throughout, and yet she haunts the book more fully than the ghosts in Cleave's house. Cass is brilliant but mentally troubled. She hears voices and has a tendency to self-destruction. Her specter comes between Cleave and his wife and even haunts Cleave's strange and unsettling relationship with Lilly. She troubles Cleave's conscience and yet we never know quite why. Much is left unstated in the novel about the relationship. At heart you feel there is a secret underlying it all, a secret that Banville will never fully reveal. At every moment when you think something is going to finally break in this tenuous story, the characters look away....and don't say what they are actually feeling. Even the final climax of the book is ultimately an enigma...like the eclipse of the title, most of the important events in Cleave's life are obscured by clouds, and even when they aren't he looks away.
This is not a book for "light reading" or for those who's interest is most heavily in plot or dialogue. In fact, the passages of dialogue in the work could probably be fit on ten pages. It is rather a long, internal monologue rendered in breathtaking turns of phrase. If you love haunting, slow and powerfully tragic novels though, Banville is for you. His is a world that I will be entering again soon.
The story is moving but unspectacular: Alexander Cleave is an aging actor who has suddenly lost it. For no reason that he can think of he unexpectedly finds himself in cinemas crying his heart out during the afternoon showings and he forgets his lines when he is on stage. He retreats to his late mother's house, hoping to get some peace of mind there and somehow find himself again. But instead of peace and quiet he finds that ghosts and living people have taken up residence with him. He is also beset by memories of his troubled daughter. Hoever, it is not so much the outcome of all this that matters as the processes in Cleave's mind, his dreams, his perplexities, his realizations, his fears.
Banville writes beautifully, exquisitely. His prose is a blend of evocativeness and precision, his metaphors are just right. An example: "Memory is peculiar in the fierce hold with which it will fix the most insignificant-seeming scenes. Whole tracts of my life have fallen away like a cliff in the sea, yet I cling to seeming trivia with pop-eyed tenacity (p. 74)." And another one: "It has always seemed to me a disgrace that the embarrasments of early life should continue to smart throughout adulthood with undiminshed intensity. Is it not enough that our youthful blunders made us cringe at the time, when we were at our tenderest, but must stay with us beyond cure, burn marks ready to flare up painfully at the merest touch (p. 83)?"
This is not a novel of plot and action, but a gently moving, meditative, introspective story, where a lot is left unsaid and merely hinted at and for the reader to find out. Only very good writers can pull that off succesfully. John Banville is such a very good writer.
