Seamus Deane, Be Assured I am Inventing: The Fiction of John Banville, in Patrick Rafroidi & Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time [Cahiers Irlandaises, 4-5] (lUniversité de Lille 1976), p.329[-38]: Deane writes that Banvilles work up to 1975 was a prolegomena to fiction rather than a fiction itself. (p.332.) This is a strange tradition to which John Banville belongs, for it is not a political literature by any means, yet it is not at all a literature without politics - that the world is subject to improvement if not to change or transformation. For them all, it is a place of proverbial and archetypal corruption. One could, I believed, argue that the degree of introversion in the major Irish fictions of this century is in exact relation to the degree of political disillusion. (Ibid., [p.334].)
[ top ] Seamus Deane, Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1986), p. 224: [T]here is an insistence on us remembering that a novel is a series of literary conventions [ ]. Banville uses literary echoes as a reminder that the essential activity is the act of writing itself and that the essential futility is manifest in the gap between a discreet, discontinuous experience and the formed plots and arranged motifs which are a necessary feature of literature. (Quoted in Catherine Canniffe, UUC MA Diss, 1999.) Note: Deane somewhere calls Freddie Montgomery [of Book of Evidence] morally delinquent, neuraesthenically sensitive, astray in the hall of mirrors he calls his consciousness, a connoisseur of his own emotions and a despoiler of those of others (quoted in McMinn, Supreme Fictions, 1999, p.102.) Rüdiger Imhof, John Banvilles Supreme Fiction, in Irish University Review, 11, 1 (1981): Birchwood is a tale of mystery, reminiscent of the romantic Poe story, because of its exploiting romantic modes and their latter-day successors - the question romance, the gothic novel, the detective story as a development of the rationalistic gothic - as well as stylised features pertaining to these fictional types. (p.62.)
Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Contemporary Irish Novelists (Tübingen: Gunther Narr 1990): The various magicians, trapeze artists, saltimbanques, and the like - more flambouyant cousins of the mathematicians, astronomers, scholars, and writers who ghost through his works from Long Lankin to Mefisto are at once real symbols and self-deflating symbols of this systematic displacement, parodic and wistful glimpses at once of a lost magic, wholeness and radiance which may never have been more than a fiction anyway; just as the various pairs of twins, incestuous siblings, and homosexual lovers are likewise markers, at once serious and playful, of a pivotal concern with the question of self-identity and self-difference. (p.221-22; quoted in Sherry Walsh, UG Essay, UUC 2003.) Joseph McMinn, John Banville: A Critical Study (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1991): With a writer like Banville, so receptive to the rhythms of European literature, and so able to select the most suitable literary company for he purposes of his own aesthetic, we would do well to recall some of the major trends of modern literary culture. The innovator in Banville turns out to be a deceptive traditionalist. His fiction, at once tragic and playful, is largely about the recreation of fictions. In this sense, we are faced with a writer who keeps returning to literature itself, a history of the imaginative life, for inspiration. / Banville makes us work for our pleasure. A writer who is so sensitive to the work of other writers keeps us on our toes, but we should remember always that the point of such a deeply referential fiction is to enrich the imaginative range of the work [...] rather than a scholarly game. This fiction is rich with ideas about illusion and perception, yet the irony of any uncritical fascination with the purely intellectual dimension of the writing is that it may very likely lose sight of the humanistic idea at the heart of Banvilles fiction. (p.1-2.) The rhetorical authority and stylistic grace of Banvilles fiction comes from [a] balanced tension between a classical design, rich and evocative, and a lonesome elegiac voice. All his narrators look back to their origins and their immediate past for some clue to their sense of tragic and farcical confusion. The underlying and enabling myth is, of course, one of lost innocence. [...; cont.]
[ top ] Patricia Craig, This is such stuff as dreams are made on, reviewing Athena, in Spectator (18 Feb. 1995) [n.p.], cites interview with Fintan OToole in 1989: Ive always likened writing a novel to a very powerful dream that you know is going to haunt you for days. If you sit down at the breakfast table and start to try to explain the dream to someone, they yawn and look at you and they cant understand what youre on about; he continues to the effect that if you imagine the author sitting down with such a dream for three years or so, refining and refining it into an elaborate work of fiction then youre close to the impulse of my novels [see longer version, infra].
Colm Tóibín, On (Not) Saying What You Mean [Colm Tóibín reports from Dublin], in London Review of Books (30 Nov. 1995), pp.3-6: [...] In the early Seventies, as the car-bombs went off in the North and the debate raged over Section 31, which banned Sinn Fein from the Irish airwaves, and the nature of Irish identity, for me and my associates the name John Banville began to have a strange, heroic power. His novel Birchwood, which appeared in 1973, remains the most extreme and perhaps the most persuasive work of Irish revisionism. In this book Irish history was a huge joke: the Famine and the war of independence were mixed with a circus and various Gothic horrors as parts of a sour dream, pieces of a narrative invented to amuse us. Banvilles earlier novel Nightspawn was set in Greece and his next, Doctor Copernicus, in Mitteleuropa. It would be hard, it seemed to me, to write a novel set in the past in Ireland without somehow taking Birchwood into account. It was the attitude that mattered most the prose glistening with irony, the tone sophisticated and knowing. The idea of viewing Ireland as a joke and the outside world as somehow real was hugely liberating if you were a student in Dublin in the early Seventies in a world dominated by Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, Daithi Ó Conall and Seán Mac Stíopháin. (Available at LRB online.)
Maggie Gee, reviewing The Untouchable, in Times Literary Supplement (9 May 1997), p.20, points out that in this roman à clef, Banville has revenged himself upon Graham Greene (who, as adjudicator to the Booker Prize, advanced his own candidate [Vincent McDonnell]), by making him a hated and hateful Quennel, author of pretentiously papist novels living with his mistresses in the south of France and even frequenting child prostitutes; Gee criticises the asset-stripping of Blunts life in external details to house a successor to Freddie Mongomery / Morrow as a current trend, reminiscence of the sentence in The Book of Evidence, I could kill her because for me she was not alive; the central character is Irish-born, son of a Church of Ireland bishop. [Gees review is answered in a letter from Neil Corcoran (Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 1997), pointing out that the childhood of Louis MacNeice, including the mongolism of his brother, has been grafted on, and further commending Banville for this blending of Blunt and MacNeice as an intensification of Banvilles abiding interest in doubleness or twinning and, it may be, a very postmodern touch in a roman à clé [sic]; and it supplies elements of pathos, humour and ethical and political complexity [which make it an] original and daring manoeuvre worthy of notice and approval in itself, further nothing the kind of Janus mask for Maskell and the heart-moving impact, making The Untouchable Banvilles richest book to date, and (pace Gee) not a word too long. This is turn answered by Gee (30 May), reproving Corcoran on the grounds that he failed to notice rhetoric, and riposting that invention is superior to soldering biographies together.] (The review is answered in letter by Neil Corcoran in Times Literary Supplement, 16 May 1997 and defended by Gee in Times Literary Supplement 30 May 1997.)
[ top ] Jonathan Yardley, review of John Banville, Eclipse, in Washington Post (Vol. 31; No. 7 [q.d.]), writes: dark and intensely interior, and accordingly [...] not to all tastes; Quotes inter alia: I am as a house walked up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger. I am all inwardness, gazing out in every intensifying perplexity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly what it is. And the thing itself, my little stranger, what of it? To have no past, no foreseeable future, only the steady pulse of a changeless present - how would that feel? Theres being for you. I imagine it in there, filling me to the skin, anticipating and matching my every movement, diligently mimicking the tiniest details of what I am and do. Why am I not writing in disgust, to feel thus horribly inhabited? Why not revulsion, instead of this sweet, melancholy sense of longing and lost promise?; further, It is not a girl like Lily I am dealing with - it is Lily herself, unique and mysterious, for all her ordinariness. Who knows what longings burn in that meagre breast?.; concludes that a compassionate heart beats somewhere inside Alexander; calls the novel circular and talky, but also oddly rewarding, and finally its reward outweighs its shortcomings.
Christopher Taylor, reviewing John Banville, Eclipse (Picador 2000), in Times Literary Supplement, 29 Sept. 2000), cites ghost story by Banville entitled The Un-Heimlich Manoeuvre in NY Review of Books; remarks, Where most of Banvilles books progress towards the uncovering of the narrators emptiness and uncertainly, Eclipse takes this as the starting-point and describes the attempt, however flawed, to find a way to live within such a state, and quotes: Never in my life, so it seems, have I beenso close up to the very stuff of the world, even as the world itself shimmers and turns transparent before my eyes. Notes tart one-liners, lyrical epiphanies and casually brilliant images and remarks that Eclipse has a warmer and more personal feel than any of Banvilles previous novels and affirms that Banville has very few rivals among serious contemporary novelists. (p.23.)
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), [Chap. 2:] Irish Metahistories: John Banville and the Revisionist Debate, pp.80-134: [...] Banvilles fiction [...] represent[s] a notable, if oblique contribution to Irish historiographical debate. [...] He brings to a kind of historical writing what Seamus Deane has called a high state of anxious self-reflection. To this extent, even these non-Irish novels touch glancingly on the Irish condition: the conflict, which has been onoing since the end of the 1960s, inherent in the arrival of intellectual modernity at the apparent end of that intellectual era. (p.11.) Banville uses metafictional techniques to alienate his reader from any possible understanding of these novels as realist texts. [...] Gabriel Godkin, the narrator of Birchwood, spends his life dealing with epistemological and representational difficulties. [... A] major part of the interest of these books lies in this representation and self-representation of crisis. In it, Banville intrudes in or interferes with Irish history writing, Irish intellectuals, the historical novel, and the nineteenth-century Big House mode that has been adopted by Irish novelists from Maria Edgeworth to William Trevor. It is precisely in Banvilles representation of crisis, his embravce of and play with crisis, that his difference from and rebuke to Irish historiography lies. (Ibid., p.112.) In Birchwood, Banville installs the Big House novel, a form already characterised, if only thematically, by familial decline and political decay, and subverts it further, using the Gothic mode, and formal techniques such as direct address to the reader, narratorial self-deprecation, the invocation of a whole range of literary and philosophical intertexts, and historical anachronisms. This strategy has political as well as aesthetic implications. (p.113.) [T]he empiricist tendency of revisionism was partly due to the problem of representation faced by nineteenth-century novelists in Ireland, a problem that Banville returned to in the early 1970s. [...] Writing pastiches of the Big House novel and the Irish Gothic, Banville attempts to subvert a literary tradition of the nineteenth-century Protestant bourgeoisie, at a time when it seemed that the Roman Catholic nationalist bourgeoisie had all but absorbed or incorporated the remains of the Ascendancy. (p.114.)
John Kenny, The Ideal Elegies, reviewing The Revolutions Trilogy: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter in The Irish Times (6 Jan. 2001), draws attention to ambitious article for New York Times in 1985, Physics and Fiction: Order from Chaos, in which Banville proposed a solution to the two cultures debate, using a version of Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle to suggest that modern literature and science are in an identical quandary: The dream of certainty, of arriving at a simple, elegant, and above all concrete answer, has had to be abandoned [...] as science moves away from the search for blank certainties it takes on more an dmore the character of poetic metaphor, and since fiction is moving, however sluggishly, in the same direction, perhaps a certain seepage between the two streams is inevitable. Kenny remarks that creativity, as Banville points out elsewhere, is often better served by an artists passionate misreading of ideas than by clinically accurate interpretation; notes that Mefisto has been excluded and questions the new arrangement. Further notes that the single most important acknowledged sources is [Arthur] Koestlers The Sleepwalkers (1959). All three novels are, as Banvilles own qualification of postmodern self-reflexivity has it, a way of writing about the creative process with out writing about a man who is writing a book about a man who is writing a book about a man who is writing a book. Remarks that the first two titles are narratived in the third person and a pair, while the third is narratied by a contemporary Irish historian trying to finish a biography on Newton while sojourning at a Big House; suggests that this 70-page novella is out of placed in this edition, though the trilogy has nevertheless [...] a perceptible unity. Further, Banvilles treatment is grandly singular and sophisticates, yet the three principles are recognisably modern existential representatives; their inner lives take precedence, though their idealisstions are ultimately seen to be a mere shoring of fragments against ruins in a post-Renaissance age of total suspicion and provisionality. Concludes: the light may be impossible to find but rarely has the darkness been delivered with such thrilling pathos. [Weekend, p.15; END.]
Bernard ODonoghue, Keeping faith with the faceless, review of Shroud, in The Irish Times (28 Sept. 2002), Weekend Review: [...] Banvilles best critic, Joseph McMinn, acutely identified the humanistic ideal at the heart of the playful, Nabokov-like world of these fictions. Though in some of the early novels the patterned cleverness was sometimes more prominent than the humanity, by now McMinns early insight looks impressively prophetic. In these novels - in Shroud even more than Eclipse - every effect is subordinated to attentive portrayals of human dilemmas. The learnedness is still in evidence, as in the Revolutions trilogy; the acknowledgments (which significantly come at the end, by which time the desolated reader doesnt want to know) feature the names of Nietzsche, Althusser, Paul De Man, Victor Klemperer, and a study of the Commedia dell Arte. The genius now - as in Nabokov - is the way that what seemed to be engaging and clever devices turn into (or turn out as) compassion and moral seriousness. / The central such device is the shroud of the title; it is most obviously the shroud of Turin, which the central characters want to see but don t. So they dont find out whether Christs face is on it. Then we remember that when Cass Cleaves body was recovered in Eclipse it was faceless; next we notice how recurrent the word faceless is here. Axel confides early on that his ideal of feminine beauty has no face, this fleshy idol; the midget child (a touch of Fellini?) seen by Cass plays with a doll whose face, she saw, had no features. Axel reflects that for the classical actor (like Alex) the mask is more like his face than his face is; his first significant critical essay was Shelley Defaced; and as he dries his face at the end, he wonders if its imprint will appear on the towel. And shrouded is the verb he uses to describe his denied past. / All this is not mechanically sustained imagery; it is the heart of the book. [...] But Shroud will not easily be surpassed for combination of wit, moral complexity, and compassion. It is hard to see what more a novel could do. (See full text in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index or direct.)
Alan ORiordan, review of Christine Falls, in Books Ireland ( Nov. 2006), p.250, following remarks about Banvilles self-conscious style, his combination of modernist formalism and postmodernist ideas: [...] Christine Falls is a straightforward mystery story. A pathologist, Quirke, finds his brother-in-law, a doctor himself, doctoring a file in Quirkes office. Its the file of the eponymous Ms Falls and this chance intelligence leads Quirke into a web (Black even calls it a web) of sinister Catholicism that takes him from abortionists to Magdalene laundries and on to the Irish aristocracy of Boston. The plot has the right tempo - teasing yet exorable. 1950s Dublin is convincing if a tad clichéd; in fact, the reader rather misses it when the story shifts to Boston. Quirke even has a drinking buddy modelled on Brendan Behan. Christine Falls, is nothing if not generic, and satisfyingly so. They are all here., the heavies; a city hierarchy mysteriously propped up by the underworld; handy malcontents ready to spill the beans; the odd coincidence here and there; a lonely investigator, flawed but appealing. Its an enjoyable but nwvery compulsive read which leaves one wondering how much notice one would give it were one not aware it was the work of our best novelist. [ top ] Alan ORiordan, review of Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2008): Quirkes [the anti-hero] prior outing was a crime novel without too much crime at all; a mystery thriller with one awkwardly concealed mystery only [...] There is a considerably longer rap sheet here [...] It still smells of Dublin but, thank goodnes, a link between the official city and the kind of misdeeds has been put to one side. That didnt work well in Christine Falls because the genre was not the place to delve into the elected controversy in a satisfying way. / Here the sordid story, while it could in a sense happen anywhere, seems a perfectly logical expression of the listless, stifling Dublin in which we find ourselves. Truly, it is an awful place. Furthermore, the central plot driver of opiate abuse, displaced to the 1950s, certainly reflects nimbly our deep-rooted national predilection for substances which keep the world at its distance. As with Christine Falls, Banville again displays masterly craft in moving the mystery along. But he again falls down in the machinations of the mystery itself. He gives us enough to be interested, and hides enough along the route, but the compulsiveness of the best crime stories and mysteries is not here. The plot is too straightforward, ultimately for that. [...; pp.13-14.)
Laura Miller, Oh Gods, review of The Infinities by John Banville, in The New York Times, Sunday Book Review (7 March 2010): If The Infinities has the bones of a novel of ideas, its fleshed out and robed as a novel of sensibility and style. Its drapery is velvet and brocade - sumptuous and at times over-heavy. Banville is the sort of writer, drunk on Joyce, who wants to nail down every fleeting moment and sensation with some strenuously unprecedented combination of words: the slurred clamor of a startled heartbeat, the humid conspiracy of a grandmother, the lumpy wodge of stirabout that is cereal left too long in its bowl of milk. He will tell you how every room smells, and is forever pausing to liken a characters gestures or stance to a scratching cat or the queen of diamonds or a mummified pharaoh. The high quality of these flourishes doesnt entirely justify their sheer volume as they assail the reader. At the very least, theres a plausibility issue when youre writing from various points of view: the minds of ordinary people (that is to say, nonwriters) arent preoccupied with a continuous flow of extravagant metaphors and conceits. / Fortunately, lavish demonstrations of literary virtuosity dont bog down The Infinities, as they often did with The Sea, the novel that won Banville the Man Booker Prize in 2005. [...] And heres something odd: The family the Godleys bought the house from are descended from a soldier ennobled by Mary, Queen of Scots, after she had the upstart and treasonous Elizabeth Tudor beheaded. The younger Adam drives a car powered by sea water. Wallaces theory of evolution has been recently overturned, and so has the theory of relativity, thanks to Godleys own work. In his youth, the dying mathematician was responsible for a series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes that unlocked the sealed chamber of time, revealing, among other things, the infinite number of infinities and a multitude of universes. The universe in which The Infinities takes place, it seems, is not our own. / In an infinity of worlds all possibilities are fulfilled, so in Godleys world the gods may be real. (See full text in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index or direct.)
Sara Keating, All artists think they are gods, creating worlds that didnt existing, bringing something into the world. You might call me an unreconstructed 19th century Romantic artist [interview with Banville], in The Irish Times (4 June 2011), Weekend - quotes: The person sitting at a desk writing is entirely different than the person who gets up and has a drink and re-enters the world, he explains, as if the Banville-Black dichotomy is nothing compared with the split between the writer and the person who must live in the world. / It is like when you are asleep and in the process of dreaming: you are both yourself and a different self as well. And fiction is a process like dreaming, where you have to be in some other zone. It is shocking sometimes when you are doing revisions and you come across a passage that you have no memory of writing. Artists are Pinocchios trying to be real boys, our noses growing longer as we tell more fictions. Further: The association between dreaming and the numinous otherworld of writing has become more vivid as Banville has aged, to the extent that dreaming has taken the place of reading fiction. I find I have no use for fiction any more, he says. Indeed, I write far more fiction than I read these days. I think it is one of the great losses of age. And yet I did not know what other riches awaited me. Now I read histories, letters, biographies, poetry, philosophy, which offers a rich cleansing of the mind. But I dont seem to need stories the way I used to. / I think it is because my dream life has become so much more elaborate over the years. I have these Technicolor dreams that go on for hours, and that is some compensation, because there is a natural collaboration between the creative mind and the sleeping mind. I am not a Freudian, but my dreams offer some vivid material for my writing. Keating describes the ocasion as an interview that is best described as efficient during which there is also a near altercation with a waiter and an abrupt ending to our conversation when Banville attempts to walk off mid-sentence, continuing: So, as much as he says he has been unfairly branded ornery and difficult, his defence is delivered with a jowly scowl. (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
[ top ] Susan Mansfield, Edinburgh Festival Book Reviews (July-Aug. 2011) [online]: Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville quoted John Updike on the subject of giving the ordinary its beautiful due. This is part of what writers do, he said, but also what memory does, storing up vivid flashes of life which may appear to have no particular significance. / Memory plays a part in [..] The Infinities, a kind of Shakespearean romp inspired by Heinrich von Kleists little known play Amphitryon. Kleist aimed to meld Greek tragedy and Shakespearean burlesque, and Banville set out to do the same, writing a book which was full of airiness and silliness, but would still have dark places under the stairs. / In a country house in Ireland, the family gather around what may be the deathbed of Adam Godley. While he lies in a coma, floating in a hinterland of imagination and memories, his extended family find themselves in their own forest of Arden, complete with irresponsible, playful gods. Banville renders all of this in his usual honed, poetic prose. / Weighing in on the debate around the Death of the Novel, Banville said: The big novel is dying, the sort of thing written by Hemingway or Joyce. What those novels did, telling us stories about life, has now been taken over by HBO [the American cable TV network behind The Sopranos and The Wire]. The novel needs to transform into something else. Im trying to turn it into a poetic form.
John Boyne, The World and Its Wicked Ways, review of A Death in Summer, in The Irish Times (4 June 2010), Weekend Review, p.10: The question of who killed Diamond Dick becomes somehow less important than the slow deciphering of the suspects [...] As the novel develops, the unsettling image of an orphanage for boys, ominously known as the Cage, rears its head and, with it, everything we know now, with the benefit of half a centurys testimonies, and everything they didnt know then. Quirke, resident in this same orphanage as a boy, is drawn to it and its secrets, and it is here, in the dark corridors populated by boys sidling past ... their downcast eyes that motives and personal histories are finally uncovered. [...] There is no predictability to Quirke: he remains a cipher of sorts, neither likable nor annoying, simply there, watching, considering, piecing things together, solving the puzzles, able to unmask the killer but uncertain about who in fact should take the blame. He might be a pathologist, but, in this regard, his actions are not far removed from those of a novelist. Of any genre. (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.)
Philip Davison, Sweet retribution, review of Vengeance, in The Irish Times (16 June 2012), Weekend Review, p.10: [...] The novel opens with Victor Delahaye taking Davy, son of his business partner, Jack Clancy, out sailing. Its a perfect day to be on the water, but Davy, a boy child of 24, is uncomfortable. He doesnt like being in a boat, doesnt know why hes there. This is the Ireland of the 1950s. The Protestant Delahayes and the Catholic Clancys are formidable rival families. There exists between them an unequal business partnership built over two generations, with a third set to take over. They own garages. They ship coal and timber. The incumbent partners are shrewd men. They recognise their complementary skills and fully exploit them. The ruthlessness engendered by their antipathy towards each other has made a strong contribution to the success of their joint business venture. The philandering Jack the small boss though he despises Victor Delahaye, is more interested in playing at love with his mistresses, as Sylvia, his English wife, later tells Quirke. Jack will proceed regardless, it would appear, his sense of excitement, envy and sweet regret unimpeded. No amount of infidelity, boardroom chicanery or jealousy can stand in the way of profit, or so it would appear. These are resilient people, well versed in staying the course and concealing their vulnerability. [...] It is a pleasure to read. (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.) [ top ] Arminta Wallace, Im at last beginning to learn how to write, and I can let the writing mind dream [ interview with John Banville], in The Irish Times (30 June 2012), Weekend Review, p.7: The past has always obsessed me, says John Banville. I look carefully at him to see if this is a Banvillian joke: a moment earlier, as we made our way to the bar of the Merrion Hotel, he had been riffing with considerable glee on the vagueness and vagaries of the 66-year-old memory. Its absolutely true, he protests. The middle stuff is all gone. But the past is incredibly vivid. We think were living in the present, but were really living in the past. / Thats one of the themes of the novel; that we live most vividly in the past. Its a strange thing. Why does the past seem so magical, so fraught, so luminous? At the time it was just, ugh, another boring bloody day. But, to look back on, its a day full of miracles and light and extraordinary events. Why is this? What process do we apply to the past, to give it this vividness? I dont know. And thats why I keep probing at the problem. [...] Although technically part of a trilogy with Eclipse and Shroud, Ancient Light stands as a novel in its own, majestic right. It is, it almost goes without saying, ravishingly written and scrupulously observed. But its also a highly playful book, full of puns and puzzles and hilarious or are they vicious? pastiches. [Cont.]
Karl Miller, So Heres To You, Mrs. Gray, review of Ancient Light, in The Irish Times (7 July 2012), Weekend Review, p.11. Cleave has married and has fathered a child. In much later times he goes to Italy in pursuit of the last days of his long-lost daughter, spent in the company of the ominous Axel Varder, who appears to allude to the disgraced postmodernist star literary theorist Paul de Man, a name Banville may have been loath to leave out of a novel prone to colourful and evocative names. He has meanwhile befriended the film star Dawn Devonport, a less tender bond than the one he had with homespun Mrs Gray, whose maiden name is scarcely divulged in the book and has escaped the mind of its reminiscent narrator. Memory and mystery are, in general, a concern of John Banvilles. Memory and invention are, according to his narrator, the same thing. Further tests are hereby imposed on the project of lucidity. / The words chosen by this lord of language may be meant to mimic the language of Cleaves theatrical day job. Satyrs bent on rapine (or rape), talk of the demonic, might be cases in point. Words such as supererogatory and leporine are used. The lovers are referred to as Lady Venus and her sportive boy; a holiday is grandly referred to as the Feast of St Priapus, perhaps. But he also uses homely terms, such as hanky-panky, a mainly Scots-Irish expression, I believe, for what happens in the hay of the ruined and rained-on hut. [Cont.]
[ top ] Christopher Benfey, Doubling Back, review of Ancient Light, by John Banville, in The New York Times (9 Nov. 2012), Books. [...] Two traumatic events from the past hang in the narrative balance. First, there is Cleaves love affair, in the spring and summer he was 15, with the 35-year-old mother of his best friend, Billy Gray, in the tight little town near the Irish coast where he grew up. And, second, there is the suicide, four decades later, of his own troubled daughter, Cass, under mysterious circumstances in the Ligurian coastal town of Portovenere, on the bay where Shelley drowned. / What brings these two events - or, rather, Cleaves shape-shifting memory of them - together is the movie, in which he will play Axel Vander, a famous literary critic with an unsavory past. Cleave learns the puzzling detail that Vander also happened to be in Portovenere when Cass, a specialist in arcane literary theory, plunged to her death. Readers might remember a younger Cleave as the ghost-haunted narrator of Banvilles 2001 midlife crisis novel, Eclipse. Those who have also read his 2003 novel, Shroud, the second installment in what can now be seen as a trilogy, will know a great deal more about Vander and Cass than Cleave does - cleave, that cloven word that means both to adhere and its opposite, to divide. [Cont.]
Alex Clark, Giving up the ghosts, review of Ghosts by John Banville, in The Guardian (16 Sept. 2000): The narrator of Eclipse, Alexander Cleave, is a classical actor who has recently corpsed during a first-night speech and fled, reputation in tatters, into self-imposed exile. Despite a sense of enfolding mental crisis, his narcissism remains largely intact, much to the exasperation and despair of his abandoned wife, Lydia, who accurately detects in his return to his mothers old, creaky house the curse of arrested development. [...] If the psychological wranglings of the situation are familiar - the unresolved detritus of childhood, the fruitless search for an authentic sense of self - then the language and tone in which they are conveyed makes them hard to recognise, not in the sense that they are unconvincing, but because the mental trauma they provoke is near impossible to unpick. Making strange, in the idiom of Cleaves provincial town, is used to describe the upset of a frightened child when confronted by an unknown adult, and Cleave is indeed estranged from himself and from the world about him. Stranded in a past that has no use for him, he is plagued by delusion and suspended in a state of transcendent tipsiness, an alienation that renders him both pitiful and monstrous. / Banvilles flighted prose, in which atmosphere is evoked through a dripfeed of lyricism, is superbly suited to his subject matter; his willed patience and defiant wordiness resonate with an almost unbearable sense of claustrophobia and the lurid excess of breakdown. (See full-text copy in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct.) [ top ] |