In John Banville’s extraordinary family romance, a troubled actor returns to his deserted childhood home to exact a minute survey of his past and, by extension, of his mind. He finds it far less deserted than he imagined, and this fact provokes further self-scrutiny. During the course of the novel little else happens, save from some minor shuffling of characters and one swift, brutal event that occurs offstage at the end; but here psychological investigation stands in for plot, and Banville’s inward prose comes to seem both populous and crowded with incident.

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 mother’s old, creaky house the curse of arrested development.

“I dreamed last night I was a child and here again,” Cleave confides to her at the novel’s opening, to which she justly retorts: “Of course; you never left here, that’s the truth.” But the insight only provokes in its object an admiration for his wife’s use of iambic pentameter; later, when she challenges him in vain once again, he muses on whether her accusations take the form of anapaests or “the rarer, shyer amphibrach”. His recourse to infuriating pedantry is in part sadistic, but also points towards a mental armoury which mere words or stray thoughts cannot easily dismantle.

In a state of agonised self-consciousness, Cleave clings to the limbo that the house offers: a way, as he puts it, of “being alive with out living”. Variously, he ascribes this paralysis to an emotional cauterisation probably inflicted on him during childhood; to the dead parents for whom he did not grieve; to the profession that has imbued him with a constant sense of being watched and has required of him his own constant watchfulness; and to his daughter Cass, similarly tormented by demons and now miserably cordoned off in her own world.

“What confusion there is in me; I really am a stranger to myself,” Cleave reflects, but his proposed solution to that inner chaos is a period of quiet introspection that soon begins to seem almost wilfully misguided. Amid the false starts and blind alleys of remembrance, he is besieged by ghosts - as he would have us and himself believe, actual ghostly presences - who move about his house in “naggingly insinuative” fashion; “ancestral resemblances” who make the furniture they perch upon “blush, almost, in the surprise of being singled out” . In time, the phantoms are displaced by solid humans; by the sly surprise of Quirke, the caretaker of the house who has furtively moved in, together with his slatternly adolescent daughter, Lily. The pair regard Cleave with a mixture of bemused concern and insolent tolerance, and their arrival on the scene, like characters in a Shakespearean subplot, provides humorous counterpoint to the would-be tragic hero’s manic melancholia. Banville’s handling of this strand of the novel is impeccable: the gruesome comedy of manners alternating with the painful impulse that prompts Cleave to take on, ineptly and disastrously, the role of paterfamilias.

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 Cleave’s 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.

Banville’s 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. At one point, Cleave recalls a stalled session with a therapist whose diagnosis is that he is overwhelmed; in parallel, the writing expertly communicates that helplessness - the critical loss of coherence in the face of a sudden onrush of feeling. Paradoxically, words are all we have available to us to describe the indescribable, the loss of language - or of the connection with language - being a common complaint of the depressed and the psychologically dispossessed.

Eclipse avoids the doomy territory of the morality tale by its constant playfulness, and by maintaining a certain degree of detachment that, at times, infects the reader with its own ennui. Yet just as Cleave is prone to portentousness, seeing in the dazed scamper of a roadside animal the call home, or in the whirl and screech of seagulls his own family dramas, the novel is not without its message. At its close, the protagonist is summoned back to life by a vast, external event and the past, if not quite yet another country, is temporarily sidelined. Ghosts, it appears, can exist in the future as well as the past; whether or not we choose to respond to their beckoning is another matter.