Eclipse [Paperback]

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. However, 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.

His alterego is Quirke, the sloppy caretaker, and his equally untidy daughter Lily. Creatures of the moment, the Quirkes are not at all introspective, indulging their basic desires without thinking about them and living entirely in the commonplace, the ordinary--they buy groceries, do superficial cleaning, go to the pub, read magazines. Only Lily's melancholy, which Cleave also associates with his daughter, suggests that she may have a nascent inner life.

If this sounds dull and abstract, it is, in a way. There is very little plot in the traditional sense, and the events that do occur are filtered through the mind of Cleave, who, though very self-conscious, is not self-aware. We do eventually find out what's happened to his daughter, we understand why the Quirkes are important, and we eventually see Cleave achieving an epiphany of sorts. But it is a measure of Cleave's remoteness that the turning point of the book is not an event over which he exerts any control, but a solar eclipse--the convergence of dark and light, shadow and substance, distance and connection. Still, this is a book full of unique insights and transcendent observations, with a main character who, in his earnest attempts to come to terms with the world, bears much in common with us all. Mary Whipple

I've been puzzled by the generally very positive responses to this novel. Many reviewers focus on Banville's ability to craft language - but I found the novel's language, with its focus on representation and reality, extremely pretentious, reading at times like an undergraduate's essay on structuralism. The characterisation is very poor, with the narrative tone ranging from a kind of stereotypical Olivier to the predictable Banville "voice".

Being about an actor who has died on stage, the novel abounds in predictable and irritating allusions to Hamlet, Beckett, etc. - which do nothing to enrich the novel. Similarly, it has been described as a humourous novel - but the jokes are not so much funny as sycophantic, flattering the reader's vanity by sharing clever allusions to high art: the book struck me as a kind of elaborate Mason's handshake in this and other respects.

In Eclipse, we are constantly told that passion, intelligence, feeling and wit are being described - but I never really saw any evidence of it, finding the book instead like a series of signposts to nowhere in particular. My views are not shared by many reviewers, but I do not recommend this novel. If you've never read Banville before, then start with the Book of Evidence, Doctor Copernicus, or The Untouchable. And if, like me, you've read and enjoyed Banville before, I'd recommend that you wait for his next novel - it's due out next year...