Ancient Light [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

John Banville (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 2, 2012

The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea gives us a brilliant, profoundly moving new novel about an actor in the twilight of his life and his career: a meditation on love and loss, and on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives.

Is there any difference between memory and invention? That is the question that fuels this stunning novel, written with the depth of character, the clarifying lyricism and the sly humor that have marked all of John Banville’s extraordinary works. And it is the question that haunts Alexander Cleave, an actor in the twilight of his career and of his life, as he plumbs the memories of his first—and perhaps only—love (he, fifteen years old, the woman more than twice his age, the mother of his best friend; the situation impossible, thrilling, devouring and finally devastating) . . . and of his daughter, lost to a kind of madness of mind and heart that Cleave can only fail to understand. When his dormant acting career is suddenly, inexplicably revived with a movie role portraying a man who may not be who he says he is, his young leading lady—famous and fragile—unwittingly gives him the opportunity to see with aching clarity the “chasm that yawns between the doing of a thing and the recollection of what was done.”

Ancient Light is a profoundly moving meditation on love and loss, on the inscrutable immediacy of the past in our present lives, on how invention shapes memory and memory shapes the man. It is a book of spellbinding power and pathos from one of the greatest masters of prose at work today.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Settling into a meditative retirement, stage actor Alexander Cleave finds himself writing about the summer he was 15 and embroiled in a mad and taboo love. He much prefers recalling the wildness of his insistent young self than dwelling on the unhappy life and inexplicable death of his enigmatic daughter. Following the mischief of The Infinities (2010), Banville’s breathtaking new novel is defined by light, from the “ancient light” of the stars to the glimmering fool’s gold of memories. As Alex tries to pin down the uncomfortable truth about his delirious, risky affair with his best friend’s mother, he reflects on how all his desperate lies ultimately helped him become an actor. His lush if dismaying reverie is interrupted by an out-of-the-blue invitation to star in an American movie, a biopic about, of all subjects, a vile critic whose life may have some vague link to Alex’s daughter’s death. Banville, a writer of exquisite precision and emotional depth, writes with droll inquisition and entrancing sensuality in this suspenseful drama of the obliviousness of lust and the weight of grief. Alex’s misremembered love story and complicated movie adventures are ravishing, poignant, and archly hilarious as the past and present converge and narrow down to a stunning revelation. Banville is supreme in this enrapturing novel of shadows and illumination. --Donna Seaman

Review

“A devastating account of a boy’s sexual awakening and the loss of his childhood . . . Seamless, profound, and painfully true to the emotional lives of his characters, it is an unsettling and beautiful work.” --Wall Street Journal
 
“A slyly constructed and stylistically buoyant novel . . . The ending [is] shattering and genuinely surprising.” --New York Times Book Review
 
“Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body of yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion. . . . [He] is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it’s a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured. . . . . This is a luminous, breathtaking work.” --The Independent (UK)
 
“Ancient Light is a brilliant meditation on desire and loss, which also skillfully reminds us, even warns us, that ‘Madam Memory is a great and subtle dissembler’ . . . [Contains] page upon page of luxurious, lyrical prose.” --Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Beautiful . . . Banville is the heir to Proust, via Nabokov.” --The Daily Beast

“Luminescent . . . Illuminating and often funny but ultimately devastating . . . Breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Stockholm jury should pick up the phone now.” --The Financial Times

“Banville’s prose, as gorgeous and precise as in his 2005 Man Booker winner The Sea, evokes scenes so that they burn in the reader’s mind.” --Sunday Express (UK)
 
“A breathtaking new novel . . . Banville, a writer of exquisite precision and emotional depth, writes with droll inquisition and entrancing sensuality in this suspenseful drama of the obliviousnessness of lust and the weight of grief. Alex’s misremembered love story and complicated movie adventures are ravishing, poignant, and archly hilarious as the past and present converge and narrow down to a stunning revelation. Banville is supreme in this enrapturing novel of shadows and illumination.” --Booklist (starred)

“A world where the past is more vivid than that present, and the dead somehow more alive than the living. . . . startlingly brilliant.” --The Sunday Telegraph (UK)
 
“The prose of the new book has a kind of luxuriant beauty, and, given the number of gorgeous arias written in difficult keys with many sharps and flats, the novel has the feel of a feverish atonal chamber opera . . . It’s as if the prose has shouldered the entire burden of undoing death and loss, an ambition rarely seen in contemporary letters. One reads Ancient Light in a state of slightly stunned admiration and disbelief that anyone still believes in literary art sufficiently to call upon its resources for these particular ends.” --New York Review of Books

“Banville, with his forensic sensory memory, his great gift for textural (and textual) precision, his ability to inhabit not just a room, as a writer, but also the full weight of a breathing body, is exactly in his element here. . . . Cleverness is on display, and nothing might be quite what it seems, but Banville’s duty of care, to the emotional lives of his characters, to the worlds in which they live, is not neglected for a moment.” --The Observer (UK)
 
“Ancient Light dazzles . . . It is a work of commanding artistry, each scene exquisitely realized in burnished prose. . . . Banville’s unmatched descriptive artistry [fixes] every fleeting moment and sensation mind with painterly precision . . . haunting beauty.” --The Scotsman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (October 2, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780307957054
• ISBN-13: 978-0307957054
• ASIN: 0307957055
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of thirteen previous novels including The Book of Evidence, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize. He has received a literary award from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Dublin.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

108 of 116 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliantly evocative, but... July 9, 2012

By Sid Nuncius TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Whether or not you like this book will depend on your response to Banville's style. The story is slow and contemplative; narrated by an ageing actor, it tells the story of his first sexual awakening in an affair with the mother of his best friend, the suicide of his daughter ten years ago and his current involvement in shooting a film. He often addresses the reader directly, describes things in unusual detail and digresses from the tale into odd preoccupations and observations. The book is about the nature of memory as much as anything - how we remember, misremember and unknowingly invent - and I think Banville does this brilliantly. He describes very believably how memories seem to work, realising for example that he remembers autumn leaves lying when the event must have taken place in April, or forgetting the content of a really important conversation but remembering small details about where it took place. He conjures astonishingly vivid scenes from minutiae like the smell of a stone wall by a road or the wafting of steam from a kettle, and comes up with some wonderful descriptions like the woman who "really is of the most remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another."

It will probably be clear early on whether you are going to enjoy the book. The second paragraph of the book begins, "What do I recall of her, here in these soft pale days at the lapsing of the year?" and a few pages later, "...I would lie with my cheek resting on her midriff...and in my ear the pings and plonks of her innards at their ceaseless work of transubstantiation." I think if you like all this, along with things like talk of "vermiform corridors" and descriptions and speculative character analysis of a random tramp, you will like the book and if you don't, you won't.

Personally, I loved individual parts but found a whole book of it a bit much so I find it difficult to give an overall rating. I can't recommend it unreservedly because it became a bit of a struggle slogging through it all, but I would be very sorry not to have read it. I suspect that a lot of people will love it and a lot will dislike it. I hope the above has given you some idea of whether or not it will be to your taste.

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written novel about life, love and memory August 28, 2012

By sb-lynn TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This story is told from the point of view of Alexander Cleave, a man in his early 60's. He has been a stage actor but has suddenly and unexpectedly been offered a role in a Hollywood film playing a disreputable rogue named Axel Vander. Alexander surprises himself by accepting the offer, and does research into Axel's life.

As we learn about Alexander's present day life, we know that he is married to his long-time wife Lydia and they are both still reeling and in mourning over the suicide of his daughter ten years earlier. She had jumped to her death off the balcony in a small scenic coastal Italian village, pregnant at the time. Alexander knew that his daughter had always been troubled but he did not know the reasons why she killed herself or who was the father of her child. He feels the need to find out.

Other present characters include a beautiful but troubled actress Dawn Davonport who co-stars with Alexander, and a production scout/sleuth named Billie Stryker who Alexander trusts to find an old flame.

That old flame was his best friend Billy's mother, a woman most often referred to as Mrs. Gray who seduced young Alexander when he was 15 and she was in her 30's. Their torrid but short-lived affair has a lasting effect on Alexander, yet as he reflects back on his life and memories he has trouble being sure if his memories can be trusted and the details correct.

This is just a beautiful novel. This is not a quick read by any means and this is the type of book where you want to read every sentence of every long descriptive paragraph because they are all so evocative and eloquent. At its heart, in many ways this is a novel about our memories and how "so often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing."

It was when I finished this novel that I knew I had to give it five stars - the denouement makes you reassess everything you've just read and see it through different eyes. This is truly one of those books that will stay with me a long time.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Banville: A Painter With Words October 12, 2012

By H. F. Corbin TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"BILLY GRAY WAS MY BEST FRIEND and I fell in love with his mother. Love may be too strong a word but I do not know a weaker one that will apply." With those two opening sentences Booker Prize winner John Banville begins his latest novel. Surely he tips his hat-- at least from a distance to Nabokov, both for his word play and people play-- but more closely to Henry James, whom he, like so many writers on that side of the Atlantic-- Colm Toibin and Alan Hollinghurst come to mind-- has acknowledged as being a major influence on his writing. On this side, James Baldwin's favorite writer was James. Banville's narrator is Alexander Cleave, an aging stage actor in his 60's, way past his prime, who is offered a role in a movie opposite a beautiful young actress Dawn Davenport. That is the here and now of the plot. But Cleave also weaves musings on his first love at fifteen with Mrs. Gray and the death of his only daughter Cass ten years ago by drowning-- and his own life-- what does it all mean if anything. While much of the action takes place within the head of Cleave, Mr. Banville does drop a couple of events or surprises near the end of the novel to bring the story at least to a partial conclusion. Of course as in most good fiction, some questions remain unanswered.

If I had to put what this novel is about is one sentence I would say it is about the unreliability of memory. Time and time again what Cleave remembers is not the way it was, or his memory of the same event is not the same as someone else's. Haven't we all experienced that? (My twin brother and I constantly remember the same happenings from our childhood that are completely different.) In the words of Cleave: "Time and Memory and a fussy firm of interior decorators, though, always shifting the furniture about and redesigning and even reassigning rooms." This thoughtful novel is also about perhaps the most dreaded of family events, the death of a child, something that parents never get over: "I cannot remember when I last spoke of Cass to anyone, even Lydia [his wife]. I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolors that must be protected from the harsh light of day." Then there is the utter incomprehension of the meaning of life in all its complexity and the accompanying loneliness. Cleave acknowledges that he no longer knows what his wife thinks, what anyone thinks and "hardly" knows what he himself thinks. Finally there is Bob Dylan's four letter word, love in all its manifestations and permutations.

You cannot discuss this novel without acknowledging Mr. Banville's genius with the English language. As I read this novel, I kept telling myself that surely this man in one of his lives was an artist. Then I found out that he once has aspirations of being a painter. It shows. I can think of no other writer whose fiction is so saturated with color, whether Mr. Banville is describing the sea, the sky, the mountains, the sun or a woman's body. And he never repeats himself. The sea is a "line of shining mercury." It is also "high and vehemently blue." The mountains are "pale blue and flat." The sun struggles "whitely." The sunshine is "a thin, pervasive, lemony element, like a very fine liquid." The sea is a "darkling tumult." Clouds are "like bits of crinkled gold leaf and the sky higher up was a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless and brimming surface of the canal." And this writer can find in a woman's body the colors of grey, lilac-grey, umber, rose, and "another tint, hard to name--dark tea? bruised honeysuckle?"

The sheer poetic qualities of Mr. Banville's prose is almost overwhelming at times. ( He has said that he attempts to merge poetry and fiction.) Every page is a journey through his poetic universe. Here is just one beautiful example from many: "Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness? Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been? When I think of those whom I have loved and lost I am as one wandering among eyeless statues in a garden at nightfall. The air about me is murmurous with absences. I am thinking of Mrs. Gray's moist brown eyes flecked with tiny splinters of gold. When we made love they would turn from amber through umber to a turbid shade of bronze."

Reading a new Banville novel is, as always, an intoxicating submersion into the English language.