Customer Reviews

Eclipse: A Novel

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In this beautifully realized and complex book, Banville blurs the edges between a man's interior and exterior worlds. He draws the reader in at the same time that he holds him at arm's length and creates a book both realistic and surrealistic. In many ways this resembles a memoir more than a novel, and it's a haunting story of a man's search for himself.

Virtually all the "action" in this novel takes place inside the head of Alexander Cleave, and the "story," such as it is, emerges at a snail's pace. An actor who has "dried" onstage, Cleave has escaped to his childhood home to come to terms with his inner self and try to deal with his worry about his disturbed daughter Cass, with whom he has had no communication for months. In the midst of a breakdown, he cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality, acting and action. He sees ghosts, spend a great deal of time sleeping and dreaming, and shadows townspeople at random, living their lives vicariously.

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

While I have yet to read all of his work Mr. Banville's novels seem to fall in to two general areas, those that are complex but understandable, and those that no two people will agree on anything other than the most general of thoughts. His most recent work, "Eclipse", definitely falls into the latter category, and while some criticize the apparent lack of structure, others applaud it.

Many Authors' work is often explained as being like the work of another writer, the, "it tastes like chicken syndrome". I cannot remember a parallel being drawn to this man's work and there is good reason for this, his writing is as original as one can read despite the millions of volumes that have gone before. He does not have a formulaic style that he follows like many contemporary writers, he is not the sort that fills in the blanks or connects the dots until all is finished or clear. Each of his books is written as the story they tell and the characters that inhabit them require. Moving from one novel to the next a reader could be easily convinced they are reading an altogether different writer.

Much like his work, "The Book Of Evidence", the story unfolds from one primary viewpoint. That the view is from a man enduring a breakdown of sorts is apparent, however Mr. Banville gives us an actor in a state of decay so that we read of a breakdown that is assembled from his 30 years of the characters he has played. Add to this the corporeal players in the actor's life, a cast of others, ghosts, demons, real or conjured, a difficult marriage, and finally a daughter who is handicapped, but perhaps a savant. And the result is a very dense work that gives meaning to the word eclipse whether as one passing another, or the infinite degrees from an eclipse so partial, to darkness absolute and final.

I found the cover art interesting as well although you have to open the jacket fully to appreciate the imagery that may or may not be there. A man is pictured at the apex of a path between two homes. Strong wind tears his hat or perhaps his mind away while the single candle he holds is impervious to the force of the wind he must lean in to. And in the far upper right hand corner there is...something, I have not a clue what, and if anyone decides please let me know.

I have grown to be a great admirer of this man's work, I don't presume to absorb all he intends for his readers, but the process is a great deal of fun.

John Banville is my favorite living novelist and certainly one of the great practitioners of the form of this century. He writes dense, inquiring profound books which are difficult but rewarding. To dismiss them as "navel-gazing" or other such stupidity is to miss the point entirely. These are layered works that reveal themselves gradually. Nothing is arbitrary in his world, everything is there for a reason no matter how random it may seem. His latest book, "Shroud," has been long-listed for this year's Booker Prize and picks up characters introduced in "Eclipse." Simply put, Banville is one of the great masters of the language, sadly overlooked but unforgettable. Once you've read his work, so much of everything else seems second-rate. If you have to have rip-snorting page turning narratives, he's not your man, go buy a Grisham; but if burrowing deep into character, if understanding essentials, core questions -- the thing itself -- is your bag, he is without equal.

This is the first novel by John Banville I read and after finishing it I immediately ordered "The book of Evidence" and "Ghost", so you can safely bet that this is going to be glowing review.

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.

John Banville has an almost scary insight into the psychology of the lie. Word by painstaking word, he creates a subtle and nuanced portrait of characters who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot or will not see the immense flaws in their souls which wreak havoc to all those close to them. In this novel, Eclipse, Banville undertakes on of these subtle portraits to create a story of haunting insight, literally and figuratively.

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.

John Banville's Eclipse is, I think, his best novel yet. There is a qualification to this claim. Banville is a quiet, introspective and eloquently descriptive writer. Most of his novels largely avoid plot and instead pay attention not so much to the characters but to the world around them. As such the more you read this author the more you understand and appreciate him.
Eclipse itself is simple. A middle age actor has had enough of life and the stage and retreats to his old family home. However things are not what he expects. Instead of longed for tranquility old problems with life and family persist. And new problems emerge. The actor does not seem able to discern between what is and what is not real.
Are the ghosts and images real or just troubled imaginations? At the end the unreal is something different again. It's a great twist to a ghost story.
Once again Banville's powers of description impress. Few writers, through their prose, can paint the world so well. Eclipse succeeds on many levels.

I was attracted to this book after reading The Sea and feeling the need to better understand this obviously talented author. Eclipse was a fine choice because in many ways its structure is like The Sea. I came away benefiting from a better understanding of Mr. Banville's style and seeing more clearly the methods he used in The Sea to make that book rise above Eclipse.

Anyone who loves beautiful language, vivid imagery and introspection will find this book rewarding. Those who prefer action, lots of plot developments and variety should look elsewhere.

Eclipse is a fine choice for a title of this book -- evoking the many eclipses in Alexander Cleave's life. He's not satisfied with his career as an actor . . . both because he doesn't seem to be able to act any more . . . and because acting keeps him from being himself (whatever that is). In addition, Alexander's relationships with his family are strained, to say the least. Certainly, these could be described as being in eclipse as well. To help get his head together, he goes back to his family home . . . which hasn't been kept up. It's in eclipse, too. While there, he experiences an astronomical eclipse to add to the symmetry. The old home is overcrowded though, with memories, ghosts and visitors. Alexander complains about this to his wife on the telephone, and she responds, "You are your own ghost." It's very Shakespearean. Macbeth seems to be lurking just around the corner.

But after an eclipse, the light does return. If that hope has meaning for you, you'll enjoy Cleave's journey.

Here's a passage of Cleave's musings that will give you a sense of the book: "Life, life is always a surprise. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, have learned your part to perfection, someone in the cast will take it into her head to start improvising, and the whole . . . production will be thrown into disorder."

After his nearly perfect previous novel, (The Untouchable) Banville continues to write magnificent prose, but the plotline in Eclipse is nonexistent. His initial idea -- an actor running off the rails -- is terrific but there is no follow-through and the end is out of left field. Despite all that, Banville also writes movingly and knowingly of human frailties in a way that makes the book memorable and his mastery of language can not be compared to anyone else writing today.

In the Banville canon so far, this would rate barely as passable. As others have astutely noted, this does not succeed on the merits of its plot and much less its unlikeable narrator. In the company of such as Freddie Montgomery, Axel Vander, and Victor Maskell, no mean feat! Alexander Cleave given his name has few conquests to please his aging ego and fewer to whom he can cling, falling away from his wife Lydia and his daughter, Cass, and certainly finding himself in an ambiguous relationship with caretaker Quirke and his daughter, Lily. Jamesian prose does suffuse this fiction, which particularly in the first sections carries a heavily Gothic aura. This is not a drawback, but it does make for slow going.

Cleave's own selfishness--as he sums up in his attempted retreat into what he thinks is a haunted hermitage: "it offers me a way of being alive without living." (132)--may be consciously nourished, but still makes his predicaments off-putting. He imagines a doctor's diagnosis: "anaesthesia cordis, and the prognosis is not good." (151) Such self-incrimination may for the three other Banville narrators mentioned above not detract totally from their defenses for their less-than-noble lives, but for Cleave, it makes him only the more to be shunned, not only by his long-suffering wife but by us as the readers. The most convincing parts of a generally emotionally dulled novel occur in the spousal warfare, with dialogue and insights that speak of conversations said and unsaid familiar to anyone in long-contested relationships. I did wonder what brought Lydia back to Alexander, or why she had put up with him for so long; the story from her perspective would've proved arguably more intriguing than that of her increasingly aphasic husband. This may be Banville's intention, but it does wear down any sympathy the reader might have kept in store for Cleave.

Now, obviously Banville knows what he's doing in giving us consistently devious narrators. But without the humanism that even the worst of the lot, Freddie, comes to realize late in the game, Cleave's meanderings come off as too self-pitying. as with other recent Banville novels, the revelations typically come very late in the book. Here, they do make Cleave marginally more sympathetic, but he has treated the loved one whose demise we and he lament with such a curious mixture of repulsion and empathy that we find ourselves more puzzled than penitent for the way we have regarded the narrator for the previous couple of hundred pages, filled with largely contempt for others and himself. What has happened to "our eclipsed light", (203) as he personifies his loved one at the end of what admittedly are moving pages (Banville always comes through at the end with a graceful save) does make some redemption possible, but too late. This by-now formulaic pattern reminds me of a composer with a recognizably brilliant but by repetition rather dulled--if still by comparison to his mundane competitors a bravado--performance. It's for those already converted to the lulling nature of his prose more than his plotting.

P.S. I looked at the hardcover, and in response to McInerney's question posted, the upper-right-hand illustrates what primarily is a leaf blown off the wind-ravaged tree, but secondarily might be a gape-mouthed, eyeless face shrouded in darkness. Think of Marty Feldman as Igor in "Young Frankenstein" but without the googling pupils, only skin over them, mole-like!

ECLIPSE is one of the most beautiful of contemporary novels, by perhaps our greatest living novelist.