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21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Axel Vander, "a virtuoso of the lie.", March 17, 2003
Axel Vander tells us from the opening of this sensitive and tension-filled study of identity that he is not who he says he is. A respected scholar and professor at a California college, Vander is recognized for his thoughtful philosophical papers and books, especially his ironically entitled The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity. Just before he leaves for a conference on Nietzsche in Turin, however, he receives a letter from a young woman in Antwerp, questioning his own identity and asking to meet with him. As the novel unfolds, we come to know more about the "real" Axel Vander and more about his mysterious correspondent, the emotionally disturbed Cass Cleave.Like Banville's narrators in other novels, the elderly Axel Vander of Shroud is unreliable and often dishonest, self-concerned but not self-aware. Consummately venal (though beautifully realized), he is a character who blithely takes advantage of whatever circumstances arise, with no concern for the consequences, except to himself. Cass Cleave, the daughter of Alexander Cleave, the narrator of Banville's previous novel, Eclipse, has visions and seizures, and Vander regards her as mad, but she and Vander develop a relationship of almost religious significance. He is a depraved and amoral old man living a life of personal un-truth, while she is a sick, avenging angel, striving to connect the disjunctions in her life so that she can become an integrated, whole person. In Turin, where she joins Axel, Cass sees religious symbolism in common events, finding an ordinary breakfast a form of communion. Artworks, especially crucifixion scenes by artists from the various settings in which the novel takes place (Cranach, Bosch, Memling, and Van Eyck in the Low Countries; and Tintoretto, Mantegna, and Bellini in Italy) further develop the symbolism. Always present in the background, of course, is the Shroud of Turin, which may be the real burial cloth of Jesus--or may not be. Parallels and contrasts between Vander and Jesus abound. Banville's novel is intense, highly compressed in its development of overlapping themes, and filled with suspense, both real and intellectual. Every plot detail expands his themes of identity and selfhood, the relationships we create with the outside world, and our desire to be remembered after our deaths. Banville's prose is exquisite, creating mystery by introducing details at a snail's pace, conveying attitude, and acutely observing sensuous details and physical reactions. He juxtaposes unlikely events from different times to convey information, providing voluptuous descriptions which contain both an idea and its antithesis simultaneously. Major surprises occur in the final five pages, not inserted as literary tricks, but generated naturally out of the action and interactions. This is a challenging and fascinating novel, beautifully crafted and rewarding on every level. Mary Whipple
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful Writing, Less than Believable Plot, December 26, 2003
"Shroud" is one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read and, unlike some authors, Banville doesn't sacrifice plot or character for the sake of style."Shroud" is the story of Axel Vander, "master of the lie." For many years Axel has posed as someone he is not but, at long last, his past is catching up with him in the form of the emotionally scarred and damaged Cass Cleve, who Vander arranges to meet in Turin, Italy, home of the famous "Shroud of Turin." It seems fitting to me that Cass and Axel meet in Turin since the shroud is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetuated on mankind. I didn't care for either Cass or Axel. Both are quite unlikable, however, that wasn't the problem for me. I found some of the happenings in this book too much of a stretch; too unbelievable. The relationship that develops between Cass and Axel is just one such point. I can see Cass desiring that relationship, but I can't, for the life of me, see Axel letting it happen. It was simply "out of character" for him. That said, "Shroud" is a beautiful book that will certainly appeal to lovers of literary and very serious fiction far more than to those who like a strongly plotted book. The reader should also be warned that this is a very melancholic and tragic book. I liked this aspect of "Shroud" but I feel that many readers will feel depressed at the book's end. If you can tolerate reading about characters you can't like, if you don't need a strong plotline and if you are really willing to suspend your disbelief, then I recommend "Shroud" highly.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A bleak yet beautiful novel, August 3, 2004
The masterful ending of John Banville's "Shroud" reminded me of that of Gogol's superb "The Overcoat." In the wild chaos he creates in the final pages, Gogol manages to literally hide the ironic ending of his story from all but the very careful reader. By contrast, Banville's final pages seemingly very peacefully and sedately tapering off, hide a bombshell, a totally unexpected surprise ending.
The style of this novel is truly mesmerizing, as objects, streets, buildings, rooms and people flow by the reader in a slow and dark river of words. A sizable fraction of the novel deals with porters, cooks, maids and other incidental characters. Weather, or the lack of it, is constantly on the author's mind. Yet, even in this thick --- too thick? --- medium, a gripping human story unfolds in its own vague manner. Were it to be told precisely, factually by Axel Vander, the main character, this story would lose all its interest, because Vander is known to us as an inveterate liar, thief, dissimulator and worse. Flooded with detail by Vander, we are forced to read between the lines and there, even a man as intelligent and as deceitful as Vander, loses control and inadvertently reveals some of the truth.
One of the main themes of the book is whether a human being has a "self" at all, and if so, whether this self is unique. Banville also tries to make sense of Vander, an extremely talented literary scholar, so thoroughly immoral and amoral as to qualify without exaggeration as a criminal, yet sufficiently intelligent to fully appreciate the extent of his own infamy.
Banville has Vander describe his own dishonesty, "There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice .... from material filched from others." Very funny did I find the theft of one of most famous words coined by James Joyce, in Vander's, "the green of the glass took on a snotlike hue." There are many other such instances. On the whole, there is something outright Nabokovian about Banville's style. Here and there this gets out of hand, as in the reference to "undulant waves," but this is no more than a minor quibble. Even the character Vander has more than a passing resemblance to Nabokov himself and to that disgraced literary scholar, the late Paul de Man (could Cassy Cleave owe something to Cynthia Chase???)
The novel offers some intriguing insights (e.g. "If it could think, the heart would stop beating") and also some that float gracefully near the surface (e.g. "How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.").
Banville visits horrible fates on his three female characters, one is mercy-killed by her husband, another jumps to her death not far from where the poet Shelley met his tragic end, and the third is not spared any of the agonies as she slowly dies of cancer under our very eyes. Misogyny? Perish the thought! Keep in mind that the surviving males are far from getting the proverbial last laugh in this bleak yet beautiful novel.
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