{"id":2086,"date":"2012-07-25T06:19:49","date_gmt":"2012-07-25T06:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2086"},"modified":"2012-07-26T06:25:43","modified_gmt":"2012-07-26T06:25:43","slug":"ancient-light-by-john-banville","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=2086","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Light by John Banville"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"\"<\/a>Published by Viking Penguin 5 July 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0256 pp, hardback, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Banville\u2019s latest novel opens rather like Lolita<\/em> in reverse.\u00a0 Alexander Cleave, a verbose, ruminative actor in his sixties, shuts himself in his attic den and writes a confessional account of his sexual initiation at the hands of Mrs Gray, his best friend\u2019s mother, half a century ago.\u00a0 Like Humbert Humbert recalling his pre-Lolita encounter with a girl-child in \u2018a kingdom by the sea\u2019, Cleave recognizes that his erotic path was set in childhood when, just outside a Catholic church in a small town in Ireland, he saw a woman on a bicycle, her skirt blown up above her waist by a gust of April wind.\u00a0 \u2018My Lady of the Bicycle … with her taut suspenders and pearly-white satin knickers, had all the dash and grace of a trim schooner plying fearlessly into a stiff nor\u2019wester.\u2019<\/p>\n

Banville is good at this sort of thing.\u00a0 Church, bicycle, pearly knickers \u2013 he makes us feel, forcibly, how a boy\u2019s life can be shaped by the fortuitous convergence of these disparate things.\u00a0 Was this vision of loveliness Mrs Gray herself, wonders the ageing Cleave, or only ‘an annunciation of her\u2019?\u00a0 Cleave is trying to make sense of his memories because he has yet to make sense of his life.\u00a0 His only child, Cass, has killed herself.\u00a0 His wife suffers \u2018nocturnal bouts of mania,\u2019\u2019dashing in the dark through all the rooms … calling out our daughter\u2019s name.\u2019\u00a0 Cleave\u2019s stage career has left him bewildered; has he ever been more than a prop, manipulated to suit his director\u2019s needs?\u00a0 Was this pattern set when, aged fifteen, he found himself the object of Mrs Gray\u2019s designs and desires?<\/p>\n

Now \u2013 improbably, it must be said \u2013 Hollywood has come knocking for the first time.\u00a0 Cleave is to play the part of Axel Vander (an approximate anagram of Alexander Cleave), a deconstructionist literary critic.\u00a0 Why anyone would agree to fund a motion picture about one of those is a question not adequately addressed.\u00a0 The film is to be called The Invention of the Past, <\/em>a none-too-subtle clue as to the nature of Cleave\u2019s attic scribblings, with a knowing wink at Banville\u2019s own role as novelist \u2013 the inventor of the invention of … and so on.<\/p>\n

This part of the book is tedious.\u00a0 There\u2019s a silent, sphynx-like figure called Billie who extracts people\u2019s secrets, a beautiful damaged co-star, Dawn Devonport, who is more or less abducted by Cleave, and a mysterious Argentinian who reveals the meaning of the universe to Cleave in a hotel bar.\u00a0 \u2018The gods watch over us, and are jealous,\u2019 he intones, as if he\u2019s strayed out of something by Carlos Castaneda.<\/p>\n

None of these characters feel at all real.\u00a0 I suspect that may be the point.\u00a0 Long- ago Mrs Gray on the stained and lumpy mattress in the derelict cottage the unlikely lovers use as a rendezvous, \u2018her breasts in their white halter huddling fatly against each other\u2019 \u2013 the young Alex Cleave\u2019s passion for her feels achingly real.\u00a0 The world of memory, where everything is pregnant with meaning, wins hands down over the stilted, schematic present.\u00a0 But where does the truth lie?<\/p>\n

Cleave and his dead daughter have appeared in other novels by Banville, but reading Ancient Light<\/em> left me too enervated to seek them out.\u00a0 Half of this book pulls you right in, the other half throws you out.\u00a0 Banville\u2019s turns of phrase can be dazzling, but his mind games leave me cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/p>\n

Banville is good at this sort of thing. Church, bicycle, pearly knickers \u2013 he makes us feel, forcibly, how a boy\u2019s life can be shaped by the fortuitous convergence of these disparate things… Cleave is trying to make sense of his memories because he has yet to make sense of his life. His only child, Cass, has killed herself. His wife suffers \u2018nocturnal bouts of mania’,\u2019dashing in the dark through all the rooms … calling out our daughter\u2019s name.\u2019 Cleave\u2019s stage career has left him bewildered; has he ever been more than a prop, manipulated to suit his director\u2019s needs? Was this pattern set when, aged fifteen, he found himself the object of Mrs Gray\u2019s designs and desires?[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2086"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2092,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2086\/revisions\/2092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}