A Different Kind of Mystery
ALLEN, BROOKE
A Different Kind of Mystery Eclipse By John Banville Knopf. 224 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New Criterion" UNLIKE MOST of his English...
...I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my center, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching...
...The actual narrative is Cleave's interior journey, not the rather banal series of lived events, and for this reason the magnificent atmospherics, in a way, are the story...
...The day is damp and fresh as a peeled stick," Cleave notes at one point...
...Everything that happens, she is convinced, carries a specific and personal reference to her...
...The comparison with Cleave's own ego-besotted state is obvious, but not of course to him...
...The deeply intelligent, unshowy Banville has pursued his interest in the loner so intensely that Ms books might be classified as studies in solipsism...
...Eclipse is essentially a reflective work...
...His ghosts, though, are real enough...
...With his newest novel, Eclipse, Banville skews his narrator's vision even more sharply, so that the book comes close to being a mystery story: What is the emotional truth behind the tale presented by its supremely narcissistic teller...
...He also loves his grown daughter, Cass, the most powerful and persistent of his ghosts...
...Cleave puts her off with sadistic detachment...
...I could not help her, I was not the one to take her and lead her back along that shadowed pathway past the shut gates guarding all the unspent riches of what she might have been...
...He has examined the criminal in The Book of Evidence (1989), and the scientist in Doctor Copernicus (1976), Kepler (1981) and The Newton Letter (1982...
...Menace was a specialty of mine," he remarks, "I was good at doing menace...
...His heroes (or antiheroes, to be precise) are defined by their own solitary, often oblique angle in relation to the rest of the world...
...Is he right...
...there, he believes, he can find and face whatever "ghosts" haunt him...
...It was there that Cleave spent his isolated childhood: His father died slowly in the upstairs bedroom when Cleave was still a small boy...
...The willful self-isolation, the paranoia, the intimations of future desertion and death, are all there, as is the contrapuntal farce...
...Cleave speaks in the pasttense because his career has ground to a halt, perhaps permanently...
...she writes, telephones and eventually shows up at the house, demanding explanations...
...Over a period of months he has been paralyzed by a sensation he cannot identify...
...So claims Cleave early on...
...He could never believe, he admits, that her work "was anything more than an elaborate pastime...
...This precludes self-knowledge, but Cleave knows enough to mistrust his sense of importance: "Acting was inevitable," he says...
...Eclipse is a novel about the limits of ego, and the answers it eventually suggests are not quite what one might at first have expected...
...The narrator is Alexander Cleave, a successful 50-year-old actor...
...When she shouts at him, he silently admires her unconscious use of the iambic pentameter...
...He is a facile performer with a special talent for the tragic and the cursed: Macbeth, Hamlet, Oedipus, Richard III...
...Some forceful emotion, not to be denied, is struggling to come to the surface...
...Panic...
...Even when alone I carried myself with covert circumspection, keeping up a front, putting on a performance...
...IN Eclipse, as in his other novels, Banville's writing is richly descriptive and full of original images...
...From earliest days life for me was a perpetual state of being watched...
...The result is a echoic, claustrophobic prose in which the reader is given moments of intense observation, but in the most limited, pointed doses...
...his mother survived in the half-life that so many settle into, "always waiting, it seemed, tightlipped and patiently sorrowing, for a general apology from the world...
...It turns out that the caretaker Cleave had hired, a local ne'erdo-well named Quirke, has been camping out in it with his sluttish but touchingly lonely teenage daughter, Lily...
...His long-suffering wife, Lydia, has not accepted his desertion quietly...
...With such ingenuity does she connect the workings of the world to her own fate," Cleave observes...
...Even in the sunniest roles, the ass in a boater or the cocktail-quaffing wit, I projected a troubled, threatening something....' The actor, or at any rate the good actor, is the solipsist par excellence...
...Trepidation...
...soon the three come to form a misconceived, parodie family unit...
...The house, alive with memories and intimations—Cleave's mother took in boarders—is an unremarkable structure on a dingy square at the edge of a small seaside town...
...When she accuses him of being an emotional vivisectionist, it is the "speck of white spit at one comer of her mouth, and a flake of ash on her sleeve," not her words, that he takes in...
...Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New Criterion" UNLIKE MOST of his English contemporaries—novelists such as Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan— the Irish writer John Banville is both emotionally and intellectually detached from his baby-boomer generation and its obsessions...
...He takes to weeping in movie theaters...
...Cleave's real family, however, has not disappeared...
...At times he seems to be laying it on a bit thick—for as the reader is well aware, his pain is quite genuine...
...But that is not a side of her Cleave wants to acknowledge, perhaps because it does not reflect or devolve from him...
...As he once said about Victor Maskell, the character he based on Blunt, "Like all narrators, he's completely blind to what is really going on, and completely misinterprets everything...
...One comes to suspect the father has fixated on the aspect of the daughter that magnifies—that mocks, even—his own insufficiencies...
...Is it inherent in his character, or has it been constructed for defensive purposes...
...One evening on stage he undergoes the ultimate actor's nightmare, breaking out in a sweat, forgetting his lines, and finally retiring from the scene in utter ignominy...
...For while Cleave presents his daughter as a cripple, a tragic figure, it is eventually revealed that Cass is in fact a historian with an international reputation...
...The only solution he can think of is to leave his longtime marriage and go, alone, back to the empty house of his childhood...
...According to his not very reliable account, Cass suffers from a mental illness, severe manic-depression perhaps, that has caused her from childhood to hear nonexistent voices and make nonexistent connections...
...There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone—at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this—a part that does not care for anything other than itself...
...Cleave is so self-involved that he only sees and describes the natural phenomena that reflect his own mental state, in an extreme illustration of the pathetic fallacy...
...The Shakespearean role Cleave is unconsciously enacting, albeit a little prematurely, is Lear...
...If a poisoner was needed, or a brocaded revenger, I was your man...
...We enter into Cleave's self-referential world and take our part in its narrow vision, its unfocused grief...
...There is nothing, not a turn in the weather, or a chance word spoken in the street, that does not covertly pass on to her some profound message of warning or encouragement...
...Grief...
...It is the future, it turns out, that has been haunting Cleave, and a cataclysmic event at the end of the novel serves to focus his mind and his heart once more...
...Filled with what he calls "the actor's hubris," Cleave struts and frets his hour on his solitary stage...
...Cleave loves his wife on some level, or at least has loved her in the past...
...The house has not stood quite empty all these years...
...his only mistake was in thinking them to be from the past...
...She andher son, entirely alien from one another, coexisted in the house until he drifted away...
...Another day he is feeling less eager to engage: "I have a deep dislike of mornings, their muffled, musty texture, like that of a bed too long slept in...
...Most recently, in The Untouchable (1997), he delved into the mysterious thoughts and motivations of a well-known traitor, the art historian and spy Sir Anthony Blunt...
...Cleave, obsessedbyhisownphantoms, turns a blind eye and tacitly accepts their continued presence...
...It is a commonplace to state that an actor believes all the world is watching him, and Cleave is almost pathologically self-involved...
...At other times an authentic nastiness unexpectedly breaks out...
...they are self-inventions rather than recognizable products of their time and place...
...He remains, at least on the surface, untouchable, and with the actor's attention to physical detail he is well aware of the impression he makes: "that tight-lipped, ironical forbearance—the sigh, the small laugh, the upcast eyes—which I know is one of the more annoying ways I have of handling those who are supposedly close to me" But just how much of a shit is Cleave...
...Cleave is, after all, a Shakespearean actor, and the Quirkes serve to intensify the Shakespearean scene, mingling farce and pathos with the sterner stuff of tragedy...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
