Product Description

In this deeply moving and original book, John Banville alloys mystery, fable, and ghost story with poignant psychological acuity to forge the riveting story of a man wary of the future, plagued by the past, and so uncertain in the present that he cannot discern the spectral from the real.

When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, at the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter destined for doom.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #843905 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-05
• Released on: 2002-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Irish author Banville (The Book of Evidence; The Untouchable) is one of the most seductive writers currently at work. His books are so intensely imagined and freshly observed, with a startling image or insight on every page, that story almost ceases to matter. In fact, his tale here is tenuous in the extreme. Alexander Cleave is a successful actor because only in performance can he hide his essential hollowness, his sense of his own intangibility. When his career starts to falter, he retreats to his childhood home in a small town by the sea and tries to learn to live with himself, to discover who he really is. Into this existential anguish intrude memories of his parents, his estranged wife, his emotionally damaged daughterDand the ghosts of people he may not even know, but to whose sadness he is attuned. He begins an uneasy relationship with a slovenly caretaker, Quirke, and Quirke's enigmatic teenage daughter, Lily; he is visited by his wife; he goes to a strangeDand magnificently evokedDcircus with Lily; he receives terrible news about his daughter. There is by no means a surfeit of incident, and the book never falters or creates impatience because every scene, every moment, is so alive, so exquisitely lit, felt and polished, that to read among them is like listening to great music. And when Banville does choose toward the end to raise the emotional temperature, the effect is deeply moving. (Feb. 28) Forecast: Banville will probably never be a hugely popular writer, and The Eclipse, unlike The Untouchable, is not structured along conventional lines. But perceptive reviews and the support of people who love exquisitely turned prose will help to slowly build his readership.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Banvillian narrator is often antisocial to the point of alienating his own audience. Armed with perfect diction, he uses language to hole up in an exclusive, hopelessly cool state of mind where the well-adjusted are unwanted. Esteemed stage actor Alexander Cleave is the latest in a line of haunted white males from Banville (The Untouchable). Beleaguered by a premonition of death, he quits the summer tour to live in his dilapidated childhood home, much to his wife's contempt. Although his seemingly irrational fears do have a climax, it will leave readers dumbfounded. This has a lot to do with the misleading "plot"Aa tedious chain of Alexander's memories about his tortured mother and aloof father. Banville's leading man is at his best when he plays a caring father to the housekeeper Quirke's daughter, but this comes too late. Not recommended.
-AHeather McCormack, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Banville's twelfth novel (his previous one was The Untouchable [1997]) is really an elegiac prose poem that takes what is at heart a mundane theme, a man's midlife crisis, and through the power of language elevates it to something undeniably better. Throughout the novel, Banville maintains a tone in his protagonist and narrator, Alexander Cleaves, that is perfect. Cleaves is never fully the authority regarding his own story, and this seems to match his life. Cleaves is an actor, not a failed one but a successful one, who has suddenly reached the point where he can no longer act, can no longer subsume his real self to the countless imaginary ones. He therefore retreats alone to his boyhood home to confront the real or imaginary ghosts of his past--primarily his parents but also himself. This action confounds his wife and possibly his grown daughter, but Cleaves makes no attempt to explain his hermitage. He soon finds, however, that the notion of a hermitage was nothing but a wistful dream. In a sense, wistful describes the book, too, as it probes the edges of the uncanny in life. Frank Caso
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Another Enigma
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.

Portrait of a Liar
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.

Cerebral.
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