Author John Banville reading from his novel Ancient Light. Photo: Penguin
The background
Booker-winning author John Banville’s latest novel, Ancient Light, sees classical actor Alexander Cleave looking back on his life – and his affair, when he was 15 years old, with the mother of one of his friends, Mrs Gray. He realises that it was the true passion of his life – but, of course, it had disastrous consequences. The novel has two strands: the other features a relationship (when he’s older) with an actress, Dawn Devonport; he is also playing the part of the late Axel Vander, a literary theorist, in a film called “The Invention of the Past. Cleave has appeared in two previous novels of Banville’s – Eclipse, and Shroud; the suicide of his daughter in Shroud haunts Ancient Light. Watch Banville reading from it below. Critics are praising his style, Nabokovian elegance, and strange imagination; some are not convinced by both plotlines, but all in all, it’s a blinder.
Banville’s writing is startling
The novel has a “sense of distortion,” said John Preston in The Telegraph. There are “many striking images” – such as when Cleave lies on his bed and realises that “a tiny opening in the curtains has turned the room into a giant camera obscura.” Banville “does regretful roues better than almost anyone.” His language can be self-conscious, but it “can also be startlingly brilliant”: Mrs Gray’s skin is “ ‘like the sheen of a tarnished knife blade’” for example. However, it is “a book of two halves”, the two narratives “make an uneasy pairing.”
Banville is in his element
Tim Adams in The Observer said that Cleave’s was “a theatrical voice”, and so “we are never quite sure where we stand.” The past is “far more real” than the present,” with “the recovered fantasy of teenage lust” wiping “everything else clean.” Banville is “in his element.” The three novels, “taken together”, “are not so much a trilogy as a triptych mirror,” with “not much” being resolved. But there are “vivid new” angles of reflection. Banville is clever, but he never neglects his “duty of care, to the emotional lives of his characters.”
Banville is rhythmic and allusive
It’s a novel, said Alex Clark in The Guardian, “criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends and peopled by shifty characters who seem provisional even to themselves.” Banville’s prose is “rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery.” His is a world of “collapsed time”, where the past “seems far more intact.”
The book is misbegotten, but it lingers long
Adam Lively in The Sunday Times said that Banville is “too interesting and questioning a writer to be bound” by caution. The film of the critic needs “more realistic justification”, and some will protest at the coincidences – but this is “exactly where Banville is at his most interesting, his most willing to embrace an imaginative experimentalism.” Ultimately, “sometimes it can be the lumpy and misbegotten, not the elegantly finished, that ends up lingering longest in the mind. Ancient Light has exactly that deeply creative, resonant unevenness.”
It’s beautiful, but the two strands don’t work
The Cultural Tale of Two Cities blog said: “There is no denying Banville’s power as a writer. His prose is like velvet, and his love of language oozes out of every page. It’s just a pity this beautiful book feels a bit cluttered with too many competing strands that don’t work as well together as the one brilliant one would have done alone.”
Watch John Banville read from Ancient Light
