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Retreat

��At the core of it all there is an absence.��

When empty, broken, and destroyed, where does one go for solitary reflection? For a few hours, I head to the forest, step confidently off the path, and lose myself among the trees. No wolves round here, so I may wear my blood-red coat. But to live alone for a period, I would seek an uninhabited version of my grandparents�� farmhouse: rooms, corridors, and cupboards sheltering deep memories and aromas from a distant age; fur and pawprints of the only dog I ever loved; hidden nooks crammed with curious mementos and friendly phantoms; a fragrant fruitful garden tapping at the leaded windows, and sunlight twinkling through the sheltering shade of the giant cedar, as it sings in the breeze. But would that heal, or hurt?

��When I fled the peopled world I had no one except myself to keep me from coming to grief. And it was to grief that I came.��



After the crisis of corpsing on stage, Alex Cleave retreats to his abandoned childhood home. He leaves his wife Lydia behind, and is out of contact with their troubled adult daughter Cass. As a child, he was familiar with the “alien presences�� of lodgers, and once saw his father’s ghost. Returning, he finds there are phantoms still: real, imagined, or both.

Haunted by memories and premonitions, he devotes himself to indulgent introspection, ��A way of being alive without living��, until ��I catch myself, red-handed, in the act of living; alone, without an audience.�� One of many contrasts and contradictions.

Poetic Incongruity

Almost every page is studded with highly-polished gems that distract from unsettling suspicions. There is something ghostly and intangible about the startling, but carefully chosen words, and about the images and ideas they simultaneously conjure and conceal. Read Banville for the language (the plot is sparse and uncertain).

�� In the corners of the room brownish shadows thronged. ��
The rhythm is perfect, and several of the words carry so much unexpected meaning they’re irreplaceable.

Just as people take on ghostly forms, so light takes on corporeal form.
�� Around us the shocked shadows congregated... On the lino... a sunburst streamed and shivered. ��

In the examples below (spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets), there is at least one ordinary word that gains heft by incongruity
(view spoiler)[:

�� “The garden’s menacing greenery crowding in the windows.��

�� “The sun was causing a livid commotion behind a heaping of clouds.��

�� “A tall sharp wedge of sunlight leaned against the white wall of the convent, motionless and menacing.��

�� “Calm summer light stood in the hall.��

�� “The open door of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me.��

�� “The protuberant pale eyes reminded me of a virulent kind of boiled sweet.��

�� “A flabby smell of overcooked food stood in the corridors night and day.��

�� “A white-capped sea of a deep, malignant blueness.��

�� “The plane unzipped the flooded runway and lifted.��
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Banville even makes the “desolating rapture�� of masturbating to “antique smut�� transcendent and almost beautiful.

Voices, Phantoms, and an Unreliable Narrator

Amid a mix of inadvertent and deliberate dishonesty, truth is hinted at, whether Alex realises or not.

When he first met Lydia, he “was not entirely what I pretended to be��. Alex is always a performer; he toys with truth and dodgy memories, “unknown, even to myself��..

When Cass was born, he saw “a host of shadowy ancestors, all of them jostling together��. As a child, she started hearing voices - an inverse of Alex being an actor, something he silently accuses her of being. Seeing phantoms helps him empathise with her “uncertainty as to what is real��, but it makes his account more questionable.

Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Sons

Alex is an outsider in his own town, in his own family. Like an anthropologist or a vivisectionist, he stalks, observes, and collects strays and “anomalies��. Phantoms are more enticing than his living, breathing family.

He is a lifelong “devotee of the goddess�� in various forms�� starting with his misunderstood mother. The allure of an older woman is a major theme of his teenage years, told in Ancient Light (my review HERE), and there are strong Oedipal overtones in his marriage.

But Alex was always committed to Cass and her needs - at least in his telling. Lydia sees it differently: jealousy, or something else? Certainly there is always the hint of tragedy to come that reminded me slightly of Emperor Augustus and Julia (see my review of Augustus) and Stoner and Grace (see my review of Stoner).

There is another father and daughter here, initially in the shadows: Quirke the caretaker, and teenage Lily. They have a curious and rather detached relationship. Alex’s arrival disturbs that dynamic, and distorts the lens through which he views his estrangement from Cass. His interest in Lily is overtly paternal. But unspoken spectres hover.

Solar Eclipse



The certainty of an eclipse is that the sun so suddenly extinguished will reappear just as abruptly. But despite the many and glorious mentions of light, this book is shaded by the fearful expectation of darkness, foreshadowing the title of the next book, Shroud.

Near the end, Alex experiences the partial (and cloudy) solar eclipse of 1999: “Peculiar light, insipid and shrouded, like the light in a dream.�� I visited Cornwall then, where it was total. Despite the clouds, there was an instant unleashing of visceral, elemental, primordial power that made me eager to experience another, better eclipse.

Quotes about Light



Light is a leitmotif, just as in Ancient Light (and maybe in Shroud, tbc), but where there is light, there are also shadows. Smells, usually unpleasant, are frequently and vividly mentioned, as in The Sea. But sound (except for a wonderful passage about manic seagulls), taste, and touch are secondary.

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets. (view spoiler)[

�� “The evening sun�� an ancient light, golden, dense, dust-laden.��

�� “The woods leaned inward�� blackly brown against the last faint radiance of the dying day.��

�� “The damp half-darkness folding me about, making me its own.��

�� “The room in sunlight was a luminous tuat tend held down by studs of light reflecting at many corners.��

�� “The sunlight was turning brazen as the afternoon lost its strength.��

�� “The oleaginous slither of light�� a livid twilight.��

�� “Even the sunlight seems bored.��

�� “The early sun had an intense lemony cast, and the morning was all glitter and glassy splinterings.��
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Alex’s Aphorisms

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets. (view spoiler)[

�� “Boredom is the brother of misery.��

�� “Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.��

�� “Lodgers�� like actors compelled to play themselves.��

�� “Grief takes the taste out of things.��

�� “Death bores the young, like a glum intruder come to spoil an already dull party.��

�� “It’s a parent’s posthumous revenge, the legacy of increasing resemblance.��

�� “What is happiness but a refined form of pain?��

�� “I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I am not present? Is a rose red in the dark?��

�� “There is no present, the past is random, and only the future is fixed.��

�� “I was looking the wrong way. I was looking into the past, and that was not where those phantoms were from.��

�� “Now that the worst had happened, I would no longer have to live in fear of it.��
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Miscellaneous Quotes

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets. (view spoiler)[

�� “One of those vague hazy days of early June that seem made half of weather and half of memory.��

�� “The countryside’s slovenly and uncaring loveliness.��

�� “Maundering chaotically in my disordered heart�� made me want to return to bed, to be “swaddled in flocculent warmth��.

�� An old phone “had the osseous heft of a tribal artefact, shaped and polished by a long and murderous use��.

�� Processed ham, “pallid, marbled, evilly aglisten��.

�� At the cinema, “phantasmally peopled darkness�� and “luminously peopled darkness��.

�� A man near death was “lost inside his clothes... moving wraithlike... a stooping figure flickering from sunlight into shadow... leaving no trace of his passing save a sort of shimmer, a fold in the air, and a coiling question mark of cigarette smoke.��

�� Smoking with “negligent deftness, as if it were a tricky exercise in prestidigitation�� tapping and twirling the miniature white baton�� with a magician’s fluency.��

�� “The surface of the water, taut and burnished like billowing silk�� The waves�� more a wrinkle running along the edges of a sluggishly swaying vast bowl of water.��

�� “Water is uncanny in the way, single-minded and uncontrollable, it keeps seeking its own level.��

�� “Drowning is strange�� for those on shore. It all seems done so discreetly.��

�� It “happened out of time�� not as a real event�� [but] in some special dimension of dream or memory��.

�� “Lily’s bare arm beside mine, each tiny strand of down on it agleam; the evening sunlight in the window, goldening the draining board�� my plate, with one limp round of tomato, a bruised lettuce leaf, a smear of crumbled egg yolk.�� Triva are more memorable and evocative than headline events.

�� “The trees were white with hoar-frost and a crepuscular pinkish mist hung on the motionless air.��

�� “A forgotten cigarette was smoking itself in surreptitious haste.��

�� “She gives herself to inaction almost sensuously. She is a voluptuary of indolence�� exudes a kind of negative radiance, a dark light.��

�� At music school, “five-fingered exercises tinkled, precise, monotonous and insane��.

�� “The silence that radiated off her like heat had a furious force.��

�� “What is it about such occasions of timeless time that afterwards makes them seem touched with such a precious, melancholy sweetness? Sometimes it seems to me that it is in these vacant intervals�� that my true life has been most authentically lived.��
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Notes

Spoilered for brevity, not plot secrets. (view spoiler)[

�� Alice: A revelation is likened to stepping through a looking glass, where “everything is exactly as it was and at the same time entirely transformed�� and is followed by a comparison with Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

�� Bible: There are surprisingly few Biblical allusions, with the notable exception of a longish scene where Quirke, in priestly mode, proffers water to a distraught Lydia, as if it were the sacrament.

�� Blood: The red stuff of life can never be insignificant, and it is casually mentioned several times, literally, and as a colour. But towards the end, there is a more disturbing and ambiguous memory of a white dress, apparently splashed - deliberately - with a stranger’s blood.

�� Circus: Lily’s childish enthusiasm for the circus has an oddly sinister air. Darkness, always darkness lurking.

�� Names: In Banville’s books, names have import, and characters often have similar names, whether by rhyme or near anagram. It was less obvious here, even when Alex considers the possible impact of changing names: his wife is really Leah, but he misheard her name as Lydia (which stuck), and when he started acting, he used his full first name (which didn’t stick). And then there’s Lily, which is not dissimilar to Leah and Lydia. Quirke’s name is too obvious to merit attention.

�� Bonnie Tyler: I wanted an excuse to weave her Total Eclipse of the Heart into this review, but other than the novel’s title, I can’t make a worthwhile association. Nevertheless, .

Image Sources:
�� Bruno Catalano sculpture of an empty man:
�� Irish eclipse, 11 August 1999:
�� Shaft of light, with photographer’s comments:
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The Cleave Trilogy

The ancient light of the past illuminates the present and future.

The publication order of the Alex and Cass Cleave father/daughter trilogy is Eclipse, then Shroud, and finally, Ancient Light.

However, there’s no need to read them in sequence, as they all have a current storyline intertwined with reflections of earlier events. (My reading order was 3, 1, 2.) The middle one is more about Cass, and the other two focus on Alex.

Hidden for brevity. (view spoiler)[
Read the additional spoilers below only if you have read the book and want to jog your memory. Links are to my reviews, where any further spoilers are hidden.

�� Eclipse, 5*: The main narrative is set in 1999, when Alex, the narrator, is ~50, and returns to his abandoned childhood home, after a catastrophic episode of stage-fright. The reminiscences are of his childhood, and that of his daughter, Cass, who has blackouts and hears voices. (view spoiler)[ He develops a friendship with the caretaker’s teen daughter that hints beyond the mere paternal. It ends shortly after Cass’s death. (hide spoiler)]

�� Shroud, 3*: The main narrative is set over a few months in 1999, narrated by literature professor, Axel Vander (in his late 70s), who meets adult Cass in Turin. Aspects of her story are told in the third person, probably by Vander, though with implausible omniscience. (view spoiler)[ Vander wrote a famous essay about the play which was her father’s most successful role. She is now an amateur researcher who has discovered secrets about Vander’s past, so the reminiscences are primarily about his teen and young adult years. Vander and Cass have a brief and disturbing relationship, and the book ends shortly after her death in 1999. (hide spoiler)]

�� Ancient Light, 5*: The main narrative is set around 2009, when Alex, narrating again, is ~60. The reminiscences are of his teen relationship with his best friend’s mother, of Cass’s teen years, and the aftermath of (view spoiler)[ her death a decade ago. Things are muddied when he takes on the role of Axel Vander (Cass’s lover in Shroud) in a biopic. The woman playing Cass has recently lost her father. She and Alex become close: another father/daughter relationship, with sexual undertones. (hide spoiler)]
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Oedipus, meet Humbert.