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Alexander Cleave, outworn actor whose glory days are gone, sets the elegiac tone of his first person narrative as part of the setting of a performance ill-omened from the start. There is little in terms of plot line in this introspective journey into the mind of a tormented character that assimilates the structure of a Shakespearean tragedy. Like a deft snake charmer, Banville reconstructs the inner purgatory of a man in five acts, leaving no space for cathartic redemption or hopeful light at the end of the tunel.

Something has died inside Alex. Fictional life on the stage, which had been truer than reality in the past, doesn’t fill the gaping void inside him any longer. Haunted by memories and dragged down by the rarified relationship with his wife and his mentally unstable daughter Cassandra, the apple of his eye, Alex struggles against a growing sense of disembodiment as he gropes in the darkness of his subconscious, searching for the secret well of grief from which springs of sorrow benum him into a detached stupor. In a desperate attempt to shake off the impending sense of doom that plagues him, the actor retires to the abandoned seaside house of his childhood, which has fallen into disrepair over the years, expecting to reconnect with the missing part of himself.

Once more, it’s in waves of detailed images that Banville stirs the waters of his swelling, unreliable narrative. Grey ash on a carpet, the glowing stub of an unfinished cigarette, a bloodstain, red like passion, on a gauzy dress, white like the pallor of a corpse drowned in a foreign sea, grimacing clowns in a morbid circus, doors ajar in mute stillness and disquieting sensation of being observed, stalked, of life being usurped by ghosts blind to the past but prescient of a stillborn future.

Straddling the classic gothic and the psychological thriller, Banville presents the veritable protagonists of his tale of woe. Loneliness, identity and erratic memory merge the currents of present and past, fiction and fact, prose and poetry in an ongoing contradiction between thematic lines and stylistic deployment. The exquisiteness of Banville’s writing, full of light and suggestive natural imagery that stimulates all the senses, doesn’t match the gloomy background of a scene never static but ceaselessly fluctuating between unbearable beauty and sordidness that attracts and repels the reader at once.
Banville is a sensualist, a linguistic sybarite, a sorcerer of the word, he probes and taunts and smirks with delectable artistry, making the reader fall prey to the ballast of his deeply charged lyrical overture. There is no escape for those who bask in texture, cadence and impeccable sentence structure when submerged into Banville’s works, to sink into the writer’s murky waters means to drown in agonizing rapture.

Amidst the climatic display of flawlessly developed metaphors that go full circle, I can’t help but wonder about the trait that distinguishes Banville from other writers. There is something of the foreigner in his use of English, maybe something to do with his Irish heritage that places him as a Pilgrim in his own language, a native of his own style, an insurgent of standardized limits.

The result of what appears a fragmentary chronicle on the surface is an understated, maybe also predictable, requiem that shakes the reader like an authentic classic.
And Alexander’s last invocation of his lost muse, his Miranda his Perdita, his Marina, achieves the quality of the divine in its cold, remote aloofness like the dead light of stars that brighten the darkest night without giving off any warmth nor any hint of exoneration.
Words are the only artifacts left to hold on to after the curtain falls and the actors have abandoned the stage, and memory becomes the only means to remember their faint echo, their fading scent of sweat, tears and remorse.

“I brooded on words. Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.�