Ancient Light [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Whether or not you like this book will depend on your response to Banville's style. The story is slow and contemplative; narrated by an ageing actor, it tells the story of his first sexual awakening in an affair with the mother of his best friend, the suicide of his daughter ten years ago and his current involvement in shooting a film. He often addresses the reader directly, describes things in unusual detail and digresses from the tale into odd preoccupations and observations. The book is about the nature of memory as much as anything - how we remember, misremember and unknowingly invent - and I think Banville does this brilliantly. He describes very believably how memories seem to work, realising for example that he remembers autumn leaves lying when the event must have taken place in April, or forgetting the content of a really important conversation but remembering small details about where it took place. He conjures astonishingly vivid scenes from minutiae like the smell of a stone wall by a road or the wafting of steam from a kettle, and comes up with some wonderful descriptions like the woman who "really is of the most remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another."

It will probably be clear early on whether you are going to enjoy the book. The second paragraph of the book begins, "What do I recall of her, here in these soft pale days at the lapsing of the year?" and a few pages later, "...I would lie with my cheek resting on her midriff...and in my ear the pings and plonks of her innards at their ceaseless work of transubstantiation." I think if you like all this, along with things like talk of "vermiform corridors" and descriptions and speculative character analysis of a random tramp, you will like the book and if you don't, you won't.

Personally, I loved individual parts but found a whole book of it a bit much so I find it difficult to give an overall rating. I can't recommend it unreservedly because it became a bit of a struggle slogging through it all, but I would be very sorry not to have read it. I suspect that a lot of people will love it and a lot will dislike it. I hope the above has given you some idea of whether or not it will be to your taste.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This story is told from the point of view of Alexander Cleave, a man in his early 60's. He has been a stage actor but has suddenly and unexpectedly been offered a role in a Hollywood film playing a disreputable rogue named Axel Vander. Alexander surprises himself by accepting the offer, and does research into Axel's life.

As we learn about Alexander's present day life, we know that he is married to his long-time wife Lydia and they are both still reeling and in mourning over the suicide of his daughter ten years earlier. She had jumped to her death off the balcony in a small scenic coastal Italian village, pregnant at the time. Alexander knew that his daughter had always been troubled but he did not know the reasons why she killed herself or who was the father of her child. He feels the need to find out.

Other present characters include a beautiful but troubled actress Dawn Davonport who co-stars with Alexander, and a production scout/sleuth named Billie Stryker who Alexander trusts to find an old flame.

That old flame was his best friend Billy's mother, a woman most often referred to as Mrs. Gray who seduced young Alexander when he was 15 and she was in her 30's. Their torrid but short-lived affair has a lasting effect on Alexander, yet as he reflects back on his life and memories he has trouble being sure if his memories can be trusted and the details correct.

This is just a beautiful novel. This is not a quick read by any means and this is the type of book where you want to read every sentence of every long descriptive paragraph because they are all so evocative and eloquent. At its heart, in many ways this is a novel about our memories and how "so often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing."

It was when I finished this novel that I knew I had to give it five stars - the denouement makes you reassess everything you've just read and see it through different eyes. This is truly one of those books that will stay with me a long time.

"BILLY GRAY WAS MY BEST FRIEND and I fell in love with his mother. Love may be too strong a word but I do not know a weaker one that will apply." With those two opening sentences Booker Prize winner John Banville begins his latest novel. Surely he tips his hat-- at least from a distance to Nabokov, both for his word play and people play-- but more closely to Henry James, whom he, like so many writers on that side of the Atlantic-- Colm Toibin and Alan Hollinghurst come to mind-- has acknowledged as being a major influence on his writing. On this side, James Baldwin's favorite writer was James. Banville's narrator is Alexander Cleave, an aging stage actor in his 60's, way past his prime, who is offered a role in a movie opposite a beautiful young actress Dawn Davenport. That is the here and now of the plot. But Cleave also weaves musings on his first love at fifteen with Mrs. Gray and the death of his only daughter Cass ten years ago by drowning-- and his own life-- what does it all mean if anything. While much of the action takes place within the head of Cleave, Mr. Banville does drop a couple of events or surprises near the end of the novel to bring the story at least to a partial conclusion. Of course as in most good fiction, some questions remain unanswered.

If I had to put what this novel is about is one sentence I would say it is about the unreliability of memory. Time and time again what Cleave remembers is not the way it was, or his memory of the same event is not the same as someone else's. Haven't we all experienced that? (My twin brother and I constantly remember the same happenings from our childhood that are completely different.) In the words of Cleave: "Time and Memory and a fussy firm of interior decorators, though, always shifting the furniture about and redesigning and even reassigning rooms." This thoughtful novel is also about perhaps the most dreaded of family events, the death of a child, something that parents never get over: "I cannot remember when I last spoke of Cass to anyone, even Lydia [his wife]. I guard my memories of my lost one jealously, keep them securely under wraps, like a folio of delicate watercolors that must be protected from the harsh light of day." Then there is the utter incomprehension of the meaning of life in all its complexity and the accompanying loneliness. Cleave acknowledges that he no longer knows what his wife thinks, what anyone thinks and "hardly" knows what he himself thinks. Finally there is Bob Dylan's four letter word, love in all its manifestations and permutations.

You cannot discuss this novel without acknowledging Mr. Banville's genius with the English language. As I read this novel, I kept telling myself that surely this man in one of his lives was an artist. Then I found out that he once has aspirations of being a painter. It shows. I can think of no other writer whose fiction is so saturated with color, whether Mr. Banville is describing the sea, the sky, the mountains, the sun or a woman's body. And he never repeats himself. The sea is a "line of shining mercury." It is also "high and vehemently blue." The mountains are "pale blue and flat." The sun struggles "whitely." The sunshine is "a thin, pervasive, lemony element, like a very fine liquid." The sea is a "darkling tumult." Clouds are "like bits of crinkled gold leaf and the sky higher up was a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless and brimming surface of the canal." And this writer can find in a woman's body the colors of grey, lilac-grey, umber, rose, and "another tint, hard to name--dark tea? bruised honeysuckle?"

The sheer poetic qualities of Mr. Banville's prose is almost overwhelming at times. ( He has said that he attempts to merge poetry and fiction.) Every page is a journey through his poetic universe. Here is just one beautiful example from many: "Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness? Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been? When I think of those whom I have loved and lost I am as one wandering among eyeless statues in a garden at nightfall. The air about me is murmurous with absences. I am thinking of Mrs. Gray's moist brown eyes flecked with tiny splinters of gold. When we made love they would turn from amber through umber to a turbid shade of bronze."

Reading a new Banville novel is, as always, an intoxicating submersion into the English language.