Two years ago the Irish novelist John Banville published a book called Eclipse. It was his twelfth work of fiction, and it had a curiously, if not a disappointingly, unfinished feel to it. At the conclusion a death by suicide took place, and the feeling of bewildered hurt attendant upon the act was left hanging in the air, unresolved. There was no explanation, no emotional catharsis of any kind, merely a man, a failed actor who was now lacking a daughter, left looking out over a ledge at the impossibly high drop.
Like many of Banville's books - including the one currently under review - the torpid fictional air of that book was thick with ghosts, strange voices, hallucinations quite as vivid as the principal character's own shifting sense of reality. Ghosts of the dead and the living abounded. The question of the ghostliness, and the alarming fluidity, of human identity, how it shifts and re-forms, was explored to the point of obsessiveness. In fact, exploration of that overbearing theme seemed to be almost the entire point of the novel, had it not been for that death.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.