Prompted by a dream, Max Morden, the elderly narrator of John Banville’s new novel, shuffles back to a seaside town called Ballyless, the scene of his first experience of childhood ardour. This ardour, like the fiction it now shapes, had been both convulsive and erratic: one moment infatuated with an older woman, his attentions had all of a sudden shifted to her daughter.
In old age, Max is ‘a man of leisurely interests and scant ambition’ (‘I was always a distinct no one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone’). Grieving over his wife’s recent death, he has returned to Ballyless for no good reason, but rather ‘precisely so that it should be a mistake, that it should be hideous, that it should be, that I should be . . . inappropriate.’
He is a man out of joint. So is the narrative, which folds this way and that, from the shallow past of his wife’s dying to the deep, misremembered past and back to the present.
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