Old lovers…

If it is true that we demand of our favourite authors above all consistency — a certain fidelity to the territory that they have earlier marked out as their own — Ancient Light contains ingredients certain to please Banville aficionados. ‘Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions,’ the novel’s narrator tells us at the outset. On the instant we are transported back through four decades of Banville’s writing: ‘We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past,’ he asserted in an earlier novel, Birchwood, written in 1973. And so, in Ancient Light, it proves to be. In groping towards the past, Banville’s narrator fixates on details, ‘always details’: ‘exact and impossible’, they fail him. Ultimately, this exercise in remembering and misremembering resolves itself in revelations of almost unbearable poignancy.

Like his need to look backwards and reassemble the broken shards of memory into something ‘true’ and meaningful, Alexander Cleave, our narrator, is a Banville familiar. He previously appeared in an earlier novel, Eclipse. At that point, Cleave was in the throes of abandoning his career as a classical stage actor. In Ancient Light, his career enjoys an improbable renaissance when he is called on to star in his first film, a biopic based on the life of a literary critic (who has also already had a fictional outing, in this case in Banville’s 2002 novel, Shroud). This self-reflexive aspect of Banville’s fiction, however, is of limited significance in Ancient Light, concerned as it is above all with an affair which took place 50 years earlier.

Retired from the stage but not yet summoned by a transatlantic telephone call to moviedom, Cleave devotes himself with luxuriant self-indulgence to what initially appears the intensely pleasurable task of recalling his sexual awakening.