A lyrical and haunting new work of fiction by one of Ireland's greatest writers...
Alexander Cleave has never been able to rid himself of the feeling that he is in "a perpetual state of being watched"-even when alone. So he became an actor, and successfully performed his way through life until suddenly, at the peak of his career, he staggered off stage, never to return.
Self-banished to his childhood home and cut off from his wife, Cleave begins to unravel the past and disinter his own identity. But his attempt to sift the accumulated clutter of half a century of existence is undermined by the house itself, brimming with lives, both ghostly and undeniably human. Memory constantly displaces Cleave's attention to the small, delicate details of the present. So too does his anxiety about the future, and the thought of his beloved but troubled daughter, Cass, tugging away at him like an undertow.
This humane and beautifully written story tells the tragic tale of a man, intelligent, preposterous and vulnerable, who in attempting to bring the performance to a close, finds himself travelling inevitably towards a devastating denouement.
Industry Reviews
Alexander Cleave, an internationally known actor, is undergoing a mid-life crisis. Having put paid to his career by 'corpsing' on stage, he abandons his wife, flees to his empty childhood home and tries, purely by introspection, to come to terms with all the raw aspects of himself he has neglected over the years and with his own mortality. Gradually, however, his internal struggles are encroached upon by the complications of reality: the fact that the caretaker and his daughter appear to be living secretly in his house, followed by the arrival of his angry wife with news of their unstable daughter. Finally, a tragedy drags him back to the fragility of real life. The novel is narrated in Alexander's voice - rhetorical, pretentious, pained - weaving in and out of past and present. He sees ghosts and apparitions, sifts through oblique and apparently symbolic incidents from the past, looking for clues to inner truth. Yet he knows that he has always been an actor in his own and other's lives, always self-conscious or self-absorbed and at one removed from his responsibility to his family. Too late, at the end, he understands the moral responsibility human existence requires. The story pulses with philosophical and psychological questioning. How do you become yourself? What is being? How can you see what's really in front of you? In a tour de force reminiscent of Thomas Mann, Banville, the 'novelists' novelist, has written a lyrical, densely packed, gripping case study of a poisonous preoccupation with self and a certain kind of masculinity in crisis. Ross King says: Any new Banville novel promises to be a treat, and Eclipse, despite its sombre subject, does not disappoint. Alex Cleave, an actor who has suffered a crisis on the stage, returns to the boyhood home where his parents died, his career in ruins. What follows is Cleave's unflinching scrutiny not only of his failure onstage but also of the botched roles - husband, father, son - he has played in real life. Secluded from everyone including his wife, he begins laying old ghosts to rest and coming to terms with the identity he has spent his career burying beneath theatrical roles. In particular he muses on his relationship with his troubled daughter Cass, who suffers from an unnamed affliction resembling epilepsy. His self-absorption is interrupted, however, when he discovers himself sharing the house with a pair of ghosts - what he takes to be a mother and child - as well as two squatters - a father and his adolescent daughter. His peace is finally shattered with the arrival of his wife, who comes bearing news of Cass. As the date of the summer's solar eclipse approaches, Cleave, fearful of the future, comes to regard the event as portentous, and, sure enough, tragedy soon strikes. All of the familiar Banville obsessions are probed with grisly humour and sharp insight - retreat from the world, anguished self-scrutiny, the unfathomability of other people, the eerie wonder of the commonplace. And Cleave's tragedy unfolds in the virtuoso prose that separates Banville from virtually all of his peers. It is his most moving novel yet - a work to be savoured. (Kirkus UK)
