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)
Alexander Cleave has left his acting career and family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but presences, ghostly and human, all conspire to distract him from his retirement.
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