Stylists, who are the gamblers of the novel, are drawn to risk. There is of course the risk of style itself - the difficulties and densities, the inevitable aestheticism of a rich prose. But stylists seem to be drawn to another risk, something akin to walking through a town in ballet slippers - that is, the leasing of a fine style to a character or milieu that might not naturally use or seem to deserve that richness. In such cases, the prose, as it were, leads a better life than its subjects. Thus Flaubert's monkish fastidiousness applied itself to the idees recues of the loathed petit bourgoisie; Joyce's scrupulousness to the untidy lives of Dubliners; Faulkner's racing articulacy to inarticulate people; and Nabokov's humane mandarinism to a paedophile.
John Banville, the possessor of a very delicate prose, often uses that prose to allow characters who have squandered their essential moral delicacy to speak their minds to the reader. As in his fine novels, The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable, his new book, Eclipse, is narrated by a man with a somewhat dappled moral awareness - at times, he seems to see clearly the harm he has wrought; more often, he lives in dank, self-absorbed denial of his failures. As often in Banville's fiction, a gap opens between this lack in the narrator and the fullness of the prose he "speaks", and in that charged bay the reader is invited to puzzle out the real nature of the man addressing us.
That man is Alex Cleave, a hammy, erudite self-pleaser, a former actor of some renown, now in his fiftieth year, and undergoing a kind of breakdown. Alex had a distinguished career, which ended abruptly in "sweaty ignominy", with an attack of stage fright. He has since fallen into a dark lull, a metaphysical depression which has all but paralysed him. He leaves his uncomprehending wife and goes to live in his childhood house, in an (unnamed but obviously Irish) village by the sea. Here he is visited by unhappy family memories, by thoughts of his unstable adult daughter, Cass, and what seems to have been his lonely and solemn childhood in this house.
It is the beginning of summer, and this, despite its dark themes, is a summer-lit book, a season which Banville takes, as others might autumn, to be the season of memory, a time when the present slows down and begins to dream its past: "There is an archaic quality to certain summer days . . . In the dreamy stillness, like the stillness in the azure distances of a stage set, all the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. A breeze will spring up, one of the weather's half-formed thoughts, and something at the corner of your vision will flap once, languidly, and be still again."
The prose - we will come to that, we must come to that - is superb, of course (how beautiful that likening of a breeze to one of the weather's half-formed thoughts), but one notes that Alex thinks of summer's stillness as akin to a stage set. Indeed, the reader begins to see that Alex has always thought of life histrionically. Alex is in love with the performance of himself; in love with his fancy prose style, his affected erudition, his forlorn loneliness, his turbulent memories, and his mid-life crises. It becomes clear that he has neglected his wife, and has been a poor, if floridly anxious, father. He likes to apostrophise his daughter, who has herself been afflicted by physical and mental problems, in high-flown ways, as "my Minerva" or "Miranda" (Alex playing the role of Prospero), or "Perdita". Yet, near the end of the novel, we realise that Cass, whom Alex has peristently written off as too high-strung to achieve anything, may well have been a distinguished scholar. In speaking of her to the reader, Alex has simply denied his daughter an independent reality. His family, indeed the world, is merely the adjunct of his strutting imagination.
ALEX is a kind of murderer, really, one who smothers the children of reality with the pillow of his fantasies. Alone in his family home, he has banished his wife and daughter; but his mind clearly banished them years earlier, for he cannot recognise their difficult existence. Instead, he communes with ghosts: with the ghost of himself; with his father, who died in this house, and with his mother, who died in a nearby nursing home, attended by Alex, who fed her and watched her whiskery lips "mumbling the rim of the cup." (The tiniest sentence in this novel blooms into poetry.)
Living alone - though he is visited by two curious inhabitants of the town, who have been living in the house - Alex goes to seed. He grows a long beard, reads obsessively, and writes a journal. He undergoes a breakdown of the kind Sartre, in his eponymous novel, called "nausea": he is weighed down by "a kind of horror" at the heaviness and superfluity of things, even at his own flesh, "unable to understand how it made its movements."
Eclipse is a difficult novel to describe. It drifts, rather like one of the "archaic" summer days Banville describes so deliciously. Alex is imprisoned in himself, and lavishly oblivious to the independent existence of other humans. Yet rather like the hero of Sartre's novel, his awareness of non-human solidities, the thinginess of the world, is tremendously acute. And there is a kind of religious joy in this (indeed, if there were not, Eclipse would be unbearably bleak). It is here that Banville's prose breathes through all its ventricles. Rich but never unbudgetedly so - the lyrical and prosaic are always kept in tight consort - Banville's prose is ripe with inheritance. One hears in it constantly the English poets, as well as Joyce and Proust and Nabokov. In general, his long, Proustian metaphors are better, more original, than his more compacted portraiture, which is sometimes ordinary. On every page there are lustres, long lovely sentences which we can witness turning themselves from safe workers into fine hazards: the old-fashioned Bakelite phone in Alex's family home: "the receiver had the osseous heft of a tribal artefact, shaped and polished by long and murderous use."
At one moment, Alex remembers seeing Cass, just born, and finding in her face the faces of her grandparents, "all of them jostling together, as in the porthole of a departing emigrant ship." He recalls taking Cass for music lessons, and hearing the sounds of children playing: "a drum-roll would come pounding down the stairs like the footfalls of a rotund inmate making a bid for freedom." Such prose is as good as anything being written in English today.
But Virginia Woolf rightly said that the novelist does not write in sentences, but chapters. Eclipse is somewhat thin in human detail - in comedy, in specificity (towns are nameless, and there are no dates), in society. It often has the quality of dream. But one settles into it, and begins to see the omissions as part of Banville's design, for he wants us to climb inside the head of his fragile and often irritating narrator, wants us to experience Alex's blindnesses - blindnesses which seem, at first, to be merely absurd, but which fatten themselves as the novel progresses, and finally become tragic. The book's subject is, really, consciousness, which makes it rare indeed in contemporary fiction. Alex, though barely likable, is alive. Eclipse's high achievement is that it makes a tragic hero of an obviously second-rate actor.
James Wood's The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief has recently appeared in paperback