The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Shroud, by John Banville
reviewed by Irving Malin

John Banville. Shroud. Knopf, 2003. 257 pp. $25.00.

Banville gives us another thrilling exhibition. He returns (obsessively?) to his favorite themes of evidence, deception, and investigation, and his dazzling metaphorical power grips us. Vander, his central character, speaks to us at first, and on almost every page he explores his fear of disclosure, his (painful?) pleasure in his impersonation of his shrouded self. He boasts: “All my life I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power. It was a way of living; lies are life’s almost-anagram.” His reputation as scholar, oracle, and prophet has never been questioned. Once he gets a letter from a young woman who has discovered his clouded past and threatens to reveal his lost identity, his World War II status, he immediately travels back to the Old World, hoping to avoid her threats. But he discovers that his shadow, Cass Cleave, also has an unbalanced self. They are meant for each other; they are phantoms. Cass, we are told, is insane: “Her hallucinations were like real happenings, or memories of real happenings made immediate and vivid.” Thus Vander and Cleave are perfect; their “marriage” is a kind of mad paradise. Of course, their “marriage” cannot last. They are unbalanced—a word that recurs throughout the novel—and although they explore their wounds, they are separated by each other’s special needs and follies. Banville could have written a comedy of errors, but he knows that somehow reality exists, if only in the body’s decay. After all the metaphors, the changes of narration, Vander (wander, wonder?) knows that the dead have their voice. And it is this voice that drowns out Vander’s secret eloquence. It appears that even death doesn’t stifle the longing for perfection: the novel eludes burial, closure—and it makes us wonder whether radiance can truly illuminate the shroud.