The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Eclipse, by John Banville
reviewed by Irving Malin

Knopf, 2001. 211 pp. $23.00.

The narrator of this ghostly novel is a middle-aged actor. He returns to his birthplace in the country after he forgets his lines on stage. He recognizes that he cannot complete his sentences or shape his life. He is a suspended, incomplete man. He muses about performance: “This is the actor’s hubris, to imagine the world possessed of a single avid eye fixed solely and always on him. And he, of course, acting, thinks himself the only real one, the most substantial shadow in a world of shades.” The novel is a series of reflections, duplicities, signs—a masterful maze. Here are some of his first words: “At first it was a form. Or not even that.” The “it” seems to be some presence which had “fallen silently into step beside me, or inside me, rather, someone who was else, another, and yet familiar.” These hesitations and counterturns suggest that the actor cannot be completely trusted. Thus we must read him, question his words, and by doing so, review his narrative. And when he begins to see things staring at him, we are not certain whether he is slightly mad or startlingly observant. The novel, like James’s ghostly tales, is more than an entertainment. It is, like Banville’s historical novels, an epistemological mystery. The narrator confuses roles—wife and mother, self and double, daughter and orphan. The end of Eclipse resembles the beginning in the ambiguity of the role playing. There is no solution to fictive certainties (to use Robert Duncan’s phrase), and we are left with a thrilling (and chilling) absence—suddenly thrust back to the queer beginning.