Eclipse: A Novel
John Banville
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0375725296
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this deeply moving and original book, John Banville alloys mystery, fable, and ghost story with poignant psychological acuity to forge the riveting story of a man wary of the future, plagued by the past, and so uncertain in the present that he cannot discern the spectral from the real.
When renowned actor Alexander Cleave was a boy living in a large house with his widowed mother and various itinerant lodgers, he encountered a strikingly vivid ghost of his father. Now that he’s fifty and has returned to his boyhood home to recover from a nervous breakdown on stage, he is not surprised to find the place still haunted. He is surprised, however, at the presence of two new lodgers who have covertly settled into his old roost. And he is soon overwhelmed by how they, coupled with an onslaught of disturbing memories, compel him to confront the clutter that has become his life: ruined career, tenuous marriage, and troubled relationship with an estranged daughter destined for doom.
and unwelcoming aspect of the spot, that would have been fitted more to brigandage than bathing. The dunes were low, and there was no grass, only a tough, thorny stuff that crackled underfoot. The beach was steeply shelved, and in places the top layer of sand had blown away, exposing striated ridges of a scaly, shale-like stuff that would cut the soles of any swimmer foolhardy enough to venture barefoot over it. I wonder if my ghosts would have known I was not in the house. Do they appear when I
which of the world’s secret administrators it was who left that cigarette burning on the bar. In the minute that I had been in the pub the morning had clouded over. A great grey bank of cumulus fringed in silver hung above the sea, moving landward with menacing intent. Quirke had crossed to the wooden quay and was walking along with what seemed a blundering step, like that of a man purblinded by tears. Or was he tipsy, I wondered? Surely he had not been long enough in the pub to drink himself
frightened, as well I might be. I imagined such sorrows; such exaltations. I turned and looked back at the house and saw what I took to be my wife standing at the window of what was once my mother’s room. The figure was motionless, gazing steadily in my direction but not directly at me. What did she see? What was it she was seeing? I felt diminished briefly, an incidental in that gaze, dealt, as it were, a glancing blow or blown a derisive kiss. Day reflecting on the glass made the image in the
morning, and there is much excitement. The circus, of all things, has come to town. After a night of disturbed sleep I was woken early by a confusion of noises outside my window, and looked through a crack in the curtains to find a dozen or more trailers drawn up at haphazard angles in the square. The horses were being unhitched, and big-muscled bandy men in striped vests were hurrying to and fro, plying ropes, and hefting things, and calling to each other in sharp, brief barks; it was as if the
shade her eyes. “It’s the circus,” I said, and had to laugh, though it came out more like a cough. In fact, as I later found, it is more than a circus, it is a kind of roadshow, with a shooting gallery, and stalls for shying coconuts and throwing rings, and a cage on wheels containing a family of mangy, purple-bottomed monkeys who gibber and hoot and stare at passers-by with comical malignity. There is even a hall of mirrors: Lily and I were present when it was being put up. The big rippled