Again

John Banville has delivered another stunning novel.  The main character in ‘Ancient Light’ is a man in his sixties.  In much of the book he recounts his love affair with an older woman when he was only fifteen.  There is insight here into the nature of eroticism and what it might mean to a boy. There is little that is titillating, but much that is fascinating.  We also learn of his adult life, the loss of his daughter, and of the circumstances of his life in the present.  The language is, for Banville, typically lyrical and poetic.  I just adore his writing and take such pleasure in reading and rereading the sentences.  I have to mark favorite passages as I read.  The ending, where we finally learn yet another and very different version of some important events described in the book, was for me very moving.  How wonderful that mere sentences on a page can magically evoke such a fascinating and complex image of life.

I’ll just mention some of the themes and quote some relevant passages.  Banville speaks best for himself.

Even in the present, we can hardly know in any objective sense what is happening or who or what is in charge.  We can only see through the tiny keyhole of our own selves at that particular time and place.  We can never truly know what another might see or experience.

Hence, about his daughter, the protagonist speculates:

'What may one know of another, even when it is one’s own daughter: A clever man whose name I have forgotten – my memory has become a sieve – put the poser: What is the length of a coastline? It seems a simple enough challenge, readily met, by a professional surveyor, say, with his spyglass and tape measure.  But reflect a moment. How finely calibrated must the tape measure be to deal with all those nooks and crannies? And nooks have nooks, and crannies crannies, ad infinitum, or ad at least that indefinite boundary where matter, so called, shades off seamlessly into thin air. Similarly, with the dimensions of a life it is a case of stopping at some certain level and saying this, this was she, though knowing of course that it was not.'

And about his lover, he confesses that though intimately involved with another, he was actually totally self-absorbed:

'Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that? I wonder. I used to watch Mrs. Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.'

'I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.'

And when looking into the past, we deal with memories, which are by definition even less reliable than our limited perception of the present. The passage of time enables us to make our own version of the past that serves our present-day needs:

'Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all. Some say that without realizing it we make it all up as we go along, embroidering and embellishing, and I am inclined to credit it, for Madam Memory is a great and subtle dissembler.  When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage – and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck? – may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.'

Even the recollections of specific, seemingly objective ‘facts’ are suspect.

'Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible.'

Where, exactly, does that leave us?  How are we to live?

'I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realize that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions.  Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be.'

'I see nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.'

With Banville perhaps words can at least portray, if not bridge, the gaps among people, among times. Maybe words can, if carefully crafted, represent the shimmering set of overlapping realities that is our reality.

'Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. … Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.'