John Banville continues to thrill me.  Shroud (2002) is part of a loosely bound trilogy (Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light), but stands very well indeed on its own. This is almost writing for writing’s sake.  There isn’t much of a plot at all, at what plot there is is not particularly interesting or even credible.  But no matter.  The ‘plot’ is merely an excuse for Banville to write marvelous passages about identity, authenticity, love and death, a pretext for absolutely hypnotic mood painting.  It’s poetry in the guise of a novel, and that’s just fine by me.

The book is divided into three sections.  The first is the least successful and the most plot-centric. The main character is an aging academic and writer.  Early on he muses:

‘For a second, strangely, and for no reason that I knew, everything seemed to stop, as if the world had missed a heartbeat. Is this how death will be, a chink in the flow of time through which I shall slip as lightly as a letter dropping with a rustle into the mysterious dark interior of a mailbox?’

In the second section, that character as a young man assumes the identity of a recently deceased friend.  The switch is not premeditated, and the motives are mixed.  Political circumstances (Nazi’s clamping down on Antwerp) trigger the ruse, but Banville is quick to explore many facets of the inevitable consequences.  I quote at length partly out of respect for Banville’s prose, partly because I suspect and hope that retyping Banville’s words will have a positive effect on my own writing:

‘No, I did not attend Axel’s funeral. I knew that I would not be welcome, that my presence would be an embarrassment, possibly a danger, to the Vanders.  I do not know when it took place, or where, even. I think now I should have been there to see him into the ground. It is said that those close to a person who goes missing will not find peace and an end to their grieving until they know the fate of their loved one, and, especially, the place where he, or she, is interred. I would not wish to appear fanciful, but when I look back over the years of my life, and those moments in it of great stress and suicidal urgings, I wonder if all along I may have been in a state of suspended mourning for my friend.  Does this make me seem too good, too faithful? It does. But certainly there is something buried deep down in me that I do not understand and the nature of which I can only intuit. It will seem too obvious if I say that it is another self – am I not, like everyone, like you, like you especially, my protean dear, thrown together from a legion of selves? – but all the same that is the only way I can think of to describe the sensation.  This separate, hidden I is prey to effects and emotions that do not touch me at all, except insofar as I am the channel through which its responses must necessarily be manifest. It will prick up its ears at the tritest, most trivial plangency; it is a sucker for the sentimental. Sunsets, the thought of a lost dog, the slushy slow movement of a symphony, any old hackneyed thing can set the funereal organ churning. I will be passing by in the street and hear a snatch of some cheap melody coming from the open window of an adolescent’s bedroom and there will suddenly swell within me a huge, hot bubble of something that is as good as grief, and I will have to hurry on, head down, swallowing hard against that choking bolus of woe. A beggar will approach me, toothless and foul-smelling, and I will have an urge to open wide my arms and gather him to me and crush him against my breast in a burning, brotherly embrace, instead of which, of course, I will dodge past him, swiveling my eyes away from the spectacle of his misery and keeping my tight fists firmly plunged in my pockets. Can these splurges of unbidden and surely spurious emotion really have their source in a bereavement nearly half a century old? Did I care for Axel that much? Perhaps it is not for him alone that I am grieving, but for all my dead, congregated in a twittering underworld within me, clamouring weakly for the warm blood of life. But why should I think myself special – which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?’

Banville also describes the liberating aspect of the identity assumption:

‘Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted.  I could do whatever I wished, follow my wildest whim. I could lie, cheat, steal, maim, murder, and justify it all. More: the necessity of justification would not arise, for the land I was entering now was a land without laws. Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that is victims too can be made free men. Adrift and homeless, without family or friend …I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – myself.  I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel’s identity. If you think this a paradox you know nothing about the problematic of authenticity.’

And, to offer yet more contradiction:

‘What did it benefit me to take on his identity? It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him – although I did, I did want to be him – but that I wanted so much more not to be me. That is to say, I desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my people. This seems to matter much. Yet I have lived as him for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was … I pause in uncertaintly, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns.’

But it’s in the third part that Banville creates a stunningly hypnotic vision.  The main character, an old man, has fallen in love with a young girl:

‘The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do.

I am, as is surely apparent by now, a thing made up wholly of poses. In this I may not be unique, it may be thus for everyone, more or less, I do not know, nor care. What I do know is that having lived my life in the awareness, or even if only in the illusion, of being constantly watched, constantly under scrutiny, I am all frontage; stroll around to the back and all you will find is some sawdust and a few shaky struts and a mess of wiring. There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as once I manufactured a reputation, from material filched from aothers. The accent you hear is not mine, for I have no accent. I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth. I used Cass Cleave [the young girl] as a test of my authentic being. No, no, more that that; I seized on her to be my authenticity itself. That was what I was rooting in her for, not pleasure or youth or the last few crumbs of life’s grand feast, nothing so frivolous; she was my last chance to be me.’

That about sums it up for this Humbert Humbert, and for modernity’s seemingly futile quest for authenticity. We’re just too damned self-aware to be the least bit fundamentally confident.  We’re doomed to constant reinvention, self-reflection, and self-doubt. Banville points out the consequences for writers:

 ‘... every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic’s task to nose out.’

In this novel the damning physical evidence of the main character’s duplicity is hidden inside a fountain pen, a lovely symbol indeed.

There is a dinner scene near the end of the book which is a wonderful combination of Fellini, Bergman (think the dinner party scene in The Hour of the Wolf’), Philip Roth, and maybe even a bit of Woody Allen. So many levels of falseness; a gaping chasm where only truth and faith could really do.  Finally the main character realizes that his own recently deceased wife probably understood his deception but kept silent and just loved him as best she could.  His first glimmer of what a more genuine life could have been:

‘What I marvel at is her silence. All those years when I thought I was preserving myself through deceit, it was really she who was keeping me whole, keeping me intact, by pretending to be deceived. She was my silent guarantor of authenticity. That was what I realized, as I stood that day in the stationer’s shop on the Via Bonafous and one whole wall of my life fell down and I was afforded an entire vista of the world that I had never glimpsed before.’

Shroud is not an easy book. I read it slowly and not without some frustration.  But there are passages to will stay with me for a long, long time. For now, Banville will be my therapist.