Can art ever be real? What about fake art? Is there such a thing?
Do we ever truly connect with another, or is it an illusion, albeit a grand one?
The master prose stylist John Banville weighs in on these issues in Athena, a novel from the mid 1990's. It's one of the strangest books I've ever read. Banville manages a very delicate balancing act. The characters are real and they're not. It's funny and yet very poignant. We never quite know where we stand, and that's part of the beauty of it all.
Through it all Banville the writer comes through again, weaving his webs of words with skill and dash. Consider the following passages on a sexual encounter:
Once more I am lying on my side, facing as before towards the window and the dwindling rain, cradling her in my arm now as she snuffles and twitches, and my arm has gone numb but I will not shift it for fear of disturbing her, and besides, I feel heroic here, young Tristan watching sleepless over his Irisch Kind; heroic and foolish, unreal, anxious, exultant. And slowly there unfolded in me a memory from the far past, when as a child one summer afternoon on a holiday at the seaside I stepped out of a tin-roofed cinema expecting rain, fox, boiling clouds, and found myself instead standing in the midst of rinsed and glistening sunlight with a swollen cobalt sea before me upon which a boat with a read sail leaned, making for the hazed horizon, and I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world.
,,, :How palely delicate she was. She glimmered. Her skin had a grainy, thick texture that at times, when she was out of sorts, or menstrual, I found excitingly unpleasant to the touch. Yes, it was always there, behind all the transports and the adoration, that faint, acrid, atavistic hint of disgust, waiting, like pain allayed, waiting, and reminding. This i am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another. And we erect cathedrals upon it.
The voice in places is reminiscent of Philip Roth. The self-conscious narrator, full of spirit, and also cursed with self doubt. Never sure of where he is, always on shaky ground, but shockingly observant of every detail. The contradiction between blindness and keen sight is always puzzling, always making the reader reconsider, think again about what is real and what is not. The plot is tied to other Banville novels, but no matter. The writing stands on its own. He is a modern master.
