John Banville - Ancient Light

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Brilliantly evocative, but...

Whether or not you like this book will depend on your response to Banville's style. The story is slow and contemplative; narrated by an ageing actor, it tells the story of his first sexual awakening in an affair with the mother of his best friend, the suicide of his daughter ten years ago and his current involvement in shooting a film. He often addresses the reader directly, describes things in unusual detail and digresses from the tale into odd preoccupations and observations. The book is about the nature of memory as much as anything - how we remember, misremember and unknowingly invent - and I think Banville does this brilliantly. He describes very believably how memories seem to work, realising for example that he remembers autumn leaves lying when the event must have taken place in April, or forgetting the content of a really important conversation but remembering small details about where it took place. He conjures astonishingly vivid scenes from minutiae like the smell of a stone wall by a road or the wafting of steam from a kettle, and comes up with some wonderful descriptions like the woman who "really is of the most remarkable shape, and might have been assembled from a collection of cardboard boxes of varying sizes that were first left out in the rain and then piled soggily any old way one on top of another."

It will probably be clear early on whether you are going to enjoy the book. The second paragraph of the book begins, "What do I recall of her, here in these soft pale days at the lapsing of the year?" and a few pages later, "...I would lie with my cheek resting on her midriff...and in my ear the pings and plonks of her innards at their ceaseless work of transubstantiation." I think if you like all this, along with things like talk of "vermiform corridors" and descriptions and speculative character analysis of a random tramp, you will like the book and if you don't, you won't.

Personally, I loved individual parts but found a whole book of it a bit much so I find it difficult to give an overall rating. I can't recommend it unreservedly because it became a bit of a struggle slogging through it all, but I would be very sorry not to have read it. I suspect that a lot of people will love it and a lot will dislike it. I hope the above has given you some idea of whether or not it will be to your taste.