Reviews
The Observer
Tim Adams
“Banville's three novels taken together are not so much a trilogy as a triptych mirror, like the one in which Cleave first spied his Mrs Gray undressing. Not much is resolved between them, though each one creates a vivid new angle of reflection. Banville's ostensible theme throughout might be the fictions we tell ourselves in the name of memory, the self-protection and the self-harm that the past affords us, but they never threaten chilly abstraction, or even formal riddling of the kind favoured by Paul Auster. His writing is too precise, too beautifully freighted with the described world for that”
24/06/2012
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The Evening Standard
Jane Shilling
“Banville’s mastery of language is an intense delight. Who else could write of “an imbricated array of banana sandwiches on a wooden tray”, a “squamous pineapple” or “leporine uncertainty”. Yet the glitter of the language is never meretricious; always it is the servant of the narrative — mysterious and fractured though that is, and populated with enigmatic figures — a well-spoken tramp, a saturnine stranger in a Ligurian hotel who confides that “everywhere we look, we are looking into the past”.”
19/07/2012
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The Financial Times
Claire Kilroy
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The plot strands combine in the closing sections of the novel as Alexander’s narrative switches from 1950s Ireland to an Italian winter to the present day, these different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears. The Stockholm jury should pick up the phone now.”
13/07/2012
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The Sunday Times
Adam Lively
“Others will protest, too, at the strange coin- cidence that sees Cleave impersonating his dead daughter’s lover (though the degree of connection between Vander and Cass is not made explicit within the pages of this novel). But this is exactly where Banville is at his most interesting, his most willing to embrace an imaginative experimentalism that novelists this side of the Irish Sea are quick to balk at ... It is true that all this sits rather strangely with Mrs Gray, her everyday sensuality and sad destiny. But sometimes it can be the lumpy and misbegotten, not the elegantly finished, that ends up lingering longest in the mind. ”
01/07/2012
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The Independent on Sunday
Leyla Sanai
“Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured. His penchant for arcane, even archaic, vocabulary is not ostentatious because it melds into the ornate, intricate structure of the text, like the Rembrandt in Kenwood House.”
08/07/2012
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The Daily Express
Jake Kerridge
“Banville writes most convincingly when he has Cleave reviewing the long-distant past. Mrs Gray, presented to us from the perspective of her youthful adorer, is not exactly a rounded character but manages to be far more full of life than Dawn Devonport. This is appropriate if not entirely satisfactory for the reader because for Cleave the past is simply more concrete than the present. Banville’s prose, as gorgeous and precise as in his 2005 Man Bookerwinner The Sea, evokes scenes so that they burn in the reader’s mind as brightly as they do in Cleave’s memory.”
01/07/2012
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The Guardian
Alex Clarke
“Now, in the third novel in this loosely configured, frequently achronological series, we are with Alexander again. Once more, he is excavating his distant past, on this occasion the teenage affair he had with Mrs Gray, a woman 20 years his senior and his best friend's mother; he is grappling, always, with the aftermath of Cass's death and with a grief that ceaselessly reconstitutes itself; and he is preparing for an unexpected reawakening of his career. That is perhaps the barest summary that one could hope to achieve of Ancient Life, a novel criss-crossed with ghost roads and dead-ends and peopled by shifty characters who seem provisional even to themselves. It is written in Banville's customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery, prose that deliberately slows you down and frequently wrongfoots you. ”
22/06/2012
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The Independent
Patricia Craig
“Cleave does not look back with affection in his younger self: all the sulks and storms peculiar to his age group are rehearsed. Banville makes us undergo, with his characters, the anxiety of discovery, with the inevitable bad end written in to the unsettling beginning. Ancient Light is not concerned to convey the sociological realities of small-town Ireland in the 1950s; rather, at its core is a moment out of time, though universal in its implications, and intensely remembered, while at the same time taking account of all the memory's lapses, tricks and stratagems.”
30/06/2012
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The Literary Review
David Jays
“Although Ancient Light stands alone, the earlier books provide context, and explain why plot strands slump in a lackadaisical dandle. It’s not too much of a spoiler, I hope, to reveal that nothing you think might happen actually does. The big reveals are unrevealed, the twists largely untwisted. Banville, as ever, is far more committed to thought than action, and above all to his lapidary, highly scented language. ”
01/07/2012
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The Spectator
Matthew Dennison
“Cleave’s summer of sensual awakening provides Banville with an irresistible impulse to descriptive writing of determined but poetic exactitude: sensuousness in the service of sensuousness. By comparison, the novel’s modern-day plot, involving Cleave’s nascent film career and his return with his co-star Dawn Devenport to the scene of his adult daughter’s death, appears almost flimsy. ‘I am getting old and the past has begun to seem more vivid than the present,’ Cleave suggests. It is impossible that the reader should disagree … a novel of unsettling beauty, demanding perhaps and spiked by humour, but ultimately inescapably moving.”
07/07/2012
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The Times
Tom Gatti
“In describing the external, Banville cannot help but write about human behaviour, too. During Alexander’s encounters with Mrs Gray in a deserted house in a wood, all the senses are electrically charged: the “stale tang of river water on her skin”; the “sharp and greenly sour” smell from outside the privy; the “rosy cincture encircling her middle” left by an elastic waistband; the summer rain “sizzling through the leaves”. The prose is precise, beautiful, musical, freshly sprung — like Alexander’s past, “untarnished, gleaming, bright as that tin box”.”
21/07/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
John Preston
“This is a book of two halves. The account of Cleave’s affair is terrific – full of sadness and yearning. Yet the more contemporary strand feels forced and a bit so-what-ish by comparison. Together, they make an uneasy pairing.”
05/07/2012
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Times Literary Supplement
Ben Jeffery
“Ancient Light continues a line of thought Banville has mined since, at least, The Book of Evidence (1989), about how surface impressions are transformed into sense (or not). “None of this means anything”, says Freddie Montgomery, the narrator of the earlier story. “Anything of significance, that is. I am just amusing myself, musing, losing myself in a welter of words.” Cleave drifts through the same idea, afraid his memories have no referent, constantly reminding us of his fallibility and inconsistency. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as a theme, but perhaps it goes some way to explaining what is recurrently dissatisfying about Banville’s work. Labouring the idea that people are a mystery (or that the world is random and unfathomable) sucks the velocity out of the text, muffling any sense of travelling to a conclusion.”
20/07/2012
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The New Statesman
Talitha Stevenson
“Banville must at times have thought that the portentousness of Ancient Light was justified by the suspense he built in the previous books ... An emphasis on subjectivity comes with inbuilt limitations, both structural and metaphysical, for a novelist. While Banville may intend the prose with which the novel concludes to waft in the fragrant air of universality and human interconnectedness, the effect is choked by his narrator’s abiding solipsism.”
08/08/2012
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The Daily Telegraph
Keith Miller
“The text of Ancient Light is notably, though for the most part seamlessly, light-fingered – strings of Yeses from Ulysses, bits of Eliot, a hazel wood from Yeats, a lovely quote from Leopardi ... Alongside the richness of Banville’s own writing though, it does raise the temperature of the novel somewhat, and creates expectations of a silver-age perfection that would be hard for anyone to maintain. A phrase such as “the hammered gold of fallen leaves” could be Yeats (and it carries a clever sting, as Cleave realises that the scene he recalls must have taken place in spring, not autumn). But “How he wept, and I the prime cause of his bitter tears” is, perhaps, a bit more Sylvie Krin.”
17/07/2012
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