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Nov 22, 2018
John Banville's two previous novels about Alexander Cleave and his daughter Cass (Eclipse and Shroud) were synchronized with one another, so that neither was needed to appreciate the other, but either would "spoil" the other's ending. I expected this third book, focusing on Alexander Cleave a decade later, to be a continuation of Eclipse for which Shroud would not furnish any explicit background. I had not reckoned on Banville's ability to construct one of the most elaborate instances of dramatic irony I have ever encountered on the printed page. It started early, and continued for nearly the entire book within one of the two major plot strands. I don't know how the book would have read in the absence of that very vivid irony, which depended entirely on familiarity with Shroud. "Cleave" is aptly named in this book, split between memories of his sixteenth summer, when he had an affair with his best friend's thirty-five-year-old mother, and his first movie role fifty years later, coming out of retirement from his stage acting career. Just as the titles of the previous books applied to their contents in over-determined polyvalent ways, so too does "ancient light." The other titles appear again, subtly worked in to the closing passages, where Banville also quite overtly opens towards a possible further volume. I liked Ancient Light better than Eclipse and perhaps not quite as well as Shroud. Consistent with the others, the prose is writerly, but still tailored to the voice of the principal character, and the book is filled with sensuous observation along with both epistemological and emotional difficulty. Critic Keshava Guha derided Ancient Light for its "vagueness," but I found it to have a real precision in the construction of its characters and the development of its themes.